Explores how the music of Dolly Parton and other prominent women country artists has both reflected and validated the harsh realities of rural working-class American women.

"Country music is often said to be "three chords and the truth." But the country music industry and related musical genres have not been particularly friendly to queer or trans musicians. Queer country musicians have developed a strategy of sincerity to engage critically with the postmodern deconstruction of essentialism (through which queer and trans experience has been understood as liberatory but also dangerously rebellious) while continuing to...

"Tammy Wynette is literally referred to as "the first lady of country music," which speaks both to her importance in the genre as well as the way she has been partially defined by her marriage to singer George Jones. She had 20 number-one hits, the best-known being "Stand By Your Man." Steacy Easton believes Wynette was a complicated figure whose work plays with themes of domesticity, high femme armor, soft politics, pain, melodrama, sex, fame, tradition,...