Her Country : How Women Reclaimed Country Music

The story of modern country music told through the women whose success, reach and ambition reshaped the genre.

'The book is deeply researched...[a] history of the kind of industry - and world - that the white men of country music have always hoped to maintain and the women who wouldn't let them.' PitchforkIn country music, men might dominate the radio waves - but it's women like Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton who are making history. For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different universe; a brief blip in time when musicians like Shania Twain and the Chicks topped every chart and made country music a woman's world. However, at the dawn of the millennium, the industry had begun to prefer its female stars more neutral and obedient. Her Country is the story of the rebels and rulebreakers who resisted the oppressive norms of the country music industry, achieving both critical and commercial success in a male-dominated genre. When the rules stopped working for these women, they threw them out, made their own and took control, changing the genre forever. Award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss powerfully documents how in the past two decades country's women have fought back against systems designed to keep them down, creating entirely new pathways to success. First published in 2022, Her Country anticipated the massive crossover and chart-conquering success of singers such as Ella Langley. Yet in 2024, female country artists received just 8.4 per cent of radio play, a decrease from 10 per cent in 2021, making Moss's prescient analysis as essential and urgent as ever. More than a story about inequity in the music business, Her Country offers an illuminating and astute examination of American society as a whole: how gender, race and class dynamics are manifested within art forms and how political power structures shape everyday life.