After we finished some videos, a singer named Leon Timbo picked up his guitar. A big, bearded man with a warm smile, he harmonized with the Houston-raised singer Denitia on a slow version of a classic R. & B. song by Luther Vandross, “Never Too Much.” The cover, which he performed at Black Opry events, had been Holly’s suggestion: an object lesson in musical alchemy. Timbo said, “It’s difficult to take the song from its former glory, because in my house we know it by the beginning of it.” He imitated Vandross’s original, with its rowdy disco bounce—boom, boom, boom.
Holly said, “To me, a cover like this is bridging the exact gap that we need. Because Black people love some fucking Luther, and to take it and make it Americana—it takes it to a place they wouldn’t have thought of. And, then again, it is also an example to white people, wondering what our place is in the genre.”
If genre distinctions weren’t so rigid, Timbo said, people might see Tracy Chapman—who was inspired to play the guitar by watching “Hee Haw” as a child—and Bill Withers as country legends. They would know about Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry. A purist nostalgia about country music was ultimately indistinguishable from a racist one: both were focussed on policing a narrow definition of who qualified as the real thing.
After the show at Dee’s, the group—several of whom were queer—hung out at the Lipstick Lounge, a queer bar with karaoke and drag shows. The queens did a rowdy call-and-response with the crowd: “Lesbians in the room, raise your hands!” In the vestibule to an upstairs cigar bar, I spoke with Aaron Vance, the son of a preacher with a radio ministry. Vance, a lanky man in his forties with a low drawl, was one of Black Opry’s more old-school members. A Merle Haggard-influenced singer, he’d written droll numbers such as “Five Bucks Says,” in which he imagined drinking with Abe Lincoln at a dive bar, talking about the racial divide. When Vance moved to Nashville, in 2014, he had been treated as an oddity, but in the farm community he came from, in Amory, Mississippi, it wasn’t unusual to be a Black man who loved country. His grandfather, a truck driver, had introduced him to Haggard. Vance considered his music his ministry, he said, and the Black Opry collective had freed him to pursue his mission on his own terms. “You can’t tell a wolf he’s too much of a wolf,” he said with a laugh—in other words, you couldn’t tell Vance that he was too country. When I asked him what his karaoke song was, he smiled: it was “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie,” by Hank Williams, Jr.
On a bright spring morning, Jay Knowles picked me up in his red truck and drove us to Fenwick’s 300, a diner where Music Row executives take meetings over pancakes. A Gen X dad with messy hair, Knowles had grown up in Nashville, with country in his blood. His father, John Knowles, played guitar with the legendary Chet Atkins, who helped pioneer the Nashville Sound—the smooth, radio-friendly rival of Willie Nelson’s gritty “outlaw” movement. In the early nineties, when Jay went to Wesleyan University, he felt inspired by the rise of “alt-country” stars, such as Steve Earle and Mary Chapin Carpenter, who had clever lyrics and distinctive voices full of feeling. It felt like a golden age for both mainstream and indie musicians, as each side sparred over who was a rebel and who was a sellout—a local tradition as old as the steel guitar.
Knowles returned home and went to work on Music Row, becoming a skilled craftsman who joked, in his Twitter bio, that he was “the best songwriter in Nashville in his price range.” He had scored some hits, including a 2012 Alan Jackson heartbreaker, “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,” which was nominated for a Grammy. But, looking back, he was troubled by how the industry had changed since marketers rebranded alt-country as Americana, in 1999, and bro country took hold, a decade later. The genre’s deepening division had been damaging to both sides, in his view: Americana wasn’t pushed by the market to speak more broadly, and Music Row wasn’t pressured to get smarter. It was a split that replicated national politics in ugly ways.
Knowles’s job was, in large part, still a sweet one: he met each day with friends, scribbling in a notebook as younger collaborators tapped lyrics into the Notes app. His publisher paid him monthly for demos, and arranged pitches to stars. But no writers got rich off Spotify royalties. Knowles had watched, with frustration, as the tonal range of country lyrics had shrunk, getting more juvenile each year: for a while, every hit was a party anthem, with no darkness or story songs allowed. Recently, a small aperture had opened for songs about heartbreak, his favorite subject. But after years in the industry he was wary of false hope: when his friend Chris Stapleton, a gravel-throated roots rocker, rose to fame, in 2015, Knowles thought that the genre was entering a less contrived phase. But on the radio sameness got rewarded.
One of the worst shifts had followed the 2003 Dixie Chicks scandal. At the time, the group was a top act, a beloved trio from Texas who merged fiddle-heavy bluegrass verve with modern storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, just as the Iraq War was gearing up, the lead singer, Natalie Maines, told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. Bush. The backlash was instant: radio dropped the band, fans burned their albums, Toby Keith performed in front of a doctored image showing Maines alongside Saddam Hussein, and death threats poured in. Unnerved by the McCarthyist atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered at an indie movie house for a sub-rosa meeting of a group called the Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It was kind of like an A.A. meeting—‘Oh, y’all are drunks, too? ’ ”
But a meeting wasn’t a movement. For the next two decades, the entire notion of a female country star faded away. There would always be an exception or two—a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the spitfire Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” became a hit—just as there would always be one or two Black stars, usually male. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew lots of talented women his age who had found the gates of Nashville locked. “Some of them sell real estate, some of them write songs,” he said. “Some sing backup. None became stars.”
Knowles felt encouraged by Nashville’s new wave, which had adopted a different strategy. Instead of competing, these artists collaborated. They pushed one another up the ladder rather than sparring to be “the one.” “This younger generation, they all help each other out,” he said. “It feels unfamiliar to me.”
Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.
People I spoke to in Nashville tended to define Americana as “roots” country, as “progressive-liberal” country, or, more recently, as “diverse” country. For some observers, the distinction was about fashion: vintage suits versus plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label had always been a grab bag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel to blues, Southern rock, Western swing, and folk. But the name itself hinted at a provocative notion: that this was the real American music, three chords and the historical truth.
The blunter distinction was that, like independent film, Americana paid less. (The singer-songwriter Todd Snider has joked that Americana is “what they used to call ‘unsuccessful country music.’ ”) Not everyone embraced the label, even some of its biggest stars: five years ago, when Tyler Childers was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Awards, he came onstage wearing a scraggly red beard, and growled, “As a man who identifies as a country-music singer, I feel Americana ain’t no part of nothin’ ”—a reference to the bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s gruff dismissal of modern artists he disdained.
Maybe, as Childers later argued, Americana functioned as a ghetto for “good country music,” letting “bad” country off the hook. Or maybe it was a relief valve, a platform for musicians who otherwise had no infrastructure, given the biases of Music Row. Marcus K. Dowling, a Black music journalist who writes for the Tennessean, told me that, not long after the death of George Floyd, he’d written a roundup of Black female country artists, highlighting talents like Brittney Spencer, a former backup singer for Carrie Underwood, in the hope that at least one of them would break into mainstream radio. “Almost all of them ended up in Americana,” he said, with a sigh.
Getting signed to Music Row demanded a different calculation: you became a brand, with millions of dollars invested in your career. The top country stars lived in wealthy Franklin, alongside the Daily Wire stars, or on isolated ranches whose luxe décor was shown off by their wives on Instagram. This was part of what made the bro-country phenomenon so galling to its critics: white male millionaires cosplayed as blue-collar rebels while the real rebels starved. The comedian Bo Burnham nailed the problem in a scathing parody, “Country Song,” which mocked both bro country’s formulaic lyrics (“a rural noun, simple adjective”) and its phony authenticity: “I walk and talk like a field hand / But the boots I’m wearing cost three grand / I write songs about riding tractors / From the comfort of a private jet.”
“She’s cute and everything, but between you and me we have no common interests.” Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
When Leslie Fram first moved to Nashville, a decade ago, to run Country Music Television—the genre’s equivalent of MTV—she studied Music Row like a new language. “I understand why people who aren’t in it don’t get it,” she told me, over a fancy omelette in the Gulch. “I didn’t get it!” Fram, who has black hair and a frank, friendly manner, was born in Alabama but spent years working in rock radio in Atlanta and New York; she arrived in Tennessee familiar with Johnny Cash and a number of Americana types, like Lyle Lovett, but few others. It took her a while to grasp some structural problems, like the way certain songs never even got tested for airplay if the men in charge disapproved. Unlike a rock star, a country star required a radio hit to break into the touring circuit—so it didn’t matter much if CMT repeatedly played videos by Brandy Clark or the African American trio Chapel Hart. Most maddeningly, if women in country wanted to get airplay, they needed to be sweet and bat their eyes at the male gatekeepers at local radio affiliates. According to “Her Country,” a book by Marissa R. Moss, Musgraves—who had made a spectacular major-label début in 2013, with her album “Same Trailer Different Park”—saw her country career derailed when she objected to a creepy d.j. named Broadway ogling her thighs during an interview. Then the nation’s biggest country d.j., Bobby Bones, called her “rude” and a “shit head.” After that, her path forked elsewhere.