In country music, the men might dominate the radio waves. But it's
women--like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves--who are
making history.
This is the full and unbridled story of the past twenty years of country
music seen through the lens of these trailblazers' careers--their paths
to stardom and their battles against a deeply embedded boys' club, as
well as their efforts to transform the genre into a more inclusive
place--as told by award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss.
For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different
universe--a brief blip in time, when women like Shania Twain and the
Chicks topped every chart and made country music a woman's world. But
the industry, which prefers its stars to be neutral, be obedient, and
never rock the boat, had other plans. It wanted its women to "shut up
and sing"--or else.
In 2021, women are played on country radio as little as 10 percent of
the time, but they're still selling out arenas, as Kacey Musgraves does,
and becoming infinitely bigger live draws than most of their male
counterparts, creating massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris's
"The Middle," pushing the industry to confront its racial biases with
Mickey Guyton's "Black Like Me," and winning heaps of Grammy
nominations.
Her Country is the story of how in the past two decades, country's
women fought back against systems designed to keep them down and created
entirely new pathways to success. It's the behind-the-scenes story of
how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, Miranda Lambert, Rissi Palmer,
Brandi Carlile, and many more have reinvented their place in an industry
stacked against them. When the rules stopped working for these women,
they threw them out, made their own, and took control--changing the
genre forever, and for the better.
