ISSUE #28: Tanya Tucker and making space for women in the middle

While I'm livin', please!

Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame

Tim McGraw is on his way to a hit. Tim – who I happen to be a fan of, why must I always make that silly caveat? – is 56. “Standing Room Only” is hovering around 6^th on the Mediabase airplay chart at the moment, and rising. Though ageism is endemic in almost every part of American culture, country music included, it’s men who are allowed to have a middle – to exist on the radio in their forties and fifties, and not just with songs that were hits several decades ago. Jason Aldean (no further comment at this time about that terrible, no-good song) has the number one hit right now, at 46. Luke Bryan, not far behind, is 47. A common retort I get when I bring up this fact is to point to Dolly Parton, or Loretta Lynn. But what about them? Well, Loretta was 90 when she passed. Dolly is 77, and despite her reign as queen of everything she still isn’t played on the radio anyway. You can be under 35 or over 70, if you’re a woman. A legend or an ingenue. A girl or a grandmother. Everything in between is mud. Invisible mud: its presence annoys you, if you notice it at all.

This Sunday, Tanya Tucker was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, at long last – and long overdue. At 65, she is only nine years older than Tim McGraw, but, unlike Tim, she was not allowed to exist in that middle, and certainly not without a fight. Before her comeback album, While I’m Livin’, produced by Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings, she hadn’t made music publicly for a decade. She was counted out and glossed over, time and again. And now, Tanya Mother Tucker is in the Mother Tuckering Country Music Hall of Fame. Thank tucking god. (For the record, one of the most fun interviews I have ever had was with Tanya at her house, watching her play me some new unreleased songs while dancing around her living room holding a vape pen. We do not deserve!).

I try not to think about all the music we missed in those years we dismissed Tanya, because what’s the use? And besides, the music she is making now is so good, so vital, those “what if’s” are futile. But I do think about the women artists in their forties and fifties right now, and the space we allow for them. That we will allow for them. Do we only get to truly appreciate Trisha Yearwood or Martina McBride when they turn seventy? Must we only revisit female genius when it is old enough for us to not be threatened by it? Reba in 2010 at 55 is the only exception to the rule I can think of offhand (thanks Natalie, resident Reba PhD, for the reminder) - an exception to the rule that proves it. Or can we give them their flowers – and their radio hits – now, not just while they’re living, but while they are creating?

“There is this period between the ages of 55 and 70 where women are just wiped off the face of the earth,” Brandi Carlile told me last year, when I interviewed her for the LA Times. “It doesn’t happen as much to the guys. It didn’t happen to Tom Petty or Neil Young. And it’s not that these women are lacking visibility. It’s that they should be in stadiums like the Rolling Stones.”

I’ve thought about this a lot since then. And I have watched Brandi work to reshape our tendencies, and how we view the capabilities that women can hold once they pass not just the 55 threshold but even younger – their forties, sometimes even their thirties, especially if they are women with children. I have watched Amanda Shires do this work with Bobbie Nelson, and now, on a record out this Friday, Edge of Forever, Margo Price with Jessi Colter. And not just in reclaiming the deserved legacies of women, but by simply existing as they are and demanding to be heard and accepted as they are – as mothers, in their forties, too. I think, granted we keep this planet functioning for another decade or two, Brandi, Margo, Amanda, Allison Russell and women like them will have changed the paradigm for the middle. They are turning the middle into the now. And as I stare down my 43^rd birthday in January, I look at them when I need to not feel like invisible mud.

Getty Images

I love this photo of Margo and Jessi, because they look like peers - the same way that Brandi looks with Tanya or Wynonna Judd, or Amanda does with Bobbie: fully reverential and in acknowledgment of their legendary status, but not treating them like some breakable bit of china. Just approaching them like artists, creating. May we all stay right there, in the midst.

- Marissa

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