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Nashville resident Marissa R. Moss has shared countless stories with the world throughout her extensive career.
The award-winning journalist has written for outlets including Rolling Stone, NPR, and Billboard to name a few, and has covered the topic of gender inequality on the country airwaves through her work. Now, with the release of her book Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success Story They Were Never Supposed to Be, Moss tells a story that not only impacts the Nashville music scene, but addresses the country music industry at large. An inside story of the last 20 years in country music through the lens of Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves, the book examines their peers and inspirations, paths to stardom, and how they, along with many other women of country, have fought back against a male-dominated industry often designed to keep them down. Moss tells the story of the women who have changed the industry forever and the battle they continue to fight to make country music more inclusive for all.
Early Inspiration: I think a lot of writers say this, but when I was five years old, I used to make little books. I was the kid who didn’t take math my senior year of high school to take extra English classes, so I was always pretty steadfast about wanting to be a writer. I think maybe back then I thought it would be fiction, and then as I got deeper into my journalism career, I realized that a nonfiction work would make more sense. I have been following this beat since I arrived in Nashville and I had been working in political communications before. Issues of equality and bringing cultural issues into my music work was really important to me, too.
Girl Power: Her Country is the past 20 years of country music through the stories of women who were real trailblazers in their careers and changed the genre forever and for better. It focuses on Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, and Mickey Guyton, but it touches on everything from how patriotism post September 11 impacted country music, what happened with The Chicks, and hits on everyone from Miranda Lambert to Rissi Palmer, to LeAnn Rimes and Margo Price. I really tried to paint a big picture of this moment in history because the country radio charts are going to tell one story and I wanted the book to tell this other story that’s not represented on country radio.
The Big Three: There are so many different ways to go about telling this story and different artists. I chose to focus on [Maren, Mickey, and Kacey] because I really love how they live from their own compasses. They’re in the mainstream of country music and that’s where I was focusing, but they did things their own way. If they got pushback they pushed harder. They not only represent certain trailblazing in their songwriting and how they live their careers, but also their choices in terms of being outspoken politically, pushing for social change and inclusion, or pushing country music to confront its deeply imbedded racism and history of exclusion, as Mickey Guyton does. And they all come from Texas, so I decided to go with this theme of looking at these people who came from Texas to Nashville, and that became the narrative bones of the story.
Greatest Reward: There are moments when I look at the Billboard country airplay charts and I’m really proud that there’s a story that can reach someone who looks at that or turns on country radio and thinks that they don’t belong in country music or that it’s not telling their stories. They can read this book and feel like that’s not true: that there is a place for them, that there are people fighting for them, that if they want to be in country music, be it behind the scenes or as an artist, that there’s room for that, that there are people who are advocating for them. When I think of that as a possibility, it really brings me a lot of gratification.
Paving Their Own Way: I think women in country music, if they realize they’re not going to get played on country radio, they find other ways to reach your fanbase or a new fanbase. Kacey did that right out of the gate. She kind of famously said, “I’d rather push people off in the beginning so they know where I stand and then I can do what I want, than fake it to get a million fans.” That gamble really paid off for her because people knew exactly where she stood right out of the gate. If you look at Mickey, she has found other ways to build an audience outside of Music Row and country radio. She was just on Ellen, she just did the Superbowl, and she’s so natural at that stuff I’m sure she’s going to have all kinds of opportunities like that come her way. You have to constantly look for new ways to build your own version of a career. It shouldn’t be necessary for women to have to do that, but it is, and women are doing it really well. I think that there are a lot of lessons for all women and marginalized people in the way they operate their careers. Women working in the coffee shop down the street witness some of these same things in different forms.
Key Takeaways: I’ve had some people who have read [Her Country] come to me and say, “Oh I totally re-found country music or discovered artists who I counted out at first,” or, “I didn’t realize that Maren Morris had been so outspoken and still gets country airplay; that kicks ass.” I really enjoy that because I think that’s kind of the most important thing. Country music is so misunderstood at a nationwide level, and often really dismissed in terms of being high art. Sometimes it deserves it—there’s a lot of mediocrity in country music, but our good is great. I hope that people can reconsider how they view country music as art too.
Hopes for the Future: On a personal level, I hope that people pick [the book] up and they feel welcomed back into a genre maybe from their childhood or that they felt excluded from. At an industry level, I hope that it’s loud enough that you can’t ignore it. Putting it all in one place and laying out my argument, I hope people will sit down with it and do some real soul searching, especially the men at the top heading up the labels and publishers in Nashville, and really think about how they contributed to perpetuating the problems set out in the book, who they rank as the leaders of country music, worth the awards or the headlining spots, and whether they’re doing that with art at the center or money at the center.