Loretta Lynn - “The Pill” from Back to the Country (1975)
Nice girls didn't talk about being on birth-control pills in the mid '70s; and they sure as heck didn't do it on country radio. But there was Loretta Lynn—mom to a half-dozen kids, four of whom were born by the time she was just 20—in 1975, singing, "This incubator is overused/ Because you've kept it filled/ The feelin' good comes easy now/ Since I've got the pill." Some radio stations banned the song, but women paid attention. It helped that Lynn was known as a Christian and a devoted mother and wife, and that she'd already made a career singing honestly about domestic issues: putting herself in the shoes of women widowed by the Vietnam War ("Dear Uncle Sam"), dealing with philandering ("Fist City"), fed up with their husbands' alcohol abuse ("Don't Come Home A Drinkin'"), and even finding themselves pregnant yet again ("One's on the Way", written by author Shel Silverstein). Lynn later told Playgirl how she'd been thanked by rural physicians who told her "The Pill" had done more to let women know about birth control than the doctors had been able to do on their own.
The Chicks - "Not Ready to Make Nice" from Taking the Long Way (2006)
The Chicks (then known as the Dixie Chicks) singer Natalie Maines set off a culture war in 2003 —nine days before the start of the Iraq War—when she told a concert audience in London: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. We're ashamed the president of the United States [George W. Bush] is from Texas." That statement sailed back across the Atlantic, kicking up a backlash that would be felt for years. Country music radio stations banned the band, onetime fans burned their albums, and Maines received death threats. Three years later, the group came back with "Not Ready to Make Nice," a gorgeous tune produced by Rick Rubin that doesn't play coy: "It's too late to make it right, I probably wouldn't if I could/ 'Cause I'm mad as hell, can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should." As Natalie addresses the death threats made against her, a chorus of strings rises in defiance. The track became the Chicks' biggest crossover hit—reaching Number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and winning both Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys.
Maddie & Tae - "Girl In a Country Song" from Start Here (2014)
As "bro country" took over the charts, two things happened. 1) Women began to disappear from radio. Between October 2012 and July 2015, there was a gap of two years and two months when no solo female artist topped Billboard's country airplay charts. 2) Women were too often relegated to cartoon clichés in the lyrics of songs by Florida Georgia Line (wearing a bikini top and popping out of the lake), Luke Bryan (flaunting a sun tan and skinny dipping) and Jason Aldean (whose "redneck romeo" is looking for his "tan-legged Juliet") as the dudes imagined a weekend-warrior backwoods idyll of lift-kit pickups and a pretty girl riding shotgun. Newcomers Madison Marlow and Taylor Dye, a.k.a. Maddie & Tae, pushed back on all that with "Girl in a Country Song," their debut single—declaring outright: "I ain't your tan-legged Juliet." "Well, I wish I had some shoes on my two bare feet/ And it's gettin' kinda cold in these painted-on cut-off jeans," they sing. "Bein' the girl in a country song/ How in the world did it go so wrong?/ Like all I'm good for is lookin' good for/ You and your friends on the weekend, nothin' more." It topped the country airplay charts in December 2014, making it the first debut single by a female duo to reach number one in eight years.
Dolly Parton - "9 to 5" from 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs (1980)
The movie 9 to 5 was inspired, in part, by a group of real working women who wanted to change the way they were treated: not given pensions, barely making minimum wage, dealing with bosses who very well might fire them for delivering the wrong sandwich (indeed, something that happened to a member). Co-star Dolly Parton’s theme song for the movie may sound like percolating jubilance, but listen to those lyrics. It’s a reassurance to working women that they aren’t alone, and that, if they banded together, they could do something about it. (Even if, in the film, that something was kidnapping the boss.) “You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder/ But you got dreams he’ll never take away/ In the same boat with a lot of your friends/ Waiting for the day your ship will come in/ And the tide’s gonna turn and it’s all gonna roll you away.” In real life, according to the New York Times, the 9to5 organization filed class-action suits for back pay, formed a union and “set up a sexual harassment hotline in an era when many people didn’t even know that harassment was illegal.” As for Parton, she did OK, too. She only accepted the film role—her first—after securing the opportunity to write the theme song, which went on to reach Number 1 on Billboard’s country, Hot 100 and adult contemporary charts. And she kept the rights for herself.
Kacey Musgraves - "Follow Your Arrow" from Same Trailer Different Park (2013)
The fact that some conservative groups objected to the lyrics of Kacey Musgraves' "Follow Your Arrow"—and that some radio programmers were hesitant to play the song—in 2013 showed exactly why it was important. "Kiss lots of boys/ or kiss lots of girls if that's what you're into/ When the straight and narrow/ Gets a little too straight/ Roll up a joint (I would)," Musgraves sings to a jaunty tune. It became an anthem of self-acceptance and not caring how others judge your choices (a frequent theme in Musgraves' music, echoed in songs like "Rainbow" and "Biscuits"). "You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't/ So you might as well just do whatever you want," she also sings. Live, concert audiences belted out every word like a battle cry. In a show of progress, the song captured Song of the Year at the 2014 Country Music Awards, proving love wins.
Mickey Guyton - "What Are You Gonna Tell Her?" from Bridges (2020)
Mickey Guyton—the only high-profile Black woman in country music in 2021, more than 50 years after Linda Martell became the first to perform at the Grand Ole Opry—has said she co-wrote this thought-provoking song after a 15-year-old girl asked her for advice on breaking into the music business. Guyton felt she had no advice to give, at a time when (from 2010-2019) women made up just 10 percent of country radio airplay. She was frustrated by, as she told CMT, seeing female artists "Blowing out their voices, ruining their hair from all of the hairspray in the heat, and not able to eat properly and worried all of the time." But it's also a song for anyone who's been sidelined—because of gender, sexuality, race or any other reason. "She thinks life is fair and God hears every prayer/ And everyone gets their ever after," Guyton sings. "She thinks love is love, and if you work hard, that's enough/ Skin is just skin and it doesn't matter … But what are you gonna tell her when she's wrong?/ Will you just shrug and say it's been that way all along?" After singer Morgan Wallen was suspended by his record label in February 2021 because a video surfaced of him using the n-word, many artists were quick to show their shock and say this wasn't the Nashville they knew. But Guyton tweeted: "When I read comments saying 'this is not who we are' I laugh because this is exactly who country music is. I've witnessed it for 10 gd years." She's striving to shake people awake and make them see what's (still) right in front of them.
Kitty Wells - "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" (1952)
In 1952, Hank Thompson had a Number 1 country hit for 15 weeks with "Wild Side of Life"—a she-done-did-me-wrong lament: "The glamour of the gay nightlife has lured you/ To the places where the wine and liquor flows … I didn't know God made honky tonk angels/ I might have known you'd never make a wife." Kitty Wells, a Nashville native who'd been trying to crack the music business for a few years, recorded a response track that would be both her big break and a feminist cry. "It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels," Well sings in her unmistakable twang. "There's many times married men think they're still single/ That has caused many a good girl to go wrong." Although Wells didn't write the song (in fact, a man, J.D. Miller, did), it allowed her to pave the way for generations of women after her. Because it was the first number-one country record by a solo woman—this despite it being banned by some radio stations, NBC and, for a while, even the Grand Ole Opry—Wells' song made more labels pay attention to, and sign, more females.
Margo Price - "Pay Gap" from All American Made (2017)
In 1980, working women made just 60 cents for every dollar a man was paid. By 2017, the year Margo Price released the song "Pay Gap," it had gone up to 80 percent. At that rate, it will take until 2059 before men and women share pay parity. But for all the tunes about female empowerment, you'd be hard pressed to find another about wage inequality. "I think it's important to give the people without a voice a voice," Price has said of the song, while admitting she wonders if she makes less than male artists when she plays music festivals. "Breaking my back, trying to bring home a check … at the end of the day, feels like a game/ one I was born to lose," she sings, sounding for all the world like she's covering an old Loretta Lynn track. "Pay gap, pay gap/ rippin' my dollars in half." For all the heavy frustration fueling the track, Price has said that she doesn't feel angry performing it: "Because that song is in a major key. It's happy. It's disguising the message with something a little more digestible that's pumped full of sugar because of the medicine that no one wants to take."
Lorrie Morgan - "What Part of No (Don't You Understand)" from Watch Me (1992)
Twenty-five years before the #MeToo movement, Lorrie Morgan called out men who just won't take "no" for an answer. "Sir, if you don't mind I'd rather be alone/ From the moment I walked in tonight, you've been coming on," she sings on the classically country tune, which hit Number 1 and became Morgan's biggest hit. If anything, with 20/20 hindsight, Morgan comes across as too polite to the pushy man who just can't fathom why a woman would rather be alone at the bar than suffer his company: "What part of 'no' don't you understand? To put it plain and simple I'm not into one night stands." Still, it remains all too relevant.
Loretta Lynn - "Rated X" from Entertainer of the Year (1973)
In 1972, the US divorce rate reached a (then) all-time high of 4 splits for every 1,000 people. But that didn’t mean the public stigma was lessening for women. And even though Loretta Lynn had been married for decades—wedding a man she called “Doo” when she was just 15 (and staying together until his death in 1996)—she recognized the way divorced women were often seen: as used goods on the prowl, not to be trusted around married men. She also recognized the double standard of that. “The women all look at you like you’re bad/ And the men all hope you are,” Lynn sang. “You can’t have a male friend/ When you’re a has-been/ Or a woman, you’re rated X.”
