I read Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be by Marissa R. Moss. I don't follow music but I had heard of the Dixie Chicks and how they were treated. It seems, for some bizarre reason, country music stations didn't want to play female artists. Their explanation was that country music is like a salad - they need lots of lettuce, which is the male artists, and just a sprinkling of tomatoes - the female artists. They especially wanted their female artists to be compliant and feminine, which did not exactly cover the Dixie Chicks. Aside from their political comments about Bush, country radio found them over all to be too rebellious. You can imagine how the straight, white men reacted to "Good Bye Earl." I'd never heard this happy song about killing an abusive husband, so I'm glad the book directed me to it. It also directed me to country women who won Grammys, and even then radio didn't want to play them because they were queer or of color or just outspoken. So I've been able to listen to people I'd never heard of before that the rest of the wold has - Brandy, Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby. I don't know if those in charge of country radio have wised up by now, but I think all the kerfuffle about Beyonce going country reflects the same old attitude. ( )

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers Program on LibraryThing. It was an enjoyable and quick read, even though it made me angry. Why is it so hard for industry executives to play more women and people of color? There is so much good music out there, and who really cares what the musician's gender or race is? If it's good, it's good. I appreciated the playlist in the back of the book introducing me to more artists I'd never heard of. I loved hearing how some of my favorite female musicians started out. I think the only thing I would have liked to have read more about is how this will change. What is actively being done, or what can be done to decrease the good ol' boys club and white male singers? ( )

Women in country music can sing, write powerful songs and if the powers that be deny them the opportunity to get their music out on radio then there is a problem. This book details many issues that women face that men do not have to deal with sexism, racism,LGBTQIA+ issues just to name a few. Some of these women have went around the road blocks put up by the old guard of Nashville to find success and win major awards with little or no help from country radio. ( )

I devoured tis book. I love counrty music and usually listen to satellite or my own cds/mp3 and did not realize how horrible corporate men were. Kudos for giving all these talented woman props for sticking through just to do what they love.

You wouldn't necessarily know it if you listen to country music radio stations today when three out of four songs are male singers belting out homages to dirt roads, pickup trucks and girls in tank tops, but not so long ago there was a golden era of success for female artists in the genre. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion of high-charting singles by women like Shania Twain, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Martina McBride, and of course The Dixie Chicks. But it didn't last, and journalist Moss lays out a case for why that starts with brute capitalism and ends with our old friend sexism with the obligatory soupçon of racism.

The consolidation of radio stations around the country under the umbrella of just a couple of big corporations — primarily Clear Channel Communications — meant that instead of local deejays at each station choosing music that most appealed to them and their listeners, programming was centralized. And the use of computer algorithms to construct those playlists made things worse. A programming operations manual spelled it out clearly:

I don't want more than two ballads in a row. I want to avoid having more than two female singers in a row.

When you limit the number of tracks by women in any given hour to just a handful, that leaves a lot of talented artists fighting for just a few seats at the table, and it means especially that women of color are largely left standing out in the hall, not even in the room.

The sexism aspect was best illustrated in 2015 by a deejay who said that women were the "tomato" in the country radio salad, while the biggest male stars were the "lettuce." It's a bad sign when an industry is so sure of its monopoly that it no longer has to hide how the sausage gets made.

The answer, so far, has been for female artists to stop trying to appeal to the chauvinists in the country-music establishment and especially the all-powerful country radio wing (where they were expected to endure men ogling them and making crude remarks about their physical attributes, and occasionally looking for other "favors") and to appeal directly to audiences through Spotify and other streaming services as well as live shows. Moss gives readers a look at how some of the biggest names today (Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert, Mickey Guyton) have found success by refusing to compromise their artistic visions to placate an industry that wouldn't want them even if they followed all the rules.

This is an engaging read, very breezy in style, and I would have finished it much more quickly if I hadn't kept stopping to open up Apple Music and search for tracks by women artists that I wasn't familiar with. I'm not going to lie: While I found a lot I like, others of these women make music that doesn't particularly appeal to me, for all I admire their ability to create their own success. But that's sort of the point: When you make room for more women, you make room for music that doesn't all sound alike and doesn't cater to the same narrow band of listeners.

The biggest critique I have is that this book really could have used an index. Moss tells the story of the artists she features in roughly chronological order, but that means any one person's story is scattered across the whole book. It would have been useful to have a way to hone in on a particular artist or song or event without having the skim the whole book.

For me, as a fan of country music who has no interest in modern country radio, the lesson was to stop thinking of radio or chart success as the harbinger of quality. There's lots of great music getting made out there, and pretty much all of it can be found on streaming services. And when you listen that way, you don't have to put up with constant advertising interruptions or inane deejays breaking the spell. ( )