The Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against the US president in 2003, infuriating conservative country music fans and broadcasters; within months, the Chicks’ music had virtually disappeared from country radio. While this made political sense, it made no economic sense because of the Chicks’ vast economic success. Why, then, target them? I argue the reaction was part of a broader regendering of the country music industry, catalyzed by legal challenges, technological changes, and the emergence of a new political conservatism. These changes ended women’s spotlighted place on country music stages where Shania Twain, The Chicks, and others had dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. This article thus begins a year earlier with the lawsuit the Dixie Chicks filed against Sony in April 2002. It is through this lawsuit – which challenged the company’s legal and economic authority over the Chicks – that this article examines the broader cultural, economic, and political shifts that characterized the substantial changes in country music performances and players.

In 2017, Rhiannon Giddens reflected on a recent performance as part of the first African American string band to play the Grand Ole Opry. As she recalled, “people started calling it a Healing Moment. But I have to ask: a healing moment for whom? One or two Black groups, or one or two Black country stars is not a substitution for recognizing the true multi-cultural history of this music. We have a lot of work to do.” These words are a touchstone for assessing Giddens’s first two solo albums, as works that reclaim and re-member the racially mixed roots of country music alongside other distinctively American genres. The analysis pushes against paradigms in which musical sounds align neatly with racial categories, specifically the presumed whiteness of country music. Giddens’s work makes clear that, though convenient, racialized conceptions obscure more than they reveal about US music and the people making it.

Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance at the 2016 Country Music Awards Show sparked unprecedented backlash on digital media spaces. For some viewers, the performance challenged the perceived boundaries of country music as fundamentally wrapped up in white identity. Consequently, white fans’ digital dialogue surrounding the performance attempted to maintain country music’s whiteness through surveillant rhetorical tactics. In this chapter, Hutten develops a theory of genre surveillance to describe how the boundaries of country music are policed not only by significant country music institutions but by a faction of country music fans. Hutten situates Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance, and the digital reactions to it, within the history and politics of country music’s sonic color line. Additionally, Hutten mobilizes Browne’s (2015) theory of dark sousveillance to demonstrate how the performance functions as an act of musical resistance.

Addressing how Dolly Parton’s Netflix anthology series uses transmedia storytelling to reimagine her earlier music, I argue that it revises narratives about country music history. As Parton reframes songs like “Jolene,” her work underscores how her gender performance challenges gender stereotypes in country music performance history. By turning songs into television stories, Parton adapts to recent trends in transmedia storytelling. Her autobiographical authenticity narratives make her especially well-suited to new media self-branding. As critics such as Nadine Hubbs, Francesca Royster, Diane Pecknold, Kris McCusker, and Jada Watson have argued, we must continue to account for more nuanced readings of gender in country music history, particularly as it intersects with race, class, and sexuality. I demonstrate how Parton’s series speaks to the variety of gender expression and gender critiques in a range of country performances. I also call for more discussion of transmedia storytelling, intertextuality, and affect studies in the field.

In 1983, a Black woman from Detroit, Michigan, Alice Randall, moved to Nashville determined to spotlight Black contributions to country music, become a novelist, and support herself by writing and publishing country songs. Forty years later, the company she founded and eventually sold, Midsummer Music continues to thrive. Randall, the only Black woman to co-write a song, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” that topped the country charts for two weeks running now teaches a course on Black Country at Vanderbilt University. Reflecting on four decades of navigating complex layers of sexism and racism; a business community that guarded itself against outsiders with a culture that included unique vocabulary, clothing, and calendar; and profound changes in how the country audience accesses music and pays for music, Randall offers a memoir of economic intention and ambition that makes visible the invisible work or certain Black women working on the row before her.

In September 2007, Rissi Palmer’s debut single “Country Girl” entered Billboard’s Hot Country Song (HCS) chart, making her the first Black female artist to chart in twenty years and one of just seven Black women in the history of the industry. With short life cycles on the chart, their songs left faint data trails making their time in the industry. As a result, their careers received limited attention from the press, their music was not widely distributed, their contributions went unrecognized by the industry, and, as a result, they remain unknown to country music fans. In an industry tightly centered around documenting, preserving, and promoting its heritage, these women have been largely expunged from the genre’s historical narrative. Drawing on intersectional theory and feminist scholarship on institutional discrimination (Collins 1990; Ahmed 2014, 2019), this chapter analyzes sixty years of chart and award history data, to offer a framework for considering how industry data shapes cultural heritage, dictating whose stories get preserved.

Who is permitted to participate in and how they participate are critical issues within the cultural and social context of country music. On the surface, the issues appear to be driven by the economics of record production—industry players study their markets and choose product strategies that meet the demands and needs of the consumer at a cost that maintains an acceptable profit margin for everyone involved. But as Whose Country Music? demonstrates, individuals and institutions within the field of country music cultural production act as gatekeepers on the sound and identity of the genre, dictating not just who gets to participate but also the terms under which they are permitted to contribute to country music culture. The introductory chapter describes the various ways in which gatekeepers control access to opportunities and resources within country music culture, pointing to chapters within the collection to show the industrial system functions.

Themes of contemporary country music during the 2010s moved from “bro-country” songs promoting alcohol consumption, partying, and hook-up culture, toward tracks outlining consensual, presumed heterosexual, romantic relationships. Close listening to these “gentlemanly” songs reveals a specter of coercion, raising questions about the nature of consent. Using music by Sam Hunt and Thomas Rhett as case studies, this chapter investigates how male country artists represent romantic relationships as an idealized goal where consent is implied rather than expressly indicated. Case studies unravel how silent partners are pressurized and narrators hear or assume “yes” where no consent is offered. Investigations of songs by chart-dominating male country artists allow us to notice how and when in these songs women’s voices may be heard, silenced, or made irrelevant. Applicable beyond just country music, this chapter offers a means for understanding how the idea of consent manifests within popular musics more broadly.

Long-associated with “insurgent” or alt.country and what is now “Americana,” Chicago’s Bloodshot Records’ first release (For a Life of Sin: A Compilation of Insurgent Chicago Country, 1994) was a compilation album featuring local punk and indie bands performing various styles of country music. The label’s ongoing use of compilation and tribute albums was not only commercial but also strategic in maintaining a connection to the label’s roots in the Chicago punk and underground rock scene, reinforcing its adherence to a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic and highlighting small-scale production and consumption practices. This chapter argues that Bloodshot’s tribute albums are significant for the layers of meaning they contributed to a label’s branding and identity by historicizing and legitimating the record label’s early country offerings while offering an argument for the importance of the independent record label and non-mainstream musical practices in the twenty-first century.

Humor has been a prevalent performative strategy in country music since the commercial genre was first produced and marketed via radio and recording in the 1920s. Yet few scholars have examined the use of comedy in women’s performances, apart from Minnie Pearl’s stage act. This chapter demonstrates how women in twenty-first-century country music, specifically the Pistol Annies, a trio comprised of Miranda Lambert, Angaleena Presley, and Ashley Monroe, have used the comedic practices established by mid-century female country artists as a rhetorical means to challenge patriarchal power structures and white middle-class pretenses. Like their predecessors, the Pistol Annies have turned the incongruity of the “unruly woman,” defined by feminist media scholar Kathleen Rowe as a “rule-breaker, joke-maker, and public, bodily spectacle,” into campy and parodic performances of white, rustic working-class women transgressing the control and rigidity of dominant society and the white patriarchal frame of country music.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.

Critics of commercial country music say that the music is homogenous, cliché, and that the so-called bro-country subgenre has taken over. This chapter uses interviews with hit songwriters in Nashville to examine the social and structural factors that influence the way songwriters practice their craft. One such factor, the “360 deal,” is a type of recording contract introduced as a way for record labels to recoup some of the revenue lost with the decline of recorded music sales. Though these contracts are legal agreements between artists and their labels, they have entirely restructured the careers of professional songwriters and the music that they create. This analysis of country music in the twenty-first century is based on a deep understanding of the occupational arrangements that underlie the creation of songs to argue for understanding the structures that shape the songwriting community as critical to the formation of country songs.

In the past decade, interest in the work of the tailor Nudie Cohn has intensified and the style he created, which was the defining dress practice of country music performance throughout the 1950s, has been reinterpreted by emerging western wear designers. This style juxtaposes the materials and construction values of bespoke tailoring with jewel colors, pictorial embroidery, sparkling rhinestones, and the style of the American West. Its revival began among musicians identified with the alt.country or Americana movements and has since broadened to mainstream country (Midland), to artists outside the genre (Lily Allen), and on its contested margins (Lil Nas X). This chapter explores the current revival as a development of and extension beyond the Nudie style’s established role as a signifier of authenticity, discussing its ability to reflect and to forge gender and race identities in country music, both historically and in the present.