Country girls rock
The new faces of country music are young, blonde and talented women
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The country music sales charts have a different look these days. So do the playlists at country radio stations.
They include a rising prevalence of women. More specifically, young women. Even more specifically, young blonde women, including several whose music careers got a jump-start in reality television: Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Nettles (of Sugarland), Kellie Pickler, Kristy Lee Cook, Julianne Hough (right), Hillary Scott (of Lady Antebellum), Heidi Newfield (formerly of Trick Pony).
Wednesday night, country music airs its most prestigious gala, the Country Music Association Awards, and you won’t have to wait long to see one of these princesses of country. Several are up for awards, and several will perform, including Swift, Lambert, Nettles, Scott and Underwood, who will cohost the show with Brad Paisley.
Before the show even starts, you can catch another rising star in the same category. Julianne Hough, best known as a professional dancer on “Dancing With the Stars,” will co-host the red-carpet gala 30 minutes before showtime outside Nashville’s Sommet Center.
This year Hough released a self-titled album and jumped aboard the Paisley arena tour as an opening act.
Is this eruption of the young, blond and pretty in country music a fad, a trend or just an odd coincidence?
“It reminds me of that period in the late 1990s when Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore and Willa Ford all broke out at once in pop music,” said Kurt Patat, country music editor at-music. aol.com. “I guess now it’s country music’s turn.”
Mike Kennedy, program director and on-air personality at country radio station Q104 (104.3-FM) in Kansas City, said there is something more substantive to this surge than mere appearance. Good looks alone won’t cut it in country music.
“I think the ones you can count on being around for a long time — Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Jennifer Nettles — they have what’s required: the talent and the material,” he said.
Proof of that are artists like Lambert, who plays guitar and writes her own material, most of it about her south Texas upbringing.
“That’s a country girl with talent,” said TJ McEntire, the weekday afternoon host at Q104. “She writes killer songs, and it’s no act. She’s genuine. I know she was on ‘Nashville Star’ first, but she built her career the old-fashioned way: slowly. She went out and did radio, met fans and built her audience. The same with Jennifer Nettles.”
Nettles is half of the boy-girl duo Sugarland, one of the biggest acts in country music. Sugarland’s career got a boost in 2006 when Nettles sang a duet with Jon Bon Jovi, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home.” That single accelerated her career, bringing in some crossover rock fans, but success for her and Sugarland seemed inevitable with or without that song.
“You could tell from the beginning they were going big places,” McEntire said. “Since they started out, they have been about the music.”
His duet with Nettles, however, prompted Bon Jovi’s band to release its first ever country-rock album, “Lost Highway,” featuring guest appearances by LeAnn Rimes and Big & Rich. Such carpetbagging has become more common in country music these days, and the list of genre-switchers includes at least two young women who have hit the country charts recently.
One is Jewel, the former folkie who released her first country album this year, “Perfectly Clear.” She followed that by enlisting as a support act on this summer’s Paisley tour.
The other country crossover is Simpson, the former pop singer, reality-TV star and tabloid regular. This year she released “Do You Know,” a modern- country album. Simpson gets writing credits on every song, except the cover of Dolly Parton’s “Do You Know.” Skeptics ought to know that it’s a legitimate, respectable country album.
“I’ll admit: I didn’t want to like it,” McEntire said. “But it’s good. A lot of these songs speak to women. The new single is about domestic violence. Anyone who likes country music ought to give it a shot.”
Simpson is one of several women who came to country music with a certain amount of fame behind them, thanks to TV or movies. Her role as Daisy Duke in the “Dukes of Hazzard” film no doubt helped grease her transition into country music. So did her contributions to the film’s soundtrack, which put her in the company of Willie Nelson, Montgomery Gentry, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Charlie Daniels. (Dating a bona-fide Dallas Cowboy doesn’t hurt either.)
Several others had some fame and popularity in their accounts when they broke into country, thanks to reality shows such as “American Idol” and “Nashville Star.” Or in Hough’s case, “Dancing With the Stars.”
Pickler epitomizes someone who parlayed fame on reality TV into music stardom. She finished an inglorious sixth on Season 5 of “American Idol” but has become that season’s second most-successful recording artist, behind Chris Daughtry. At least four others have done the same — launched a music career outside the TV show that made them famous.
Underwood, by far, is the most successful of those. In less than four years she has catapulted herself from “Idol” champ to one of the best-selling artists in all of music. And she’s only 25.
The others: Lambert, who finished second on “Nashville Star” in 2003; Whitney Duncan, who finished fifth on “Nashville Star” in 2007; and Kristy Lee Cook, who finished seventh on “Idol” this year. Cook recently released the ironically titled “15 Minutes of Fame,” the first single off her album, “Why Wait.”
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