🗨 Don't Rock the Comments Section: What's One Weird Trick To Fix Country Music?

Big news: Mark your calendars for another edition of the Don't Rock The Inbox Book Club!! On Wednesday, April 8th at 7:30 p.m. CT, we'll be hosting a Zoom discussion of Alice Gerrard's memoir, Custom Made Woman: A Life In Traditional Music, for paying subscribers (subscribe here!).

All Don't Rock The Inbox readers can purchase a copy of Gerrard's book for 30% off from the UNC Press website with discount code 01SOCIAL30!! Thank you UNC Press, so excited to dig into this one! [Also, if you happen to be in Knoxville this weekend, Gerrard will be performing for free (!!) as part of an extremely cool-looking festival called "A Celebration of Women in Old-Time Music."]

The current CEO of the Academy of Country Music, Damon Whiteside, is stepping down — more or less meaningless to the bulk of this newsletter (unless there's some scandal about to drop), but it got me thinking (dangerous). We're obviously not of the mind that country music needs to be saved at Don't Rock The Inbox, but there's certainly...a lot of room for improvement (as in so many things...). If I were in Whiteside's shoes, what would my country music platform be? (Can you tell I just got through a widely publicized primary...)