Martina McBride - “This One’s For the Girls”

Country music has long had a complex and interesting relationship with women. Of all forms of popular American music it has, almost from the beginning, been the one that has most allowed women to be on equal footing and as big a stars as their male counterparts. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, Faith Hill, The Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift, Miranda Lambert, and many many others have all sold as well and been seemingly as popular as their male contemporaries. And that sort of history and track record for female artists is unfortunately too rare in any art form, let alone music. So it should be rightly celebrated and embraced. And best of all, country music has always allowed women to be feisty and strong and independent minded and individualistic in a way that the rest of popular music has been much slower to come around to. And likely because of country music’s inexorable ties to the American south, its male singers have always sung about women with a level of admiration and respect that is all too often absent in other forms of music.

Yet despite all that there always seems to be a deep paternalistic, sexually and socially regressive undercurrent lurking just below the surface of country music. The genre that gave us “9 to 5” also gave us “Stand By Your Man” after all. And it’s always been allied very closely with a political movement that is no fan of women’s reproductive rights. And we all know what happened when The Dixie Chicks tried to speak their minds. But most of all, country music seems all too interested in a woman’s purity and goodness. It’s no coincidence that the genre’s biggest star is Taylor Swift. And I say that a big Taylor Swift fan and supporter. But even in this wonderful Martina McBride song the whole first verse is about remaining chaste and innocent.

Now I’m painting with a broad brush I know, but totally fair or not, does the good mentioned in the first paragraph outweigh the perceived wrongs of the second? After all country music has been, and continues to be, great to its female artists and to the cause of female empowerment and feminism in general. Yet at the same time, even as I typed that sentence it seemed like an inherently and almost laughably incorrect thing to say about country music.

I guess, as I said at the open, it’s a complicated issue.

Then again, so is life.