Tag: lgbtq

Kacey Musgraves is Country’s Queer Icon, but These Roots Artists are Actually Queer

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Kacey Musgraves’ dominance during Sunday’s 61st Annual Grammy Awards has certainly solidified her place as country music’s newest queer icon. She offered simply stunning, near-perfect performances during the primetime broadcast and took home four trophies: Best Country Solo Performance, Best Country Song, Best Country Album, and one of the most prestigious awards of the night, Album of the Year. So-called “Gay Twitter” devolved into a tizzy as the show unfolded through the afternoon and evening with Musgraves decidedly at the top.

Said Album of the Year, Golden Hour, saw a critical mass of LGBTQ+ fans embracing Musgraves’ music, but her relationship to the broader gay community has been percolating since her debut album, especially given its overt “Follow Your Arrow” message. All combined, her eye for gratuitous-yet-effortless glamour, her acid-steeped, anime-meets-California-meets-trailer park aesthetics, and her singular, pop-influenced countrypolitan sounds are gay country manna from heaven. And it’s not just in the music. This year, she made an appearance as a guest judge on VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars and she routinely advocates for LGBTQ+ fans and their causes on her social media feeds.

To be sure, Musgraves fits the diva-idolized-by-gays criteria impeccably, but there’s a certain passive erasure that can occur when fans consciously or subconsciously become myopic in their praise of and infatuation with straight, cisgendered, female artists. It’s true that Musgraves has played an important role in expanding country music’s borders — musically, socially, and otherwise — but at the same time a burgeoning community of LGBTQ+ writers, artists, musicians, and creators are carving out their own space within country, Americana, folk, and even bluegrass and old-time.

This writer would never go so far as to suggest that one ought not squeal with delight at Musgraves’ fierce-as-fuck costumes, her tear-jerking solo performance of “Rainbow,” or her impossibly long and flowy Cher-callback, bump-it wig. Rather, if you love Kacey Musgraves and Golden Hour — because queer identities can be seen and reflected within her work, because she opens the door to the idea that country isn’t a forbidding place for these identities, and/or because she’s unabashed and unapologetic in her pursuit of these goals — you’re going to love these eleven badass, talented, inspirational, openly queer roots musicians, too.

Time to get stanning:

Brandi Carlile

After last night’s show this name should no longer need mentioning or introduction, as Carlile and her twin collaborators, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, absolutely brought down the Staples Center with one of the most moving performances of the night, the soaring, galvanizing, overtly queer, and now Grammy-winning masterpiece, “The Joke.” Carlile is openly gay, married, a mother of two daughters, and a tireless voice for representation and progress in Americana and its offshoot genres. If “The Joke” resonates with you (i.e. if it makes you sob uncontrollably, as it does this writer), check out “That Wasn’t Me,” “Hurricane,” and, of course, “The Story.”

Mary Gauthier

Gauthier’s latest, Rifles & Rosary Beads, was nominated for Best Folk Album this year and though it didn’t take home the prize, the album has received universal acclaim for its message of hope, empathy, and visibility for members of our armed services and the struggles they face during and after their service. Gauthier collaborated with veterans of the military in writing all of the record’s heart wrenching, honest, raw songs — which might seem counterintuitive given gays’ historically tenuous relationship with the military writ large. But Gauthier’s own life story, and the trials she’s faced, make her the perfect writer to prioritize empathy above all else in these songs.

Don’t sleep on the rest of her discography, though. The simple profundity of her writing is consistently awe-inspiring. Check out “Mercy Now” after you’ve given Rifles & Rosary Beads a listen.

Karen & the Sorrows

Jewish New York City native Karen Pittelman may seem like an unlikely frontwoman of a country band, especially when you factor in her past punk and queercore experiences, but it turns out she grew up bathed in the country compilation albums her father produced and sold for a living. Her voice recalls country mavens of bygone eras — it’s delicate yet powerful, with a pin-up girl quality that’s as subversive as it is natural. Also check out “Take Me for a Ride,” a Pittelman original that plays like a trad-country, queer version of Sam Hunt’s smash hit, “Body Like a Back Road,” but without the cheese.

Little Bandit

All of the hollerin’, barn-burning, hell-raising country soul of your favorite outlaw country rockers, but with lacy gay edges, Little Bandit (AKA Alex Caress, et. al.) is as honky-tonk as it gets. It’s a beautiful balancing act, presenting as an impossibly big-voiced, piano-smashing, charismatic frontman while singing male pronouns without hesitation. He leans into a beautifully paradoxical queerness that equally embraces diamonds, Waffle House allusions, platform shoes, and plain ol drinkin’. If you like it — and you will — check out “Diamonds,” too.

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers

Outspoken outlaws in a crop of alt-country artists who align with that eponymous country movement of the 70s, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers are a road-dogging band that would seemingly fit that mold, excepting Shook’s deliberate efforts to challenge the inherent heteronormativity of country music at every turn. For Shook it’s not necessarily about having a political message, as she put it in a 2018 interview with BGS, “I feel like doing what I’m doing — touring relentlessly, putting out records, and being unapologetically myself — is a very powerful and political maneuver as well… I’ve never been concerned about that because I feel it’s important to be honest and forthright as a human being, and as an artist and certainly lyrically as well.”

Indigo Girls

Both Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — the two halves that make up the absolutely iconic Indigo Girls — have released solo albums in the past year, both of which draw heavily on folk, Americana, and country influences. This should be no surprise to even the most casual IG fans. Banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, and so many other hallmarks of roots music have been integral to the Indigo Girls’ sound all along. But the songwriting, devastating and personal and oh so very real, is the real takeaway from both projects.

kd lang

This list might as well not exist if it excluded kd lang. Before her crossover to more mainstream genre designations, kd pretty much originated the role of badass queer making unimpeachably trad country music that refused to shy away from its queer touchpoints. Just take a look at this video! “Honky Tonk Angels,” sung with Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, Kitty Wells, and finally, kd in all of her butch, gender-bending, binary-eschewing glory — complete with a Minnie Pearl cameo! Country has always been (more than) a little queer, y’all.

Lavender Country

A man well, well ahead of his time, Patrick Haggerty (AKA Lavender Country), released his debut, self-titled album in 1973. It was a groundbreaking work, but the world, let alone the country music community and its commercial machine, were not ready for it. A Seattle DJ was fired for playing “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” on the airwaves, only one thousand copies of the album were printed, and the band was relegated to performing exclusively at LGBTQ+ events and programs. But, despite being largely shut out of the industry, Haggerty and Lavender Country never ceased. In 2018, at the age of 74, Haggerty took part in AmericanaFest’s very first queer-focused showcase.

Amythyst Kiah

Amythyst Kiah’s booming, captivating voice, and her haunting, Southern gothic approach to Americana, bluegrass, and old-time set her apart from almost anyone else on the scene at this moment. Her reimagination of Dolly Parton’s magnum opus, “Jolene,” is a perfect example of how she carefully turns tradition on its ear. Based in East Tennessee herself, she draws on the rich musical heritage of the region, adding her own spin, creating space to allow herself to soar. And there’s plenty more soaring in her future, as she has opened shows for artists such as Rhiannon Giddens and Indigo Girls across the country and in Europe, and her collaboration album with Giddens, Allison Russell (Birds of Chicago), and Leyla McCalla, Songs of Our Native Daughters, is set to drop February 22.

Alynda Segarra

Singer/songwriter, activist, and Hurray for the Riff Raff frontwoman Alynda Segarra entrances with The Navigator, a concept project that focuses on the life and times of a fictitious Puerto Rican youth living in New York City. Themes of immigration, identity politics, displacement, disenfranchisement, and capitalistic overreach are threaded throughout the album, which offers its songs as tableaus of this girl’s — Navita’s — reality. It’s a stunning reminder that the intricacies and nuances that define us, and by doing so, separate us, are not so difficult for us to overcome with empathy and understanding. “Pa’lante!” (which translates to “forward!”) is the album’s battle cry, a song that turns utter despondency, grief, and a sore lack of humanity into a glimmer of hope.

Trixie Mattel

While almost all other drag queens who delve into the music scene release dance tracks, rap albums, or similar club-ready jams, Trixie Mattel (AKA Brian Firkus) draws upon her rural Wisconsin roots on two folk-adjacent, country-ish albums, Two Birds and One Stone. (Get it?) This isn’t just an opportunist attempt to punch up Trixie’s Dolly Parton-esque, country barbie aesthetic, she’s really got the chops. Not only is she a talented humorous-while-poignant songwriter, her technical skills on guitar and autoharp (yes, autoharp) are precisely honed to showcase her original music. This is no gimmick — though the Doves in Flight Gibson guitar and the custom, pink d’Aigle autoharp are jaw-droppingly perfect additions to Trixie’s lookbook.

 

Che Apalache: Connection Through Context

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As a column, Shout & Shine tends to hinge on unpacking, refuting, and/or subverting expectations about who does and doesn’t  “own” American roots music and its constituent genres. So it’s interesting that, in a conversation with Joe Troop, frontman of Argentina-based, bluegrass-flavored, Latin-infused string band Che Apalache, not only would we come up against those sorts of expectations — and how the band refuses to fit any molds set forth by them — but also in certain cases, we realize they fit quite tidily into the norm, the tradition, and the heritage of the music. Despite however far or wide a band may stray from what we may automatically suppose these genres ought to look like, feel like, and sound, roots music will almost always demonstrate that we are more connected and more similar than we’ve been led to believe.

We connected with Troop on the phone ahead of Che Apalache’s performance headlining our Third Annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass — the namesake of this column — at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference and Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, next week.

This whole slew of unspoken, subtle expectations about who has a claim to roots music is already being subverted by just the existence of Che Apalache, so I wonder, as you tour — especially right now, as you tour the U.S. — how have you felt yourselves coming up against those expectations with your audiences, or perhaps anyone who wouldn’t ever suppose someone from a different hemisphere would even want to play bluegrass?

I fell in love with bluegrass because it’s amazing music, really. It’s such a beautiful thing to have happened in the world. This instrumentation, this ensemble, I tend to think of it also outside of bluegrass, but bluegrass is what gave it technique, there’s a lot of evolution that came from bluegrass. Don’t get me wrong, I love bluegrass, but there are some social issues in the bluegrass world — but there are also things that are understandable, because it’s an extension of American society. As American society continues to evolve and change, bluegrass is naturally going to do the exact same thing. It’s kind of a self-evident history. Being historically accurate is something that bluegrass musicians were never good at. They took something that wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon “pow-wow” and they made it into that.

Americans are not good at historical accuracy; our culture is predicated upon the exact opposite.

America’s perhaps the most hyper-nationalized country in the world right now. That’s something that you get to reflect upon a lot when you spend years — I, personally, have been out of the country for thirteen years of my life, so I’ve thought about that a lot, how nationalism seeps into every nook and cranny of your construct of identity. It’s pretty frightening. I would say bluegrass never escaped from that. Because of advertising and marketing and corporate dominance, Americans basically just want sunshine shoved up their asses 24/7. They just want to be told how great they are.

Not only because you come from South America, but the array of backgrounds and starting points for all of you in the band, I wonder how you feel you are working to deconstruct that paradigm? Is that an active thing?

Yes. Absolutely. It’s 100 percent intentional. I’m also cognizant of the fact that I’m privileged, regardless of the fact that I’m gay. I’m a middle-class American, that puts me way ahead of almost anyone anywhere else in the world, as far as having economic ability and being able to go to college without breaking a sweat, all that. My parents were not privileged growing up. They’re baby boomers, they had this idea of what they wanted for their children, that’s what they procured for us, but that gave me a different view than most of my family, who were blue collar. I grew up between two worlds and my parents were the segue between those worlds. Back then, identity was constructed very differently and there wasn’t much wiggle room.

So why be intentional through art? Personally, I developed an empathetic point of view because I had multigenerational friendships, and bluegrass is a brilliant genre because it does — unlike almost any genre in the United States — allow you to intermingle with people of different social statuses. Bluegrass is more of a launching pad than almost anything else, contrary to the very conservative ties it may have. If not the best, it’s one of the best musical forms with which to cultivate a greater sense of empathy. Then, when you want to make a greater artistic statement, you know how to untangle that mess a little bit more. Che Apalache tries to put out things that are very intentional, to help people reflect who may not have had any exposure to certain belief systems before — and I’m referring to my own belief systems as well. I have an agenda, clearly. Mainly that’s to help this process [of breaking down these paradigms] along in some sort of way where people are obligated to think.

I want people who hate these things — immigrants’ rights and gay people — to first fall in love with us almost like someone would as a child, because art has that innocence and beauty that’s primordial. If we can hook them in with artistic prowess and then challenge them to grow, that’s social art. That’s what we’re going for.

Musically then, what are the similarities and differences in your approach to string band music coming from the perspective of Argentina and South America, rather than North Carolina or Appalachia?

So we’re in Latin America, and in the 1970s, the United States backed Operation Condor, which was an intentional ousting of and/or assassination of democratically-elected governments in the southern cone of South America. They were replaced by very violent dictatorships. American intermingling in Latin America has led to the basic destruction of young intellectuals in the ‘70s, their baby boomers, who were pressing very important social issues. All of this led to some serious bullshit down in South America. Our histories are very intertwined. Talk about Americans needing sunshine shoved up their asses — to deny the fact that America and the CIA were directly responsible for what happened in South America would be equivalent to saying that Hitler and the Third Reich weren’t responsible for the Holocaust. It’s an important thing to understand when presenting a string band in South America, because most people are going to simply reject it. A lot of people would not look favorably on anything iconically American. That’s just part of what you have to understand before you even start to understand what an Argentinian string band means. You have to have context to know what you’re doing in the world. That’s what Americans are so pitiful at, having context. The inherent symbolism of a string band in South America is something that we’re conscious of both there and here.

What I hear you saying is that you’re patently, obviously American in Argentina and Latin America, but at the same time, you’re existing in this odd middle ground where, in the U.S., folks will view you as patently foreign. How do you bridge that divide?

Through queerness! [Chuckles] That’s my guiding light. It all started because of queerness. I fell in love with bluegrass simultaneously with the recognition of my own sexuality. That was the major defining factor in the construct of my identity. Being different, while at the same time being 100 percent Anglo-Saxon, North Carolinian, banjo and fiddle player, was like trying to tame two wild, bucking mules with a rope around each, trying to pull them back together.

Something that I continually go back to is that if we, as othered folks, are able to stand in the center of disparate halves like this–

Yeah! Who else is going to do it? I think being “other” means that you’ve already had societal defeat, you’re nothing. Back when I was coming to terms with my sexuality, gay meant death. I went to Spain when I was 19 and no one gave a shit. I have to give Spain a hand, I love that place. In a personal way, queerness plus Latin culture gave me the liberty to deconstruct my own idea of my identity.

I want to be very clear in connecting all of these thoughts, for our readers, to Che Apalache’s music. Let’s talk about “The Wall.” I love how it subverts that style of song with what it talks about. I feel like it’s the perfect synergy of all of these things you’re talking about.

That song was again, very intentional. I knew it had to be about the wall. It took getting piss drunk on a bottle of whiskey and writing it all out, in my friend’s bathroom crying — it had to be exactly that. The whole mission there was to create a song inspired by Ralph Stanley and what he represented. He’s one of those luminous voices that comes once in a century, he sounded like he was a hundred years old even in his 20s. He was an amazing but also very humble guy. He campaigned for workers’ rights, unions, and workers’ syndicates. He may have fallen into the clenches of Obama, in a way — because Obama didn’t deliver on a lot of the key issues he campaigned for — but the symbolism of Ralph Stanley campaigning for Obama, that speaks for itself, regardless of what happened afterwards. The idea was to put democracy back into the hands of the people. Ralph Stanley has that legacy.

Sure, there are degrees of radicalism — it all tends to be relative.

In southwest Virginia, what he did was extremely radical. You have to contextualize it.

There’s such a history and legacy in that region of folks who would have been relegated to the forgotten pages of history being on the front lines of progressive issues.

Totally. So that song, [“The Wall,”] on a musical and ethnomusicological level, comes from that! Four-part vocal harmonies and Southern gospel unify our band. In April we even did a residency in southwest Virginia through the Crooked Road. We got to play at the Ralph Stanley Museum and his birthplace. In those regions, a lot of those folks are conservative, they identify as Trump voters. We couldn’t think of a better way besides taking that style of music and try to somehow rope them in, then when the fourth verse comes through, they’ve already fallen in love with us, but then we’re tearing their wall down.

And that act isn’t something that you’ve set out to do just because Trump is president; you’re building on what all of these artists and people have done before you, using this specific style of music to make these changes in the world.

Totally. Exactly. We performed this song at [the Old Time Fiddler’s Convention in] Galax, Virginia, and you can see a lot of people listening politely, and only a couple of folks getting angry, but most sat listening respectfully. But hopefully, when they got up the next morning, it made them think.

Once again, queer people, othered people, are the perfect example of this hot button issue of “come togetherness.” We, the othered folks, are leading the way, showing how to come together despite our differences in a way that honors ourselves and our identities, without being complicit in our own oppression. That’s the power we have, to show people what it looks like to truly come together, to start these dialogues, and conversations. Whether it’s at IBMA and Shout & Shine, or at Galax, or around the country, or in Latin America.

That’s it exactly. I made a promise to myself to fly the gay flag, the rainbow flag at Galax next year over our campsite, because it’s usually just stars and bars there. I think that it would be nice to have other folks there to be a part of that! There’s strength in numbers. I would be reticent to go in there with an overt political agenda, though. Because that’s not strategic enough. I think what people like about Che Apalache is that it’s fresh, it’s breathing new energy into something, that for a lot of people has grown stale. That’s the majority of the comments we get. There are a lot of traditional bluegrass fans that follow us because they feel that the genre is doing what it always has — a resurgence of a new kind of thing. That new kind of thing isn’t going to be tipping the hat to the past in a cheeseball, more mash sort of way. People aren’t stupid. People want symbolism. People want string band music.

Photo courtesy of the artist.  

Nic Gareiss: The Subtle Art of Queering Traditional Dance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American music and dance have always gone hand-in-hand. Immigrants, bringing their folk traditions, art, and music to North America, combined and cross-pollinated with and stole and borrowed from the art and music of Native Americans, African Slaves, and African Americans. In that beautiful, conflicted, human, melting pot way we arrived at the incredible roots genres of our modern time. Dance had always been an integral part of that reckoning, of the growth, adaptation, and molding of our country’s vernacular music, but at the advent of the recording industry and the commercialization of music, musical dance and percussive dance were left by the wayside. They fell from ubiquity and popularity, largely relegated to preservationist, folklorist, familial, and rural niches.

Nic Gareiss doesn’t believe that dance belongs in those shadowed corners of our musical realms. A percussive dancer, scholar, and ethnochoreologist (think ethnomusicologist, but for dance — choreography), Gareiss devotes his creativity to bringing dance as music back into the traditional and vernacular genres that have slowly but surely lost nearly all of its influence. In the process, he explores greater ideas about his listeners’ and audiences’ expectations about the relationships of dance and melody, dancer and musician, dance partner and dance partner, song and singer, and performer and audience. Not only does he “queer” dance, by stripping it of its normative trappings, and laying its essentials bare, he also queers its heteronormativity, its patriarchal tendencies, and its binaryism — in a fashion that’s supremely gorgeous to both the ears and the eyes.  

A good starting point would just be that we’re a music site, right? We cover music, not so much dance. Some readers might need a quick briefing on your mantra that “dance is music.” Can you give people a quick 101 on your worldview that dance is something that’s essential to music, not just tangential to it?

I work as a dancer who makes sound. The traditions that I study and continue to study — and love — are dance traditions that are percussive. Whether that’s Appalachian clogging, Irish step dancing, or step dance from Canada, all of these dance forms have as their impetus rhythm-making with the feet and body. Also characteristic of these styles is the fact that they occur in environments where traditional music is being played. One might actually argue, and I would probably puckishly argue, that the soundscape that’s created by dancers is actually as much a part of the soundscape of traditional music as someone playing a fiddle or a banjo.

It’s interesting that that is an extant truth about vernacular music — especially American vernacular musics — but the way that American music has grown and evolved, it’s extirpated dance from itself, and then brought it back in, in different ways.

I think that because of the commercialization of music over the years, especially because of recording technology, dance hasn’t had as prominent a role, sonically. For some reason people didn’t think that the sound of a moving body was worth recording as much as the sound of another moving body, but holding a guitar. [Chuckles] What I’m interested in doing as I work mostly with musicians, and usually musicians that come from folk music backgrounds of some kind, is creating dance for listening. That manifests in mostly concerts, but also in some recordings, some teaching, some lecturing — there are a lot of things that make up my year along those lines.

One of those things is Solo Square Dance, a show that you’ve worked up, which strips away all of the old-time music and folk music that’s a part of these forms of dance and just showcases the actual, physical dancing — the part that had been lost, perhaps due to that commercialization, like you were just saying.

Exactly. In Solo Square Dance there are no musicians, except for me! [Laughs] There are no sounds except the sounds that I create myself, using my voice, using my feet, snapping my fingers, whistling. The idea is to reference and pay homage to traditional music and dance as a symbiotic entity. Because I don’t play instruments in that show, that means that traditional music shows up almost as a specter, or as a concept of something that’s been erased, so you can still feel a trace of it. It’s not just the idea of traditional music as a nebulous canon of the music writ large. Instead, there are actually specific pieces of music that come from, say, the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell or a traditional Irish dance tune that shows up in a tribute to one of my Irish dance teachers. There is various music in the show, it’s just music as made through a sounding body without a prosthesis, without an instrument.

Something that you’re also digging into with Solo Square Dance is leaving behind a whole host of presuppositions and expectations about dance, but you specifically call out heteronormativity. There are so many layers here, because you have to unpack that dance is music, and that it’s always been an integral part of these musical styles, but then you have to unpack that dance is inherently heteronormative, too. That’s a lot of ground to cover!  

The interesting thing for me came out of these video clips of Bascom Lamar Lunsford dancing on the porch, in this film by David Hoffman that was shot in 1962. [In the film] Bascom is demonstrating what it would be like to be in a square dance, but he only has one body to do it, instead of the usual eight people that it takes to make up a square. I saw that and thought that that was kind of inherently lonely and beautiful. But also, it somehow simultaneously was merry and celebratory. I think Bascom’s reimagining or demonstrating of the square dance is kind of a queer thing — and by “queer,” in this moment, I mean a set of stylistics that are somehow “beyond,” somehow an outsider, that have that “crooked” or critical relationship to the normative. Making that first piece a solo square dance and building the rest of the show around it, I tried to think so much about the way that dance possibly enacts some kind of revolutionary potential. Through touch, through interaction of sound and gesture, through [considering] what it might be like to have communities that move together, and what it might be like to have an individual that a community watches.

In all those things, I kept coming up against this idea that there are, indeed, heteronormative facets of that. Like [in square dancing] when we say, “Gents, swing your corner lady.” We say only “gents” and “ladies.” We say only, “Gents do this.” So there’s also a patriarchal power there, in who does what to whom. There’s also a binary that doesn’t allow for, perhaps, the existence of something like polyamory, where there are multiple people involved in a romantic or physical connection. I started thinking about what it would be like, if instead of singing, [Sings] “I’m gonna get that, get that, get that, I’m gonna get that pretty little girl,” what is it like if someone who performs the gender that I perform sings about someone who has a similar gender as themself? That subtle switch turns more than I ever could’ve imagined. It didn’t take putting on heels and a feather boa to queer square dance, just the simple expression of speaking about intimacy, thinking about the gender dynamics of that special social form, and then creating that little shift in the reiteration of that call. Which, I’m really happy about! At first, to decide, I’m gonna “queer” traditional dance — it’s a little bit of an arduous project. I’m finding that it’s these subtle nuance shifts that maybe make the biggest strides to imagining anti-normative futures as well as pasts.

I read an interview of yours, years ago now, in which you mentioned so succinctly that straight people have always let their identities shine through their art, so why wouldn’t queer people do that, too? That was a groundbreaking moment for me, realizing that my identity has an equal right to being included in my art, because no one else is filtering out their identities, their identities just happen to be the norm. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, like you were just saying, it just takes a change in perspective to open that paradigm up. How do we help all kinds of folks to realize that anti-normative future that you see?

I think it’s important to remember that queer people are not a facet of postmodernity. Queerness has always existed.

That’s such an important point! It just hasn’t always been visible.

Right. When we think about traditional music, oftentimes we relate that not only to a particular place, but a particular time. It’s important to remember that there have always been LGBTQIA+ people in those historical moments, again, whether those people were allowed to visible or whether it was okay for them to be visible is another question. Now, some of what we’re starting to see is nascent queerness beginning to whisper, or to sing, or to dance. That feels like a very exciting time, but we’re not inventing that. Queerness [has] been around for a long time.

For example, people who sing ballads, who maybe keep the pronoun of the song the same, or maybe switch pronouns to express a sexual object choice that is somehow other than straight, this is a simple, subtle way people have always enacted some kind of queer performance. And for a long time! I don’t only think that it’s always related to romantic connections, to be honest. I really like the idea of queerness as a critical set of stylistics. For instance, my relationship to percussive dance is a little queer — or bent — because I had a teacher who always said, “There will be no scraping in our class.” That means, in percussive dance, good technique is a sharp, short, adroit connection to the floor, where you strike your foot against the ground, but you don’t leave it on the ground. That, for me, sort of became a provocation. It made me want to slide my foot, to whisper, to create this foot-to-floor fricative, for many reasons: One, it got me closer to a fiddle’s bow, sliding slowly across the strings, but secondly, simply for the pure joy of transgressing! It opens this world of other tambours I didn’t have access to before.

So then, in conclusion, if a reader and roots music fan is looking to have their ideas about traditional and percussive dance queered, where will they be able to find you in the near future?

Solo Square Dance will continue to tour, there are shows in Ireland and Scotland lined up. I have a new project called DuoDuo with cellist Natalie Haas, guitarist Yann Falquet, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and myself. That project is out on the road. Also, my band, This Is How We Fly, is getting together to make our third record starting in November, which is very exciting. Then, in the fall, I’m touring with this incredible tap dancer, who is also interested in vernacular dance forms, vernacular jazz and swing — his name is Caleb Teicher. We have a duo dance project, again a project without any instruments! Just us, making the music with our bodies and voices.

Because dance is music, damnit.

Exactly! And, to be honest, music is dancing as well! [Laughs] I found, in my collaborations with musicians, when there’s a moving body on stage, musicians begin to consider their own bodies a little bit more. They start to think about where they stand and how they move. It’s actually an interesting metamorphosis to witness and be engaged with. It reminds everyone that if one person can cross the sound/movement divide, if a dancer can be heard, maybe a musician can be seen!

Editor’s Note: Gareiss will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount, clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves on March 17 as well as a headlining performance with Blount on March 18.

Photo credit: Darragh Kane

Fink, Marxer & Gleaves: Connecting Songs, Connecting Stories

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Intersectionality is the keystone of activism and action. Banding together across whatever barriers our identities present strengthens and energizes the mission, stripping away the isolation that all marginalized folks feel on the day-to-day. In bluegrass and old-time, many, many activist-minded artists, creators, and songwriters have carried the banner for inclusion and an action-forward, open community since the very beginning of these genres.

Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer are a prime example of those forebears, having fought for the inclusion of queer identities and women in folk music and bluegrass for decades. Shout & Shine, their new collaboration with youngster-yet-old-soul Sam Gleaves, is a perfect illustration of cross-generational mind melds — and musical melds. Messages of social justice, feminism, working class empowerment, and activism through music are so viscerally powerful because the trio shows that anyone can connect with each other across the rifts and barriers that many would assume were insurmountable. In this case, age and experiences are most strikingly disparate, but the core concept should apply to gender, religion, orientation, cultural background, or banjo right hand playing styles, too.

BGS is proud to be a place where these intersections are encouraged and celebrated, whether editorially or, for instance, on stage at our Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass showcase, held in Raleigh, NC during the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference for the past two years. Fink, Marxer & Gleaves — before they officially donned that moniker — performed for the showcase in 2017. The theme song they penned for the event is indeed the perfect ethos for their band, their album, the showcase itself, and the types of connections we’re all trying to foster as we press ever forward.

Some folks might not know that the Bluegrass Situation is already connected to this album and its title track!

Cathy Fink: I think it’s a pretty simple connection — I would even say that the Bluegrass Situation and the Shout & Shine showcase at IBMA were the reasons that brought Cathy & Marcy back to IBMA. [It gave us] a big feeling that the door was opening wider for more inclusion in every direction at the conference. Needless to say, once I found out about the showcase I made the connection with you about having us involved. And I made some suggestions for other artists [you] could have, which turned out well. We had worked with the Ebony Hillbillies and they came.

So I was just sitting on the back porch one day and I thought, “You know, this event needs a theme song!” Sometimes you think about a song for years and sometimes it takes a couple minutes and there it is. This happened to be one of those songs. It really popped out. There were several lines that I kept working on after that time, but that’s really what happened. In all serendipity, it fit our trio perfectly, in terms of what we stand for: loving traditional music, loving contemporary music that is formed on top of traditional music, and what we want to accomplish as a trio, playing bluegrass-related music that has a deeper meaning than, “I lost my girlfriend.” [Chuckles]

It often feels like this is a newer, growing movement for inclusion and diversity in bluegrass — it’s happening across roots music genres right now — but I wonder what it looks like to you, Cathy and Marcy, since you have been on the frontlines of this fight, this battle, this dialogue, for your entire lives? It’s often difficult for younger folks to appreciate how long and hard-fought these issues have been, and you two can bring this perspective, so I wonder, too, how this influences your mentorship?

CF: I want to start by saying the mentorship of Sam is a two-way street. We learn as much from him as he learns from us. Sam is an incredible inspiration to us, because he walks the walk, not just talks the talk — in terms of the songs that he’s written, the songs that he chooses, and frankly, how he treats people. These things are all interconnected.

Historically, for us, Marcy and I started to play out in the ‘70s, in days when women didn’t really play bluegrass music. I know that there are other women who had similar experiences, even though there were amazing women in country music on the radio beginning in the 1930s. One of our friends and mentors, Patsy Montana, was the first woman in country music to sell a million records. She was really the first woman in country music to start writing songs from the female perspective. Marcy and I spent ten years performing with and working with her, but we also played a lot of bluegrass festivals where people would come up to Marcy and say, “Wow! You’re a girl and you’re playing lead guitar!” They’d come up to me and say, “Wow! You’re a girl and you’re playing bluegrass banjo.” While we’d say, “Yeah, we’re people and we each have ten fingers that work!”

Marcy helped me with a release on Rounder Records in the late ‘80s called, The Leading Role. We did a lot of songs that people didn’t know had been recorded by these amazing women, like Ola Belle Reed, the DeZurik Sisters, Lily May Ledford, the Coon Creek Girls, and the Girls of the Golden West — there was an amazing heyday of women in country. Patsy made sure that they were getting the respect that they deserved. Then, later in the ‘80s, we did the Blue Rose album. Marcy and I put that together out of a desire to highlight some of the great women who we felt had been making amazing music but not getting any recognition. That included Sally Van Meter, Laurie Lewis, and Molly Mason.

Moving forward now, after thirty years, the cool thing is that we have the Justin Hiltner’s, and the Sam Gleaves’s, and the Jake Blount’s, and the Amythyst Kiah’s and a long list of people who are the next generation. They’re going to bring up the generation after them in a more inclusive world.

Marcy Marxer: My view is that in the early days of country music, the music better reflected who was actually out there playing. Then, when the record business got serious — not just 78s, but smaller, independent record companies started popping up and recording people — they might have recorded, say, just one or two fiddlers in an area, and because they were the two who got the record contract, that’s what people thought was happening over that whole area, when there could have been fifty other fiddlers within a mile. One of the reasons why it went to all-male was that that’s who was getting the record contracts. It wasn’t that women weren’t playing anymore, it’s that there were companies who were successful, then other companies wanted to copy that success, and it grew into being a male-dominated field.

This issue keeps coming up as I do these interviews. The reason we’ve ended up where we are today, with these ideas of who “owns” roots music, is largely because of revisionism and erasure. What I appreciate about what you three do, and what this record stands for — at least in my eyes — is that we’re avoiding that sort of erasure as we move forward, because you two are collaborating with Sam, who is almost four decades your junior, so we aren’t losing these stories and this institutional knowledge. I see this as the most important message of this record. Do you agree?

MM: I do agree. Absolutely. I think that, additionally, the bonding of the friendships is the best part of this record and the joy that we feel from this music is an extension of [that]. What Sam brings to this project — and music in general — is that he’s done such extensive research and background. Often we’ll meet younger players and they don’t have that background at all. Sam knows all of the greats and has gone to see everybody that he can. Not that one is better than the other, because you have to start somewhere, but with Sam, we feel like we bonded immediately artistically, musically, and emotionally.

Let me bring you in Sam, I don’t mean to talk about you so much as if you aren’t also on the line. [Laughs]

Sam Gleaves: No! My nature is to listen and I’m just very honored to work with Cathy and Marcy because they really are my She-roes. It’s the truth. I’ve always admired their work promoting diversity in roots music, with their presence in the community and their advocacy.

One difficult aspect of making roots music in this day and age is that so many listeners just write it off as nostalgic and they don’t see it as something that’s present and in the here-and-now. There are so many folks primed to hear this kind of protest music or counter-cultural music right now, but they write off these genres as being for someone else. As you formed this series of songs, how consciously did you work to make this music relatable in a modern era?

SG: I think it’s very organic for us. We love playing music together and we know what sort of material is fun and exciting for us to play and what kind of messages we want to promote. We recorded a song that Maybelle Carter wrote, “Buddy’s in the Saddle”; we recorded a song from Jean Ritchie’s repertoire and Elizabeth Cotten’s repertoire. There’s a theme of matriarchs in these songs, which always feels powerful to share. I was honored to get to record three songs that I wrote, one about moonshine, one about a hot pink house trailer — which is super fun and zany — and a song called “Welcome Table,” which uses lyrics from African American spirituals. Cathy’s “Shout & Shine” is kind of the [album’s] ethos, it brings the theme all together. All of the material seems to have a balance of the joy of playing music together and messages of social justice and lifting up voices from the traditional music community.

Let me put the same question to you, Cathy.

CF: It did organically happen, but what organically happens between the three of us musically leans in the direction of wanting to make good music and speak social justice without having a hammer over people’s heads. We didn’t sit down and say, “Hey, we need to do a bluegrass album about social justice.” We sat down and said, “What are the songs we enjoy singing the most?” There was this list. There were some surprise songs, but they fit in beautifully. We knew that “Shout & Shine” was first and foremost, but the title of the album took on additional meaning when one night, after recording, I said, “Look Sam, I know you’re holding out on us, I know you have more songs and you haven’t shared them.” Sam in his usual, humble way played “Moonshine.” We said, “Bingo! Let’s figure that one out right now!” It made Shout & Shine more than just the agenda, but also just looks at real life for a lot of people and the fun — we all enjoy a little hit of ‘shine now and then! I think it shows Sam’s versatility as a songwriter. This song is just a great piece of Southern storytelling. One of the things we also did on this album is that we connected a bunch of stories that we felt drawn to. To a large extent, their about people that we know or knew.

Connecting stories is what keeps music that is focused on social justice from being bogged down by the weight of those topics.

CF: Exactly! I think you just nailed it. We try to do this in a celebratory way as opposed to a bogged down sort of way.

How do we take a message like this and connect it to people who maybe couldn’t automatically relate to a record, band, or collection of songs like this?

MM: For years I’ve felt like an icebreaker and I know that Cathy has, too, because we’re an openly gay couple and my being a woman in guitar and flatpicking, I found that by relaxing, being myself, and putting the best I have out there, people gain a glimpse of understanding and they don’t see stereotypes quite as much as they might have otherwise. One of the things that’s been on my mind is that I’ve been a cancer patient now for over three years and how that has really, totally changed my life and perspective. There’s one song called “Closer to the Light,” the last song on the record, that I really adopted. I did not write the song, but when I heard it I knew it spoke directly to me. That’s the beauty of a song. It doesn’t say “cancer.” It says, “I’m going through this dark time and I don’t mind as long as I keep moving toward the light.” That applies to everything. It applies to social justice; it reminds me of the days of the civil rights movement, when music would keep us going. There are so many individual songs that mean so much to individual people. It’s great to have open, gentle songs that just encourage us to keep going.

Photo credit: Michael G. Stewart

BGS Celebrates Pride 2018

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s June! The most rainbowy time of the year! BGS is proud to celebrate Pride this month while the world marks the anniversary of the riots that began the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, nearly 50 years ago at The Stonewall Inn in New York City, with parades, parties, protests, and loads of glitter.

Queer voices are an integral part of the roots music communities we all love — and they always have been. Let’s revisit some of our favorite pieces and stories that focus on LGBTQ+ identities, music, and perspectives as we raise up this incredibly strong, vibrant, open, and loving community.

 

Last year, we celebrated 30 years of queer goddesses The Indigo Girls by naming them our Artists of the Month. Some of our favorite songwriters — like Angaleena Presley and Becky Warren — paid them tribute as well. The Indigo Girls blazed a trail for openly queer folks to make music loud and proud. Their wide-reaching influence cannot be overstated.

 

Brandi Carlile gave the remaining 10 months of 2018 an impossibly high standard to live up to when she released her most recent record, By the Way, I Forgive You, in February. One song off of the new project, “The Joke,” is poised to become a queer anthem for our generation — and President Obama himself listed it as one of his favorite songs of 2017. It’s one of our favorites ad infinitum.

 

Southwest Virginia natives and old-time, bluegrass, and folk musicians Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes are helping to dispel the all too common assumption that rural communities are devoid of LGBTQ+ folks. “When We Love,” a song off of their self-titled, debut duo release made our Class of 2017 list of favorite songs from the year.

 

We were honored and proud to support the first ever Bluegrass Pride last year, partnering with the California Bluegrass Association on a float in the San Francisco Pride Parade. The float ended up winning Best Overall Contingent and brought live bluegrass music to literally hundreds of thousands of potential fans. The icing on the cake is this bluegrass version of Whitney Houston’s “Dance with Somebody” by Front Country and some fabulous friends.

 

Singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier demonstrates the incredible power of empathy on her record Rifles & Rosary Beads, a collection of songs written with veterans of the armed services. It’s an important message for this day and age — one that Gauthier delivers with, once again, empathy.

 

Americana singer/songwriter Becca Mancari may be based in Nashville, but her debut album, Good Woman, released last fall, draws inspiration from well beyond Music City. The critically-acclaimed album can thank its lyric-driven, personality-rich songs for its success — a reminder that living one’s truth and letting that truth shine is always the best plan of action.

 

Country music is for queers too, damnit! Karen Pittelman of Karen & the Sorrows believes that if we edit our own personalities, perspectives, and identities out of our art, it’s a disservice to everyone. Especially given the fact that queer people have have been making all kinds of art and all kinds of music all along.

 

She took home the crown from RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars Season 3, but last year, before her return to the iconic reality TV show, drag superstar Trixie Mattel (AKA Brian Firkus) released an album of folk-tinged country songs. This year, she released its follow up. We spoke to Trixie after her first album dropped about how a drag queen can fit into roots music communities.

 

Singer/songwriter and “poster child for intersectionality” Crys Matthews carries on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. through her music, writing relevant, hard-hitting, convicting songs that champion social justice and activism.

 

Country artist Sarah Shook is an activist just by being herself, unapologetically. It’s a classic outlaw perspective and a perfect fit for a queer voice in the country realm.

 

Folk legends, GRAMMY winners, producers, and life partners Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer released their forty-fifth recording, Get Up and Do Right, early last year. It’s no surprise that it has a social justice bent, given that the pair has spent their entire lives and careers on the front lines of the battle for LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights.

 

Artist and Americana/soul singer Chastity Brown contemplated heartbreak and healing on her latest album, Silhouette of Sirens, released a little over a year ago. To Brown, the personal is political, “Just by me being a bi-racial, half-black, half-white woman living in America right now is political. Just being a person of color, a queer woman of color, for that matter, is freaking political.”

 

Of course, we’ve been proud to highlight diverse and underrepresented identities at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference for the past two years – and continuing this year! The inclusion and diversity movement swept IBMA’s events in Raleigh last year, and we took a look at how and why.

 

And last but certainly least, how could we celebrate Pride without going back to our conversation with the most busted, washed-up, wannabe country star in the universe, Ms. Marlene Twitty-Fargo? As she would holler from stage, “Happy Pride, biscuits! Though I don’t know why all you queers love Charley Pride so much.”

Lede photo by torbakhopper on Foter.com / CC BY-ND

ANNOUNCING: The Second Annual Shout and Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass

Posted on by Editor

The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone are excited to announce the second annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass showcase at World of Bluegrass. The event — which was created to foster representation and encourage inclusion of the diverse artists, musicians, and professionals who love and create bluegrass and roots music — will take place at 10 pm on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at the Pour House in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a part of IBMA’s official showcase schedule/lineup, the Bluegrass Ramble.

Shout & Shine’s lineup includes the Tyler Williams Band, the Ebony Hillbillies, Sam Gleaves, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, the Otsuka & Watanabe Brothers’ Japanese Jam, and 2017 IBMA Hall of Fame Inductee Alice Gerrard. There will also be a SuperJam hosted by Emerging Artist of the Year nominees Front Country. Each artist was carefully chosen to celebrate and encourage diversity within the bluegrass and roots community. In addition to working toward universal inclusion of LGBTQ+ and POC (people of color), Shout & Shine recognizes the importance of representing people with disabilities and working toward universal access for all people at music events, clubs, and festivals.

The showcase was born in 2016 as a direct response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s controversial “bathroom bill,” HB2. The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone joined forces with the shared belief that celebrating folk music means supporting its rich and varied history. By amplifying diverse and underrepresented voices, we present a reminder that this music belongs to all and that inclusion strengthens our communities, our businesses and organizations, and our art. Multiple advocacy organizations will have representatives present and information available, including Equality NC, Triangle Friends of African-American Arts, and NC Asian Americans Together, who will have voter registration information available (the event falls on National Voter Registration Day).

“We are excited to have the Bluegrass Situation and PineCone producing another great Shout & Shine showcase this year, putting into practice the IBMA’s value statement around diversity and inclusion as a fundamental characteristic of our music community. Bluegrass is for all of us, and we’re stronger together than we could ever hope to be individually,” notes Paul Schiminger, Executive Director of IBMA.

Shout & Shine is made possible through the support of sponsors, which include Raleigh Convention Center, Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau, VAE Raleigh (via the Ignite Fellowship), Larry’s Coffee, Montgomery Violins, and the Press House. For those who cannot attend but would like to be part of the event, the showcase will live stream on the Bluegrass Situation’s Facebook page.

Trixie Mattel: Equal Parts Mother Maybelle and Mama Ru

Posted on by Editor

To be in roots music is to be infatuated with its “good ol’ days,” with its forefathers, and with tradition. Almost any change — stylistic or cultural — is debated. The labels on album spines and headstocks are just as important as the labels given to each other. After all, any genre within roots music is not simply a genre, but a community and, if the members of these communities look, sound, act, and think like ourselves, it’s easier.

On the other hand, the art of drag is all about challenging perceptions and presuppositions. By slapping on a wig and three or four pairs of pantyhose, a queen puts gender identity, sexuality, and societal pressures all under the microscope. In drag, boundaries are meant to be pushed, shock is a commodity, and respect for the “tradition” is more often than not shrouded in biting, heartless insults. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe.

Where the two overlap, we find international drag queen superstar, contestant on season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and folk musician Trixie Mattel. While many Drag Race alumni have released albums — not surprisingly all are dance/club-oriented — Trixie (aka Brian Firkus) just released Two Birds, a folk-influenced country album of original songs. Firkus grew up in rural northern Wisconsin with hardly a neighbor and a shortage of friends, so playing Carter scratch guitar and listening to his grandad’s favorites — Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, and the like — were the most entertaining use of time. To most roots music fans, that’s an awfully familiar story, right up until you add a wig even larger than Dolly’s, makeup that rivals a clown’s, and a lacy nightgown.

In our brand new column, Shout & Shine, we will explore diverse voices and identities in roots music. We’ll talk to musicians, artists, and creators who don’t fit the “mold.” People who are marginalized within roots music communities — not because their love and respect for the music is lacking, not because they don’t have the familial or cultural ties, and not because they did not grow up learning chords from their grandparents at the kitchen table, but because there are people out there who believe the music can only belong to those who are exactly like themselves. A man in a wig, lashes, nails, and a nightgown is surely disqualified.

When I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a video of you playing “Storms Are on the Ocean” on autoharp, I was shocked. Where did you get those autoharp chops?

Oh my God, you are going to laugh. I’ve only been playing autoharp for like … five months? I love the instrument! Plus, it’s such a pretty-looking instrument to play in drag. It has such an angelic, feminine look to it. I learned on a chromaharp by Oscar Schmidt and I just got a D’aigle harp made for me. It’s a custom build and it’s so beautiful.

I’ve played guitar for 15 years. I play kind of “Carter scratch” style. I grew up alone in the country playing, so I learned how to play the accompaniment with the melody together on guitar. I’ve always sung and played together, so it made perfect sense. I taught myself guitar, and autoharp, to me, it’s the same business. You use the leading tones of the chords to find the melody. You just learn to play by ear. That instrument, it’s sort of like learning to sight-read or sing solfege — like do-re-mi. Once you do it enough, it becomes second nature. On the album, I got Allison Guinn to play it. She’s like the Beyoncé of autoharp — she’s been on the cover of Autoharp Quarterly and she’s a Broadway actress whose special skill on her Broadway resumé is that she’s an autoharp champion. She’s fabulous.

I saw you perform in Nashville for A Drag Queen Christmas where you sang Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” live and accompanied yourself on guitar.

That was the only night I did “Coat of Many Colors.” I love that song and, to me, it’s almost a Christmas song. I ended up dropping it because I wanted to do what I normally do — I do a stand-up set with music woven in. I’ll make a joke about Aja [RuPaul’s Drag Race season nine contestant] looking like a burn victim, then I’ll sing “Girl on Fire” for 15 seconds. Or I’ll make a Columbine joke then sing “Dust in the Wind” for 10 seconds. That’s usually what I do — little bits of music punctuated by jokes. For Nashville, I wanted to do “Coat of Many Colors,” because I thought, if anybody is going to go on this journey with me, it’s the people in Nashville.

I play guitar. I went to school for music, but it never occurred to me to make Trixie sing. When I started, it was like a light turned on. I never really sang in drag until this year. I look like Dolly Parton, but I sing like Garth Brooks … like it doesn’t really make sense. [Laughs] It didn’t make sense to me for Trixie to have this man’s singing voice. But then the comedy became less about being a drag queen and more autobiographical. The stand-up show I’m doing now, there’s a portion where I do original music and it’s always everyone’s favorite part of the show. It occurred to me, people relate and are more responsive to Trixie being a singing drag queen than I thought they would be, so I might as well run with it.

You said you’ve been playing guitar for 15 years — how did you get started?

I’m from the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and we didn’t have any neighbors or anything. I didn’t have any friends. There wasn’t anyone else who lived around us, so I learned to play guitar at the kitchen table from my grandpa, who was a country musician his whole life. At 13, I started and he kind of taught me, but he was a little more insistent on me teaching myself. He said, “If you were a good musician, you could figure it out on your own,” which I think is sort of true.

Who did you listen to growing up? Who did your grandpa turn you on to?

He turned me on to George Jones, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty. Obviously, I gravitated more toward the women — I liked Loretta a lot. Dolly. Loretta and Dolly, for me, are running head-to-head for my favorite. I think Dolly is a finer musician, but I do like that Loretta’s music is a little rougher and tougher. She’s a little more like a tomboy in country music. I like the rougher side of her lyrics, and it’s a little more mellow. Her songs are about being poor and stuff, but obviously, I’m a drag queen, so I like that Dolly wears full drag.

There was some crossover into pop music for a while, that stuff you listen to when you’re a teenager. With folk, I was like, “That’s old people music! My grandparents like that.” When I started to get older, I was done with it, but then only as an adult, when I entered my mid-20s, did I realize that country and folk, given how simple it is, it speaks to the most basic human needs. It’s simple music because it’s by simple people for simple people, really.

I’m the only person from my family to go to college. You can be smart, but not educated and, in folk music, that’s pretty apparent. There’s an emotional intelligence. They communicate really deep things with clean, simple structures in the music.

The people who created this music have always had marginalized identities: immigrants, impoverished people in Appalachia, African slaves, African-Americans being excluded from Western European music and turning to jazz, creating blues. Roots music has always been this vehicle for the struggle of people who are othered. It would makes sense that LGBTQ identities could be intuitively folded into that music, but within these genres, there persists this narrative that they belong to straight, white, Christian men.

Folk music feels like it’s not for us because the culture that surrounds folk music is so old school and very religious. We feel like we can’t belong in that genre of music. When is a gay [artist] ever going to win a CMT Award? Probably never. Or even like an Americana award or something smaller. It’s a challenging thing. Folk’s contemporary movement is a little more liberal.

When I wanted to do the album, I thought it was going to be a shot in the dark, because I really wanted to use gay musicians, if I could. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. My producer, Brandon James Gwinn, is originally from Nashville, but he works in New York producing off-Broadway music material for musical theatre. I’m a half-musical theatre person, half-folk person, so he was perfect, because he knew the Nashville sound. He worked on Ring of Fire, the Johnny Cash musical, and he had a network of people, like the fiddle player and bass player.

I feel like a foray into the roots music market would be daunting for any LGBTQ person, let alone a behemoth character/star such as Trixie?

Originally, when we shot the album artwork, we did it in drag, out of drag, and we shot one together, because we weren’t sure how we were going to market it. We also thought about doing two different covers and different names to sell the album in different ways, because we wanted people who like folk music to pick it up, but not be deterred by the fact that there’s somebody who puts on a dress on the cover. My manager asked me if I wanted to release it as Trixie or as Brian. First I said Trixie, then I said Brian, then I was like, “You know what? It’s kind of irrelevant. It’s more about the story of the music. People can envision whoever they want singing it. That’s kind of irrelevant. That’s sort of the point of the album.”  I didn’t want to market it as drag, but I didn’t want to shit on what people already know about me. It would make no sense, as a business person, to market it without the name on it, because all of the followers I’ve gotten — who like me for comedy, for dressing up — it would be stupid to not try to also let them know that there are other things going on.

I think people, in general, especially in drag and with the age of drag on television, people aren’t used to drag queens having any discernible gifts whatsoever. Nowadays, dressing up is enough. When people see you do something, they’re like, “Oh my God! That person got on stage and did a thing!” I’m like, “By the way, Linda, people used to have to do that.”

How does it feel for you to go from being a former Drag Race contestant to becoming a songwriter?

I’ve always felt like a songwriter first and a live performer second. It’s exciting to have people hear it, even if they don’t hear it live. But I also prefer to play alone. I’ve always played by myself — it’s just what I’m used to. I really love to do stand-up and I love to do comedy and I think I’m actually funnier than I am a fine musician, so I like to blend the two together.

I’m hoping people will go on the journey with me. A lot of people love me for the look and for the comedy. I hope that they’ll listen to it. The music is kind of the behind-the-scenes of the lifestyle of being a comedian and drag queen. It’s not necessarily funny music; though a lot of it has a sense of humor to it, it’s not comedy music.

Would you say on your family tree, on one side you have Mother Maybelle and on the other side you have Mama Ru?

Oh yeah, totally! I’m so into that. There’s a museum somewhere that has Mother Maybelle’s autoharp on display and I’d love to go see it someday.

Last question: Do you think there oughta be a bluegrass drag queen named Shady Grove?

Oh my God. Yes. The answer is yes.

Gretchen Peters’ Protest Song (Op-ed)

Posted on by Editor

As a songwriter, I'm genetically programmed to dig for truth. To recognize it when it appears, to root it out, to know the difference between words that sound nice together and ones that hurt, that pierce, that open wounds in order to clean them out. Ones that bear witness.

Some of us have got it made / some of us have more than paid / but we're all marching in this slow parade of losses.

I wrote those lines three years ago. The parade of losses stepped it up a few notches last week: Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, the country I thought I lived in.

Last Tuesday, I went to bed in a country where hate groups like the KKK were universally reviled, considered fringe lunatics. On Wednesday, I woke up in a strange land, where they were holding a victory march for their new president-elect and a white supremacist was poised to take on a top job in his cabinet. I went to bed in a world where a woman becoming president was more than a theoretical possibility; it looked like it was finally going to happen. I woke up to find the glass ceiling still intact, and my heart was the thing that had shattered.

If I have grandchildren, I will be hard-pressed to find a way to make them understand what a painful shock this was. The grief that I felt for a homeland which, apparently, only existed in my mind.

I heard from friends: "Your song is your weapon." "We need art and artists more now than ever." All true. But before I can begin, I have to find out what I need.

Right now what I need feels like a safe place to hide, in a bunker with my family and my friends and especially everyone I love who is so much more at risk than I am — starting with my transgender son. I wondered how many mothers across the country received a panicky, frantic text message on Wednesday morning like the one I found on my phone. When your own child fears for his safety because he is suddenly no longer welcome in his own country, what do you say? "You’re overreacting?" He’s not. "It's going to be okay?" Maybe it won’t. At best, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Sometimes the songs know more than you do. They are prescient in a way that is uncanny and inexplicable, except that human history repeats itself, in heartbreakingly familiar ways, and, as Christopher Booker said, "We write the same seven stories over and over."

Sometimes the songs transform with the times. My friend Mary Gauthier emailed me Wednesday: “The meaning of my fucking songs has changed.” I found myself singing my song “Idlewild” on Saturday night and hearing the words come out of my mouth as if they were brand new. I wrote it about my childhood in New York in the 1960s.

We shoot our rockets / we shoot our presidents / we shoot the commies and the niggers and the Viet Cong / Everything changes / everything stays the same.

As the sickeningly regular parade of Black men and boys murdered in the street continued, the song took on more layers, and felt more important to sing. Now it feels like we’ve stepped into some kind of nonlinear time machine and it’s 1968 and 1939 and 1861, all at once. And I sing it and I can’t believe we’re here again.

As a writer and the daughter of a journalist, the loss I mourn the most is the loss of truth. Now it seems that words don’t matter except to the extent that they can deliver the poison into the minds of the unsuspecting. Facts and truth are negotiable, malleable, unnecessary. Believe and repeat fake news on Facebook. Call a sexually abused woman a liar and she is one. I was raised to make my case, if I believed in something. I was taught that science and logic and facts were things to be celebrated and respected. That we evolve and progress by the exchange of ideas, and presenting one's case with care and empathy and above all, facts, is paramount. After Tuesday, all evidence points to the fact that the Orwellian nightmare is real, it is here, and it is now.

Although it feels futile — and I feel impotent to change things — one day I’ll write a song, and then another, and then another. But not yet. First, I have to comfort my son, my family, my friends, and, hardest of all, myself. That will be my first protest song.

Singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters is a member of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame with three decades' worth of award-winning tunes in her catalog. 

Photo credit: yukon28209 via Foter.com / CC BY-SA.