‘Mamas If Your Daughters Grow Up to Be Cowboys, So What?’: Women Refiguring Rurality and Class in Country Music

Abstract

Drawing on the burgeoning fields of rural studies and working-class studies, this essay examines contemporary country music by female artists. Namely, it considers rurality and class in the music of artists Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, and Mickey Guyton. While country music scholars have long attended to how rurality and class function in country music by men, country music scholarship has largely disregarded these concepts in the music of female country artists. Whereas male country artists typically reference rurality and the working-class as a means of identification, Lambert, Musgraves, and Guyton reference these social constructs to interrogate, destabilize, and refigure. In crafting multilayered responses to contemporary dialogues on rurality and the working-class, these women not only call attention to country music’s premises, but they also produce variations of rurality and class.