‘Dangerous gatekeeping’: why is country music still resistant to diversity?

‘Dangerous gatekeeping’: why is country music still resistant to diversity?

In 2017, Texas-born singer-songwriter Maren Morris won her first Grammy award for best country solo performance with her debut single, My Church. After that breakthrough moment, she cemented herself as an industry staple winning six Country Music Association Awards, earning four number one hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and 15 Grammy nominations in the country category. Morris’ success was not only held up by country music executives as a shining example of change in the industry, but she also consistently used her platform to “talk about the importance of making folks of colour and LGBTQ+ people more visible in the industry”, explains Dr Francesca Royster, author of Black Country Music.


Six years later, Morris is getting “the hell out” of country music citing an industry that celebrates people “proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic”. Morris’s experience as a white woman, outspoken on issues of racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, is just the latest in a series of instances where liberal country artists are struggling to feel at home in Nashville. Black country singers and journalists are being called racial slurs by fans and openly LGBTQ+ performers are having to back out of performances.

Twenty years after the tidal wave of misogyny faced by The (then Dixie) Chicks and the progress suggested by their 2016 performance with Beyoncé at the Country Music Awards, Morris’s damning indictment of Nashville’s culture begs the question as to whether a woman, LGBTQ+ singer or artist of color can succeed in country music, especially if they speak out and go against prevailing political norms.

LINK