A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Queer
A new Link Wray reissue for Record Store Day, plus an interview with Country Queer publisher/editor-in-chief Dale Henry Geist to kick off Pride Month.
Hi, and welcome to the June edition of Switchblade—a couple days early, even!
Never mind that I’ve now been out of school for almost as many years as I was in it, I still get that antsy “last week of school” feeling this time of year. Then around mid-June, it finally settles into the familiar “fuck it, it’s summer” feeling.
Have you gone back to seeing live music yet? Nothing has really piqued my interested enough to stand in a sweaty crowd again, except maybe the 2022 Primavera Sound lineup. I might need to dip my toe in by going to a bar or movie theater first before I consider Spain, though.
Book Updates
We’re now looking at a 2022 publish date for my Link Wray biography. There are a lot of loose ends are being tied up and final revisions being made. Bazillion Points, my publisher, has a dedicated email list for the book that you can sign up for! That and this newsletter are the best way to find out about pre-orders, pub date announcements, events and everything else book-related when the time comes.
Wait, This Guy Sings?
I don’t usually pay too much attention to Record Store Day releases anymore and can’t even remember the last time I went shopping on the day. But this year (June 12) catch me combing every record store in the Twin Cities for the new reissue of this ultra-rare 1964 gem, Link Wray Sings and Plays Guitar, from Sundazed Music.
As corny and generic as the title sounds, when Vermillion Records—Link’s brother’s label—originally put out this LP, it was a big deal that Link was both playing guitar and singing. Since “Rumble” in 1958, he was really only known as an instrumental artist, with very few exceptions; Link Wray Sings and Plays Guitar was Link’s first record without any instrumentals. While his self-titled 1971 Polydor album would officially introduce the world to Link Wray the Singer, LWSAPG was a nice—and kind of odd at times, especially on side B—preview of those abilities.
The notes on the back of the original album cover would have you believe that the music industry and Link’s fans were begging him to sing on record. Maybe they were, but this effort was likely more due to the fact that once-popular quick-hit instrumentals were falling out of fashion in the early ‘60s in favor of longer, FM radio-friendly tracks and full-length albums, not to mention the British Invasion bands and those they inspired. The lead track from the album, originally released under Link’s side project, The Spiders, even serves as tribute to the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” (Can you tell the opening riff apart from John and George’s?)
There were fewer than 1,000 copies of Link Wray Sings and Plays Guitar pressed and Vermillion originals go for a pretty penny. I was thrilled to speak with Bill Dahl, the music historian and writer who did the liner notes for the Sundazed reissue and several other Wray reissues, recently. Bill specializes in roots music from post-World War II to the ‘70s and has an encyclopedic knowledge of this era. Look for his insights in my book when it comes out!
We’re Here, We’re (Country) Queer
I wrote a few months ago about Country Queer, the website (and podcast) all about lifting up LGBTQ+ voices in the country and Americana community.
CQ has some lofty goals and, I believe, a pretty bright future ahead. While they’ve already seen some success, publisher and editor-in-chief Dale Henry Geist is looking to take the site to the next level, paying staff a living wage and operating the organization in a financially healthy and sustainable way. (If only some of the publishers I’ve worked for in the past had the same outlook, sigh.)
In addition to continuing ad and merch sales, they’re launching a crowdfunding campaign in June and are kicking it off with virtual “Taking Flight” concerts June 1 and 2. The lineup features lots of great up-and-coming (and not so up-and-coming) country and Americana artists, many of whom you can hear on the Country Queer Spotlight podcast. Admission is free via YouTube (June 1 link here; June 2 link here) and you’ll find a link to donate on the YouTube pages once the concerts begin.
So, in the spirit of Pride—also just because I love the site and am all for anything that pushes the music industry to be more inclusive—I interviewed Dale about the state of country music and what’s ahead for CQ.
Dana: The connection between queerness and country and Americana is not a new thing by any means, but it's definitely getting a lot more attention now—and that's partly thanks to Country Queer. If someone's just sort of wandering into this world and this juxtaposition, are there any landmark artists that you would highly recommend?
Dale Henry Geist: The first name that always comes to my mind is Brandi Carlile. She may be the highest-profile artist that is country or Americana adjacent, and the way that she conducts herself artistically and personally is tremendously inspiring as well. There are people who have paved the way [like] k.d. lang. She was a country star, and then she came out and had a lot of success in the pop world, but she was not going to get played on country radio.
There's another artist that is really sort of the ground zero for out country: Patrick Haggerty, who recorded under the name Lavender Country. They put out an album called Lavender Country in 1973 that I think probably moved 200, 300 units.
It was up in the [Pacific] Northwest. And it was a completely community-driven effort, I think the studio was a volunteer thing, and the band, so he felt completely free to be himself, which is radical—you know, an outspoken queer man. He was writing about that. It’s 100 percent country honky-tonk stuff, which is what he grew up with on a farm in rural Washington. The writing is terrific.
There are also some recent great country artists: Waylon Payne put out an amazing album last year, Amythyst Kiah just came out with an amazing album. S.G. Goodman, who's a really great emerging artist from Kentucky and has a very rock-inflected Americana [sound]. Aaron Lee Tasjan’s newest record is doing really well. It's really a stretch to call it country, but he came out of the Americana world and it's a rock kind of thing now. But it’s not, you know, contemporary rock. It's good rock. [Side note from Dana: If you like Jeff Lynne, you’re gonna like Aaron Lee Tasjan!]
My favorite album of [last] year was Jamie Wyatt’s Neon Cross. D’orjay the Singing Shaman, who is Canadian, she's terrific. Adeem the Artist, who just got a gig opening up for American Aquarium. They are incredible, with a recent album called Cast-Iron Pansexual that’s clearly in the very folky Southern vein, but also really directly addressing queerness in the lyrics and the challenges of being a Southern rural queer who’s into country. You've got to check out Melissa Carper if you dig that old-time sound, beautiful stuff, twin fiddles, done in Nashville. And she's got that in her bones. She grew up in the country with folks playing that stuff on the porch.
The past couple of years there have been a lot of really great strides made with diversity, including queerness, in all kinds of music. There's also been a huge pushback and a lot of resistance—for example, against Lil Nas X. Do you feel like country and Americana are by nature slower to accept change and evolve with the times?
Absolutely. Without question. Americana is a lot less slow for sure. In some ways Americana is country for the NPR crowd, so they're always going to be on the lookout for progressive trends … they certainly were the first to embrace Brandi Carlile and Aaron Lee Tasjan, and they've embraced Amythyst Kiah and Jake Blount.
To be honest, country is different, and the reason that it's different is because it was deliberately marketed to rural white folks—white working class folks, even if they weren't in the country. So along the way, in order to successfully market that kind of music to those folks, there's been a lot of gatekeeping, [and] what do the gatekeepers think that those kind of people want to hear? That tends to be a very self-reinforcing type of dynamic. A lot of those gatekeepers are actually in radio; I think country is still the most heavily entrenched in terrestrial radio and and physical CDs because of the age and the location of the audience. And so the gatekeeping can happen even more than it can in most other genres where, you know, people go out and find music on the internet and they’re getting recommended by algorithms and so forth.
So the culture of rural white America and white working-class America has a very large component of conservatism that is going to be extremely slow about accepting anything that challenges a conception of the world as “white cis hetero Christian men at the top running things.” And it doesn't mean that you have to be one of those people to buy into it—plenty of women buy into it, plenty of people who are not straight, not cis, not white, also buy into it. But that is a worldview that is more dominant, it's fair to say, in the white, rural culture or white working-class culture. And I think that the people that market country music are aware of that, and they are afraid of challenging that. So that keeps the doors closed to people of color, LGBTQ people and diverse voices.
How can non-queer country and Americana fans and musicians be great allies right now?
Be aware of systemic bias in the marketplace and keep your eyes and ears open for great music that's being made by non-cis/white/hetero/males. Listen to it, tell your friends about it, buy it. Nobody's asking anybody to support inferior music. All you’ve gotta do is scratch the surface and you're going to find really, really good stuff that’s easily able to compete with whatever's on the radio, no question. If your thing isn't mainstream staff, if it's more of a roots sound or more of a rock, country-rock or punk-type thing, that all exists, too, with very high quality in the LGBTQ space and with Black and Indigenous [people] and people of color as well. So the great music is out there. It's a question of looking for it and raising it up.
How does Country Queer cut through the status quo?
Well, we are trying to do it two ways. One is inside and the other one's outside. In terms of inside, that means trying to have an influence in Nashville and the way that we've gone about that is simply by existing. Artists and journalists that are in the Nashville scene have picked up on us—the ones that are more progressive—and they've amplified us. In that sense, I feel like we and our mission are getting amplified within the industry. The other thing we do is cover as many deserving artists as we can, regardless of whether they’re radio-friendly, regardless of whether they're in Nashville or even in the United States. Because we know that there's a whole media ecosystem apart from the Nashville country music industry. And you know what, the people that are in the Nashville music industry, it's a bunch of liberal people that want to do the right thing—but they think that their audience for the most part is a bunch of rednecks. So that's tough, But we are trying to prove that there is an audience out there that Nashville is not reaching. We're trying to show that there are people out there that will support queer country artists commercially. We think that will put pressure on the industry as well.
What do you think is different for country fans today versus 10 or 20 years ago? Or for country musicians, for that matter?
I think it was about 10 years ago, Chely Wright came out. That was a big deal because she was a big country star. And when she came out, she said, “I know this is going to tank my career.” And it did. They stopped playing her on country radio. [Note: she also received death threats.] [Today], she does okay. She plays folk clubs and stuff, but you know, she was a star. I don't think that would happen now. Brandy Clark is on country radio and she's out. Ty Herndon is on country radio; he's out. We might see more of that. Obviously T.J. Osborne came out and felt like he could come out while being a country star, and it doesn't seem to have dimmed his commercial prospects. So that's a big change in 10 years. And I actually think most of that change has happened in the last couple of years.
Twenty-nineteen to me seemed like something of a watershed because you had Brandi Carlile sort of bursting into national consciousness by her star turn on the Grammys. She took home three Grammys, but probably [what] was even more impactful was when she performed “The Joke” and just completely killed.
That was also the year that Lil Nas X came out with “Old Town Road,” which, you know, was probably going to sell a zillion, or download a zillion, copies to kids no matter what. But then Billboard decided to make it even more appealing by deciding, “oh, in fact, it's actually not country” and knocking it off the country charts. So he goes off and immediately cuts and another great version of it with Billy Ray Cyrus on a video and it becomes a massive hit. I don't think we're going to see Lil Nas X on country radio ever, and he doesn't seem to care about that. He sort of burst on the scene [and] was this Black, gay country star. And then Orville Peck comes along too, and starts showing up on magazine covers and [was] not at all on country radio.
He becomes this glamorous kind of presence. So between those folks, that that's kind of where I was at when I started Country Queer. I was like, “I think there's a moment,” you know? And so we started even though nobody knew about us. I'm not going to say we invented this whole thing—we actually built on some of the work that had been done before. There was an existing country magazine that we took over, but they didn't have anybody reading it. It was done by musicians and almost in some ways for musicians. So there wasn't really a focus on building an audience. And I knew that was the focus that I wanted. So I've been going about trying to discover that audience, and allow them to discover us.
Last summer, Apple Music radio put their money on that bet as well by starting Proud Radio with Hunter Kelly. At the same time they gave Rissie Palmer a country show [Color Me Country] and then Kelly McCartney, who is queer, they gave her a show [Record Bin Radio]. I feel like the momentum has really built a lot in the last couple of years with T.J. [Osborne] coming out and a few other watershed events. I think it's changed a lot just in the last two, three years.
It seems like there's been a buildup of momentum. And I think you're right that in 2019—not just in country, but in a lot of other genres—that's when Indigenous musicians and other musicians of color really started getting a lot more credit. It feels good that there are actually tangible things happening.
And in some ways I think that the pandemic gave it a boost. It’s a little hard to quantify or say why that necessarily happened. Artists were able to communicate more personally with their audiences. That's one thing. Also, it's not like the culture has progressed as a unit. As much as we're seeing advances culturally, we're seeing pushback and there's no music genre that represents that more than country.
I wrote a piece in early February; I published it the day after Morgan Wallen was revealed to have said some horrendous things. And T.J. Osborne came out; that happened on the same day. I had been working on the piece even before those things, based on what I saw happening in the country as translated to country music, where country music was trying to paper over the differences by increasingly calling for unity: “Let's just all get along, Black and white, left and right.” And of course the problem is, people were getting their heads kicked in and people were getting shot, you know? You can't ask them to extend a hand to the people that are doing violence to them. So in that piece that I wrote, I called upon country music to quit doing that because that's only helping the white supremacists; it's only helping the anti-trans factions. It's not helping the people that are being marginalized, and you want to help the people that are being marginalized and come out against white supremacy, against homophobia, be affirmatively in favor of the people whose voices that are marginalized. So I think that is that's the moment that we're still very much in.
You can watch 92Y’s recent Diversity in Country Radio panel featuring Dale and hosted by Hunter Kelly, here.
IYKYK
Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll talk to you next month!
Dana