Book Review: Her Country
Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be by Marissa R. Moss (Henry Holt and Co., 2022)
I wanted to love this book. I really, really did. I’ve watched the regrettable situation it describes—the deliberate shutting out of female country singers by their own industry—unfold over the years; I’ve even written about it myself. When I came across Her Country, I was hoping it was just what we needed.
But having read it, I’m not sure it is.
Let me start by saying that the raw material is great. Though she covers a number of female singers and groups here, Marissa R. Moss focuses especially on three who found success by forging their own paths: Kacey Musgraves, Mickey Guyton, and Maren Morris. Moss has put in years of following her subjects, interviewing them extensively, talking to those around them, reading up on them, and generally doing her homework. She knows these musicians backwards, forwards, and inside out, and her enthusiasm for them is off the charts. And that’s really nice to see.
But as I’ve learned over the years, when you’re writing with that much enthusiasm, you have to be a little bit careful. Otherwise it can spill over into a heavy-handedness in style and tone. Which, unfortunately, is what’s happened here.
In the style department, this manifests as an unfortunate tendency to write sentences like the following:
“And not as a Nashville outsider, or someone who can take the rope given to them by a secure home in Americana or pop or any genre where voicing one’s opinions is welcomed, if not nearly mandatory, but as someone fully engaged—happily—with Music Row and country radio, who still banked airplay despite a world that rarely sees any presence from female voices on the airwaves.”
If you could understand that sentence in fewer than four readings, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
As for Moss’s tone, it’s heavy-handed in that she puts her subjects on the very highest of pedestals and keeps hammering into us how much they belong there. In a way it’s hard to blame her for that. As I mentioned above, the gender gap in country music is dire. Most of the women are singing and writing circles around a lot of the men, and yet the women have to jump through hoops the men never even dreamed of, just to get a little radio play. And then, more often than not, they still can’t get it. (And that’s just the white women; as Moss shows us in heartbreaking detail, Black women like Guyton have it even worse.) It’s unfair to the point of being enraging, and yet these women are handling it with grit, grace, and guts.
So it’s tempting to put them on pedestals, sure. But Moss overdoes it. She declares so often that her subjects are bringers of truth to the world that you’d think she was writing about the Pope and the Dalai Lama, rather than country singers. Nearly every aspect of their beliefs is laid out for us, and we are given to understand that if we have any beliefs that are different, we are worthless worms who should crawl into a hole and never be heard from again. I’m not joking, that’s the attitude that comes off the page. While Music Row definitely displays some vile beliefs about women and minorities and their place in the world, and those beliefs clearly deserve to be shouted down, I don’t think it follows that every belief the women hold is therefore sacred.
Strangely, for someone who keeps writing that these women have a handle on the truth, Moss gives us disappointingly little on how they developed their beliefs in the context of the constrictive worlds they grew up in, which would have been more than pertinent to her story. And for someone who clearly adores Kacey Musgraves, Moss somehow manages to present her as the most boring person alive. Going solely by what Moss tells us, Musgraves does little but write songs, perform, get high, write more songs, perform again, and get high again. Yet a two-minute search on her name turns up that Musgraves reads Shakespeare and listens to Bach, both of which help shape her thinking and her songwriting. Why don’t we get any interesting details like that in this book?
I’m a fan of a number of the singers and groups featured here: Mickey Guyton, Brandy Clark, the Pistol Annies, Maddie & Tae, Kalie Shorr, Margo Price, and others. I’ve bought, enjoyed, and recommended their music, and I’ve supported their fight to get that music heard against formidable opposition from their own industry. I’ve never once thought that I needed to agree with them on everything. I’m pretty sure that’s not how music works. And I’m afraid that when writers like Moss try to convince us that it should work that way, they’re narrowing the audience for the singers who deserve to be heard, not broadening it.
Book Links: