There's a video on YouTube from the Country Music Association awards back in 2014. The song is "You're Lookin' At Country," one of the legend Loretta Lynn’s big hits. On that night, she had a duet partner — a young singer named Kacey Musgraves.
That same night, Musgraves won the Song of the Year award for her song “Follow Your Arrow,” with its references to rolling joints and kissing boys — or girls, if that’s what you’re into.
It felt like a night of revolution in country music. But it wasn’t.
Country radio, which is more important than radio in any other music genre, still ignored Musgraves and just about every other woman out there.
A few months later, a powerful Nashville consultant would say that male artists were the base of country radio, like the lettuce in a salad; female artists were tomatoes, to be sprinkled in from time to time.
So Musgraves and other artists made their own roads. Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss chronicles that work in her book "HER COUNTRY," which is out this week.
It’s an indictment of a music industry that has backed itself into a corner, and a celebration of artists who figured out their own shades and colors of the Nashville sound.
Show notes:
- Where to buy "HER COUNTRY"
- The websites for Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton
- Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) doing "Daddy Lessons" from 2016
Other music in this episode:
- Kacey Musgraves and Loretta Lynn, "You're Lookin' At Country"
- Mickey Guyton, "Black Like Me"
- Maren Morris, "Circles Around This Town"
