The country-pop-folk scene being carved by female artists strikes us as far superior to the big-hatted fellas. 3 chords and the truth n’all. Almost statistically proven. With Kathleen Edwards, Margo Price, Katie Pruitt, Esther Rose, Margaret Glaspy, Jaime Wyatt, Lilly Mae, Liddy Clark et. al.
The Country Music YouTuber, influencer and commentator Grady Smith does an entertaining take on the recent trends in country’s lyrics. All nicely supported, in the modern way, by data analysis! You cannot get anybody’s attention these days without flashing them a bit of data and Smith has kept a database of the ‘country music radio’ top 30 for the past six years. For the lyrical analysis, the numbers were crunched by Dana Gibbon.
Now, before we get into lyrics there is something rather striking about the data sample - striking but perhaps not surprising. Of the top 20 artists in the data tracked (ranked by those that scored the most top 20 hits), just two are women: Carrie Underwood (13) and Kelsea Ballerini (17). Add another ten to go top 30 and we can slot in Maren Morris (25) and Miranda Lambert (26). Keep going to 50 and you get one more female artist, Carly Pierce, in 49th place. Quick ready reckoner = 5 out of the top 50 country music played artists in the USA in the past six years are women. Perhaps one of the stars of our all-woman series should release a country-pop version of UB40’s [I am the] One in Ten.
But back to those lyrics. The most common word in modern country music is simply “yeah” which is the filler word of choice, but hot on its heals is the word “girl” (more common than the word love). Another super common word is “little” which Grady posits as “flirtatious, fun and conveniently short”. Those words however are not particularly stereotypical of country - especially the male-dominated ‘bro country’ scene in which we expect ‘trucks’ and ‘beer’ to crop up - a lot. They do, but perhaps not as much as you think. Trucks have been on the slide in recent years, which this time Grady attributes to something of a backlash to bro-country themes. It has however been replaced simply by the word ‘car’.
Grady and Dana created clusters of words. Body parts are very common in country music, with “hands”, “eyes” and “lips” the top three words. With nine in 10 country hit songs performed by men it’s pretty easy to see where this is going. The male gaze looms large in country music, and is pretty much still heavily focused on “cars & girls” (in dresses, since dress was the most popular word in the ‘clothing category’)! But in a trend towards (whisper it), refinement, ‘beer’ was not the top word in the ‘drinks category’, that honour going to whisky, then red wine. So perhaps the guys are getting more sophisticated in their approach to being cliched. Awe, I don’t mean to beat up on a genre, I really don’t. But perhaps if anyone, just a little, needs a good right hander, it's those boring country dorks with the big hats. Hell yeah!
Incidentally, in this new (Vol. 2!) all female compilation, the lyrical tropes we’ve explored above are much less prominent, well with the exception of alcohol - as ever we’ve stumbled upon a pretty boozy collection. But these songs (all 25 of supremely high quality) focus on somewhat more adult themes - the complexity and distance in relationships (and not just straight ones btw guys), loneliness and depression, the wisdom of hindsight but foolishness of nostalgia, the weight of expectation or the joy of being a late bloomer - in short, the whole messiness of life.
However, one striking theme running through this collection is breaking up, moving out or moving on. Funny that. The majority of these songs seem to follow the thread of getting rid of a bad lover and one can’t help but wonder if, statistically speaking, there might be a correlation between this and the beer-guzzling big-hatted truck drivers that make up country music’s other half. Let’s just call it a hypothesis for now.
We hope you enjoy this volume 2 of Lipstick & Cowboy Boots. We devised this series in part to protest country music’s ‘sexism problem’, but mostly, because the country-pop-folk scene (we like to bring a wide lens focus to genre at TSS) being carved by female artists strikes us as far superior to the big-hatted fellas. Consider the series as a gateway into country music if you’ve ever thought all that twangy, corny ‘hat act’ stuff was just too much. Three chords and the truth n’all.
On the cover: the artists on all 25 songs here are making very special music right now and we recommend you check out all their latest or forthcoming albums, but we especially like the Sarah Jarosz tracks on this collection (does ‘Johnny’ have just a touch of Alice In Chains about it?). Her recent album ‘World On The Ground’ is quality from start to finish. More folk-country than pop-country and very mandolin-infused, the record is one of those quietly insidious collections that gets under your skin the more you listen, and reminds me of Alela Diane’s fabulous Cusp. No wonder she’s won a few Grammys (even if that particular institution needs a reboot). We hope Mick’s cover does her justice. Do listen more.
Carrie Underwood is confirmed in the data as the most successful woman in country music (at least in the USA), but she is most definitely the first human to make a christmas (holiday) record in 2020, having released a Christmas album on 25th September. Come on Carrie, even the supermarkets (grocery stores) haven’t moved on the seasonal promotions yet! Well, she’ll be on our ‘Country Christmas’ collection for sure. But Carrie, you will have to wait until December.