Growing up in Palo Alto, California, Molly Tuttle was surrounded by music. Her dad was a teacher at Gryphon Stringed Instruments, which is not-so-coincidentally where I got the pickups installed on my mini harp. Molly took to the guitar early and intensely, eventually earning a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music. But I think it was those early days growing up in California, attending bluegrass festivals with her family, basking in the glow of the jam, that set the tone for her warm and collaborative approach to playing music.
At Berklee, Molly formed a band called “The Goodbye Girls,” and cut her teeth touring in Scandinavia. Digging into The Goodbye Girls was a good launchpad for talking about what it means to be a female musician in Americana, as well as what happens when you explicitly call yourself an all-female group. As the first woman to win the IBMA Guitarist of the Year award, Molly has a unique perspective on this particular conundrum. It’s juicy.
I talked with Molly about her debut album, When You’re Ready, and her dazzling covers album …But I’d Rather Be With You before sifting through the many layers of her latest album, Crooked Tree. Crooked Tree features Molly’s brand-new band, Golden Highway. This new record is a study of bluegrass sensitively executed by one of the genre’s stars. Molly’s interpretations of bluegrass traditions like the murder ballad, shiny stacked vocal harmonies, and lightning fast guitar playing, are something to behold.
Artist:Lera Lynn Hometown: Athens, Georgia; now lives in Nashville Song: “What Is This Body?” Album:Something More Than Love Release Date: July 15, 2022
In Their Words: “We all go through so many iterations of physical self, especially women. We grow, we mature, we thrive, we age, we wither and die. Through all of those changes we are made to examine our physical selves and reconcile what we once were with what we’re becoming. It’s a never-ending identity challenge.
As a mother, my physical self-concept has been completely turned upside down and then righted again. That’s an otherworldly experience. And an identity crisis in itself. You sit and watch your body download a whole new operating system and transform into a temporary baby hotel. And then, magically, your body morphs back into itself again (almost).
“As a woman, I’ve felt the societal pressure to look a certain way as well as the societal emphasis on and preference for youth. I’ve felt the pressure from the entertainment industry to abstain from pregnancy. I’ve felt both totally alienated from my physical self and completely at home in my skin. The relationship is constantly changing because my body is constantly changing, and it takes constant mindfulness to tune out the noise and love my body.
“And I do love my body. It is a magical machine carrying me and my ideas through the world. I am so grateful for my health and strength and beauty. It is fleeting. And that is beautiful too. As society is evolving, we are questioning more and more the self-valuation though our physicality, as well as the definition of beauty. I think it’s changing and I’m glad. It’s coming just in time for me to get gloriously old and saggy.” — Lera Lynn
The best songwriters use all the tools at their disposal to craft their music. Among tools like instrumentation, timbre, and arrangement is story, a sometimes-overlooked device for writing incredible music. Amanda Shires is no stranger to story and demonstrates her aptitude as a writer in her emotional single, “The Problem.” The song tells a specific story, but not in an “on-the-nose” fashion; instead, it feels like a memory, slightly faded and filled with more feelings than information. Upon the single’s release, Shires stated, “This song is about making tough decisions and not having to go it alone.”
Delivered as a conversation between Shires and husband Jason Isbell, “The Problem” has a dreamy quality due to its winding melody and a cloud of reverb glowing over the studio production. With a similar atmosphere and feeling as The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” it acts as a testament to Shires’ knack for skillfully navigating lyric, tonality, and instrumentation to spin a narrative with a brooding unrest beneath the surface. Take a moment to hear one of the best writers in roots music today with this live performance of “The Problem” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
There are a whole lot of ways you can tell the story of 2020, but for us here at BGS, it will be remembered as a year of especially remarkable songwriting from women in roots music.
We lead our playlist with the one and only Dolly Parton, who assured us that life will be good again. Parton’s songwriting is presented in an enticing new book, Songteller, and her ability to articulate complicated emotions — through lyrics that speak to all walks of life — is something that Brandi Carlile picked up on as a teenager. In this video interview from the 2020 BMI Country Awards (with a cameo from Dolly at the end), Carlile explains how Parton’s perspective on equality kept Carlile from divorcing country music completely.
Parton, who turns 75 next month, shares a number of important qualities with a new generation of singer-songwriters she’s inspired. In the case of Brandi Carlile, there’s a sense of belonging that is woven throughout their work, from Parton’s “Joshua” to Carlile’s “Carried Me With You.” Like Parton, Brennen Leigh is able to capture a sense of place and make it relatable, even for a listener who’s never been there. Kyshona Armstrong offers a sense of self-worth and self-awareness in her writing, as Parton does, allowing listeners to know them better. Likewise, Maya de Vitry and Parton share a sense of wonder and joy, portraying landscapes — internal and external — that are imagined, yet vivid.
On Prairie Love Letter, her full-length paean to her homeland on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, Brennen Leigh demonstrates a visceral, evocative grounding – just as Parton constantly speaks of her Tennessee mountain home: with a glint in her eye, and a sorrow in her heart for knowing she had no choice but to leave it. Leigh stakes her claim on both the wide, expansive plains and Nashville all at once, asking her audience “Don’t you know I’m from here?” As if to remind she’s as at home in bluegrass and country — and Music City — as Dolly herself.
“Backwoods Barbie,” “Dumb Blonde,” and “Just Because I’m a Woman” are all perfect examples of Parton’s lifelong radical self-possession. She expresses her agency boldly, confidently, without (visible) second guessing – from her wigs to her infamous tattoos to her nothing-special acknowledgement of her plastic surgeries, struggles with suicidal ideation, and so on, she is her fully realized, autonomous self. As Dolly told Jad Abumrad on Dolly Parton’s America, “Who we are is who we are… I would just bow out if I wasn’t allowed to be me…” Kyshona Armstrong‘s prescient album, Listen, holds similar space, as Armstrong doesn’t simply ask folks to listen; her presence, compassion, and radical honesty demand it. Because, first and foremost, she’s welcoming and non-judgmental in that aim, you will find yourself fully enveloped by her music before you realize the conviction within it.
Maya de Vitry made a gorgeous, poetic foray into heavier, rockier turf with How to Break a Fall, a gutsy, genre-bending set of songs. Their anger, release, and passion, expressed by the folk-rock production style, feels right out of Parton’s post-White Limozeen era, an effortless combination of seemingly disparate musical influences, distilled into something that, almost above all else, feels joyful. Where male-centered rock and roll finds itself often hung up on its endemic toxic masculinity, de Vitry and Parton stride into electrified sounds with their femininity forward, and the result is as charming as it is subversive.
It’s striking, among such an incredible volume of musical output from their Americana and country peers this year, that these women would stand out, above and beyond the still-common glass ceilings imposed upon them for decades. Dolly blazed a trail, but these dozens of writers — and singers and pickers and composers and front women and side musicians and authors and poets — would have crashed through inevitably on their own. With songs like Adia Victoria’s “South Gotta Change,” Sunny War’s “Can I Sit With You?,” “Troubled Times” from Laurie Lewis, the Secret Sisters’ “Cabin,” it’s obvious Dolly Parton’s songwriting legacy will be inherited by multiple generations worthy of carrying it on.
Throughout 2020, the BGS editorial team embraced this wealth of excellent music from women songwriters in roots music. It has been a privilege to share these original voices with our readers, too. Here are 50 of our favorite tracks from 2020:
Photo credit: Daniel Jackson for BGS, Newport Folk Fest 2019
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