Women of all backgrounds are still fighting the good fight to be heard and seen in the country music industry. With their voices closer to the foreground, rural America could be represented truer to itself.
by Skylar Baker-Jordan February 6, 2024
2023 was the year small towns roared with discontent – in the lyrics of two of the most popular country songs, at any rate. Jason Aldean released his defiant and controversial “Try That in a Small Town.” The following month, the relatively unknown singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony released “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100.
While these songs swept the nation and became populist anthems that resonated with many Americans, they presented but two similar and singular views of rural life by white, straight, male voices. Left out of the conversation about rural America was anyone who did not tick those boxes – especially women, and especially women of color and LGBTQ women.
“We don’t have country music playing songs by women at the rate they play men,” Nashville based singer-songwriter Fimone says. “Not even close.”
Having grown up on a farm in rural Minnesota that has been in her family for over a century – “if you think of Little House on the Prairie, that’s where I grew up,” she says – Fimone has been in music city for 17 years. She says that though “it’s breaking now,” the industry has long been “a white boys’ club of the people who held power.”
The uphill climb women in country music face is well documented. “I don’t want to sound jaded, but you kind of just have to face facts,” says singer-songwriter Leah Blevins.
Originally from the small Appalachian town of Sandy Hook, Kentucky, Blevins has a palpable fondness for her hometown, which she jovially describes as not even having a stoplight “because I think on three or four occasions someone shot it out because they just didn’t want to wait for it.” Sandy Hook, she says, is a place where “folks still actually ride their horse around the McDonald’s.”
Many of Blevins’ songs, such as “Magnolias” (in which she sings about “poor white people on the hill”) include similar if more poetic themes as both of last summer’s country hits, reflecting on the joys and challenges of rural life. Unlike Anthony and the incredibly successful Aldean, however, Blevins has yet to break into the mainstream.
“We are fortunate now that there are the Lainey Wilsons and the Carly Pierces of the world who are kind of changing what country radio looks like, which I’ve never broke through on that,” she says, but adds that “there are times when I felt like over the years that I wasn’t being listened to or taken seriously, possibly because of my looks, so I would cut all my hair off and I felt like maybe that would change the way I was perceived.”
If things are hard for white women, the bar of entry is even higher for Black women – a fact that singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah says is baked into the history of the genre. “The reason why there aren’t or haven’t been as many people of color up until this point really being recognized or seen in folk music is because of the segregation of the commercial music industry,” she says, pointing back a century to the separation of “hillbilly records” and “race records” (a euphemism for Black music, particularly Black Southern music) in the 1920s.
Kiah’s big break came with the release of “Black Myself,” a rootsy folk-rock song that asserts her place in rural music. “I pick the banjo up and they sneer at me/’cause I’m Black myself,” she sings in the Grammy-nominated track.
Growing up outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Kiah was initially concerned whether it was even possible for her, a Black woman, to sing this kind of music. “‘Am I going to be putting myself into a hostile environment if I actively participate in this music?’” she remembers asking herself. “Usually the assumption is, ‘Oh, well, this music is for white people’ or ‘You’re acting white if you play this music.’ There has to be an argument or a defence against that in hopes that this kind of breaks people from the spell of this false narrative about how the music came to be.”
Like Kiah, Blevins and Fimone each came to country, roots, and Americana music because it resonated with their experiences as women from small towns. However, those unique experiences were not reflected in the Aldean and Anthony songs that so many rural Americans sang along to last summer. “All types of people exist” in rural communities, Fimone says. “I came from there, and I’m a liberal gay woman. And I’m not the only one.”
Torrey McDowell, an openly LGBTQ singer-songwriter originally from North Georgia, agrees. She finds fault in Aldean’s representation of rural life not only because it does not square with her own identity as a lesbian from the rural south, but because Aldean himself is far removed from the realities of small-town life.
“Jason Aldean is an extremely wealthy person,” she points out. “The perspective that he has on life in general is not going to match the average person. Here’s this man who has had more resources than most human beings can ever dream of, and he’s writing this song that’s supposed to be reflective of a lifestyle that he doesn’t even participate in anymore. He doesn’t live a smalltown life. He’s not doing the nitty gritty work and being a part of that kind of typical lifestyle that people who live in rural America are experiencing.”
She is quick to point out, though, that she is not trying to silence Aldean or anyone like him. “I’m not saying that I don’t think that your story is legitimate or deserving of being told, but it’s not reflective of the average person who lives a life that way,” she explains.
Like Fimone and McDowell, Kiah also does not see her experiences or life reflected in Aldean’s song. “Listening to that song, watching the video, this was not a reflection of anything other than a particular [political] narrative,” she says.
Anthony’s song, on the other hand, was more nuanced in Kiah’s view. While she says there were “a couple of lines that I do think weren’t the most well-advised lines,” she is quick to add that even though Anthony and Aldean are both white males, they’re very different in their approach to music and discussing social issues. “With Oliver Anthony, for example, he was living out in the woods and this whole thing just totally went through the roof,” she says. “I just read an article where he cancelled a show because he found out they were going to sell tickets for $100. And he’s like ‘I’m sorry, but that’s BS. Nobody should be spending $100 just to come see some music.’ So, it’s interesting. He appears to be a genuine person trying to do good.”
Still, she points out, the fact that he went viral is telling of the problem women face in country music today. “There are many talented female artists that are almost in the industry or are kind of there. They have a team, they’ve been going at it for years and they are getting completely passed by,” she says. “The comparison of someone actively trying to make a career out of music versus someone who was doing it as a hobby, and they get catapulted and the person happens to be a white guy? It’s hard not to think ‘would this happen to any other kind of person?’”
Blevins is more circumspect. While pointing out that at the time of our interview she had not listened to either song in its entirety, “I definitely understand what the message is,” she says. “We live in a time where everyone is offended.” To her mind, Blevins wishes we would “let art be art.”
“It’s hard to just be your authentic self without worrying if you’re going to offend somebody or get cancelled, if you will,” she says. “I think it’s kind of sad in a lot of ways, and disheartening because you can’t really be your full self and allow your opinion to be heard without causing some stir. But I think the bravery of releasing any type of song, I stand behind that.”
Fimone, on the other hand, is more critical of “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
“I’m looking at a white man… sing a song about all of his problems,” she says. “Here I am, staring at this man singing this song, and [he] still has [his] bodily autonomy, and [he] still has [his] bodily rights. Me, as a woman living in Tennessee? I don’t even have rights over my body anymore.”
To that end, she wrote a parody of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in which she sings about the trials and tribulations of a woman living in smalltown America. “I’ve been selling my soul, working all day/bullshit hours for overtime pay,” she says, reflecting Anthony’s original lyrics before adding her own twist: “so I can come back home, take care of these kids that I was forced to have by my abusive husband. It’s a damn shame what this world’s come to for women like me and people like you.”
To Fimone, the reality of living in a small town is far more complicated. Reflecting on her early life in rural Minnesota, she says that “it was a beautiful place to grow up aesthetically in nature, with 80 acres of prairie land and a creek running through our property.” She also fondly recalls that “every cliché that you hear about a small town is true: Everybody knows everything about everybody. There’s gossip. There’s all of those things.”
But, she adds, “your opportunity for access to things is limited,” recalling how she wanted to be a swimmer but that her rural high school did not have a swim team. “It’s full of pros and cons.”
One of those cons, she says, is how people from marginalized communities are often treated. Fimone, who is openly gay, also has a gay brother who she recalls was bullied as a young man. “I remember hearing somebody call him a faggot for the first time, and I will never forget that,” she says with sadness. “Small towns are maybe great if you’re a white cis man, but if you fall outside of that, it can be a dangerous place.”
Still, Fimone believes that “small towns are also beautiful places for community to grow and for change to take place. I think it’s a double-edged sword of putting the negative stereotypes onto rural America.”
Those stereotypes, Blevins points out, stigmatize rural people – often unfairly, and often to the detriment of rural people who want to make careers not just in the music industry, but in any mainstream occupation. “We are referred to as hillbillies, unintelligent, you name it,” she says. “And if we’re speaking the truth… we give you the shirt off our back, we work ourselves to the bone.”
“Knowing where I came from, we’re genuine people. We work hard and we do anything for you at the end of the day. Yeah, we may have, like, an interesting dialect or say words funny to most, but it doesn’t take away from our genuine nature, or our talent.”
For her part, Kiah says she is “proud of where I’m from, finding spirituality in the mountains.” She has a song on her upcoming album where she discusses the realities of being a Black queer woman from Appalachia, one she hopes will resonate with listeners when it is released. “We have to carve out our space and what we want to talk about,” she says. “Only we can explain what our lives are like, and it’s all going to look different as well.” She encourages rural female artists to “pick up a pen and paper and pick up your instrument and just talk about what you love about where you live and put it out there.”
That is what artists like her – along with Fimone, McDowell, and Blevins – have done, even if they have not received the same level of attention as Aldean and Anthony. Sharing their experiences as rural women from diverse backgrounds helps to expand the definition of what it means to be from a small town and broaden the understanding of just how diverse rural America is.
In 2024, more people should listen to them – and the many other rural women who are telling their stories with three chords and the truth.
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