Pop Goes the Country

Lainey Wilson takes the reins of stardom

One hundred years ago, in the work of figures like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Country music emerged as a distinct genre of popular song. Before that, such performers simply thought of themselves as musicians—American musicians. But the emergence of a new media infrastructure by the 1920s, notably radio, fostered awareness of a variegated musical landscape that included blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley, among other genres. Country music attained a sense of consciousness as a minority subculture of working-class white people from the South and West (as suggested by the evolving coinage of “Country & Western” by the 1940s).

A minority subculture of Southern working-class white people. But not necessarily for Southern working-class white people. Or, more accurately, for them alone. Indeed, Country’s appeal was soon apparent in working-class white communities generally—and indeed non-working-class class communities as well. (“I’m a simple girl myself, grew up on Long Island,” Alan Jackson puckishly sings of the pop star who goes Nashville in his 1994 hit “Gone Country.”) The genre has been capacious enough to absorb the Princeton-born, Brown-bred Mary-Chapin Carpenter, who cut her teeth in D.C. clubs. And there has been a small but steady stream of African American artists from Ray Charles to Charlie Pride to Darius Rucker to Yola, who have done distinguished work in the idiom. Just ask Little Nas X, who’s been down that road.

Like other musical genres whose appeal broadened beyond its immediate cultural roots, the success of Country music has generated unease among those who fear its mass appeal would lead to fatal compromises in the name of mainstream success.  By the sixties, Country songs were being augmented with string arrangements that horrified purists who feared performers were selling out in the name of mass success. (The most notorious demonstration of this sentiment occurred at the Country Music Awards ceremony of 1975, when Charlie Rich set the card nominating John Denver for Entertainer of the Year on fire at the podium.)  Such concerns led to the Outlaw movement personified by legends like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, who carried the torch of rebellious traditionalism into the late twentieth century. Even Glenn Campbell, who enjoyed such crossover success, satirized it in his 1975 hit “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

And, indeed, by the turn of the 21^st century, Country did show signs of its absorption into the pop mainstream. When someone like Garth Brooks has success recording Billy Joel’s “Shameless”— or Taylor Swift masters the genre only to leave it behind—one could plausibly wonder where the Country was heading. Actually, it sometimes seems headed back toward a merger with Rock & Roll, which it parented in a union with R&B three-quarters of a century ago. Luke Combs’s latest album, Growin’ Up, sounds like it would fit in just fine on rock radio stations of the 1970s. (The very title is redolent of a Bruce Springsteen song—and Springsteen himself was the subject of Eric Church’s 2011 hit song of the same name.)

Which brings us to the case of Lainey Wilson. The 30-year-old Wilson’s latest album, Bell Bottom Country, has spawned a series of hits, among them “Watermelon Moonshine” (featured on a recent episode of Yellowstone, where Wilson had a small recurring role) and “Heart Like a Truck,” which as of this writing is currently in the top ten on the Billboard Country chart. As its very title suggests, Bell Bottom Country wears its syncretic identity on its sleeve—“a little Mississippi, a whole lotta rolling stone,” she sings on the album’s first track, “Hillbilly Hippie.” But Wilson’s work also shows that Country has a durable half-life: no matter how far away you get from its original sources, it somehow manages to retain its essence.

Many of the songs on Bell Bottom Country bear little stamp of the genre at all. “Grease,” an ode to lust sung from the kitchen, has a riff that could have come from Paramore’s latest album. The melody and instrumentation of “Me, You, and Jesus” sound like a cross between Phil Collins in his hitmaking Genesis days and Sophie B. Hawkins’s “As I Lay Me Down.” I was pleasantly surprised not to recognize the acoustic opening of “What’s Up? (What’s Goin’ On)” before it flowered into a full-throated cover of the 4 Non-Blondes classic of 1993, though Wilson’s voice does not quite have the vocal power of Linda Perry’s original. Wilson regularly invokes Dolly Parton — what female country singer of the last half-century doesn’t?—and even has a song, “WWDD” (as in “What Would Dolly Do?”). But the presiding influence of this record is closer to Stevie Nicks than Steve Earle.

And yet…

Bell Bottom Country has an unmistakable Country vibe. This is less a matter of the dobro and banjo flourishes that adorn the record than other elements in the album’s makeup. One obvious one is the lyrics—pop sensibility notwithstanding, there are not a lot of mainstream hits that invoke a Christian deity the way “You, Me, and Jesus” does. “Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arizona,” Wilson name-checks in “Road Runner,” a song with standard roaming tropes. We hear references to pickups, most obviously in “Heart Like a Truck,” which relies on them as an extended metaphor for bruised durability. Wilson purveys a tough-minded feminism in “Hold My Halo,” but hedges it with traditional femininity in “Atta Girl.” (In her 2021 hit “Things a Man Oughta Know,” she fuses them in the same song, bragging of her ability to fire a gun as well as to understand the way love works better than the guy who broke her heart.)

Above all, there’s Wilson’s voice. The Louisiana native sings with a full-throated Southern twang, which decisively shapes whatever material she’s recording. She uses it to rich effect on a song like “Weak-End,” a melancholy meditation on loneliness. Wilson might be a better songwriter than she is a singer, but she may yet refine those pipes to fuller effect as she grows into her powers—which are considerable, as is her potential.

There’s a line printed on the inside of the CD jewel case of Bell Bottom Country that reads “Country with a flair.” That sounds about right. As long as there are artists like Lainey Wilson around, Country will be big enough, and deep enough, to stretch across the nation.