Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be
From the publisher's website:
It was only two decades ago, but, for the women of country music, 1999
seems like an entirely different universe. With Shania Twain, country’s
biggest award winner and star, and The Chicks topping every chart,
country music was a woman’s world: specifically, country radio and
Nashville’s Music Row.
Cut to 2021, when women are only played on
country radio 16% of the time, on a good day, and when only men have
won Entertainer of the Year at the CMA Awards for a decade. To a world
where artists like Kacey Musgraves sell out arenas but barely score a
single second of airplay. But also to a world where these women are
infinitely bigger live draws than most male counterparts, having massive
pop crossover hits like Maren Morris’s “The Middle,” pushing the
industry to confront its deeply embedded racial biases with Mickey
Guyton’s “Black Like Me,” winning heaps of Grammy nominations, banding
up in supergroups like The Highwomen and taking complete control of
their own careers, on their own terms. When the rules stopped working
for the women of country music, they threw them out and made their own:
and changed the genre forever, and for better.
Her Country
is veteran Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss’s story of how in the
past two decades, country’s women fought back against systems designed
to keep them down, armed with their art and never willing to just shut
up and sing: how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, The Chicks, Miranda
Lambert, Rissi Palmer, Brandy Clark, LeAnn Rimes, Brandi Carlile, Margo
Price and many more have reinvented the rules to find their place in an
industry stacked against them, how they’ve ruled the century when it
comes to artistic output—and about how women can and do belong in the
mainstream of country music, even if their voices aren’t being heard as
loudly.
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