By Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker Magazine | On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. residents—including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. Stars had texted famous friends; producers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone—only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town.
The doors were about to open. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars—but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it.
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Only one mainstream country star played that night: Maren Morris, a Grammy-winning artist whose breakout 2016 hit, “My Church,” was an irresistible pro-radio anthem that celebrated singing along in your car as a form of “holy redemption.” Morris, who has had hits on terrestrial radio—the regular, non-streaming kind that you listen to on a road trip—was an exception to the rules of Music Row, where liberal singers, even supernovas like Dolly Parton, kept their politics coded, supportive but soft. Performers who were too mouthy, particularly women, tended to get pushed off the Row—and often turned toward the more lenient world of pop, as had happened with Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and Brandi Carlile (who, along with Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby, and Morris, is a member of the Highwomen). Decades later, everyone in Nashville still spoke in whispers about what had happened to the Dixie Chicks, in 2003, when they got blackballed after speaking out against the Iraq War.
Morris had recently had a few skirmishes online with right-wing influencers—notably, Brittany Aldean, the maga wife of the singer Jason Aldean. Morris had called her “Insurrection Barbie”; in response, Jason Aldean had encouraged a concert audience to boo Morris’s name. Both sides had sold merch off the clash. The Aldeans hawked Barbie shirts reading “don’t tread on our kids.” Morris fans could buy a shirt that read “lunatic country music person”—Tucker Carlson’s nickname for her—and another bearing the slogan “you have a seat at this table.” (She donated the proceeds to L.G.B.T.Q. charities.) A few months before “Love Rising,” Morris had done an interview with one of the event’s organizers, Hunter Kelly—a host on Proud Radio, a queer-themed channel on Apple Music—and had told him that she wanted to be known for her songs, not her Twitter clapbacks. But, she added, she wouldn’t apologize for having political opinions: “I can’t just be this merch store on the Internet that sells you songs and T-shirts.” Within the context of Nashville, she explained, “I come across a lot louder than I actually am, because everyone else is so quiet.”
Near the end of the concert, Morris, a petite brunette in a floor-length tuxedo coat with a tiny skirt, sang “Better Than We Found It,” a protest song, inspired by her newborn son, that she’d written after the death of George Floyd. During her opening banter, she had told a sweet, offhand story about watching her now three-year-old boy standing in awe as drag queens got ready backstage, amid clouds of glitter and hair spray. “And, yes, I introduced my son to some drag queens today,” Morris added, sassily. “So Tennessee, fucking arrest me!” The next day, Fox News fixated on the moment.
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Read the rest of this lengthy article here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/country-musics-culture-wars-and-the-remaking-of-nashville
Photo: Nashville in the morning | https://www.facebook.com/nashville.tn.10/
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville, er, NashVegas
