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Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. residents—including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. Stars had texted famous friends; producers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone—only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town.
The doors were about to open. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars—but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it.
Shires, overwhelmed by the crush backstage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she poured each of us a goblet of red wine. A Texas-born fiddle player who is a member of the feminist supergroup the Highwomen, she had forest-green feathers clumped around her eyelids, as if she were a bird—her own form of drag, Shires joked. Surrounded by palettes of makeup, she talked about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, something that her grandmother had refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. Shires’s adopted city was in peril, she told me, and she’d started to think that more defiant methods might be required in the wake of the Tennessee legislature’s recent redistricting, which amounted to voter suppression. “Jason, can I borrow you for a minute?” she called into the anteroom, where Isbell was hanging out with Mercy. “The gerrymandering—how do we get past that?”
“Local elections,” Isbell said.
“You guys are ruining my origin story.”
Cartoon by Dahlia Gallin Ramirez
“You really don’t think the answer is anarchy?” Shires remarked, bobbing one of her strappy heels like a lure.
“Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re gonna win,” Isbell said, mildly, slouching against the doorframe. “You bite somebody’s ear off, you’re probably gonna beat ’em. And if there are no rules—or if the rules keep changing according to whoever won the last fight—you’re fucked. Because all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Hey, this guy’s a really good ear biter. Let’s make it where you can bite ears! ’ ”
That night, the dominant emotion at “Love Rising” wasn’t anarchy but reassurance—a therapeutic vibe, broken up by pleas to register to vote. Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke; stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” showed up via Zoom. The folky Americana singer Joy Oladokun, who had a “keep hope alive” sticker on their guitar, spoke gently about growing up in a small town while being Black and “queer, sort of femme, but not totally in the binary.” Jake Wesley Rogers, whose sequinned suit and big yellow glasses channelled Elton John, sang a spine-tingling version of his queer-positive pop anthem “Pluto”: “Hate on me, hate on me, hate on me! / You might as well hate the sun / for shining just a little too much.”
Before Adeem the Artist performed “For Judas,” a wry love song to a man, they summed up the mood nicely, describing it as “a weird juxtaposition of jubilance and fear.” Backstage, however, they struck a bleaker tone: Adeem was planning to move to Pittsburgh—“the Paris of Appalachia”—with their wife and young daughter. In Tennessee, the rent was too high, and the politics too cruel. As much as Adeem appreciated the solidarity of “Love Rising,” they viewed its message as existentially naïve: as Shires had suggested, the state was already so fully gerrymandered—“hard carved”—that, even if every ally they knew voted, the fix was in.
Only one mainstream country star played that night: Maren Morris, a Grammy-winning artist whose breakout 2016 hit, “My Church,” was an irresistible pro-radio anthem that celebrated singing along in your car as a form of “holy redemption.” Morris, who has had hits on terrestrial radio—the regular, non-streaming kind that you listen to on a road trip—was an exception to the rules of Music Row, where liberal singers, even supernovas like Dolly Parton, kept their politics coded, supportive but soft. Performers who were too mouthy, particularly women, tended to get pushed off the Row—and often turned toward the more lenient world of pop, as had happened with Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and Brandi Carlile (who, along with Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby, and Morris, is a member of the Highwomen). Decades later, everyone in Nashville still spoke in whispers about what had happened to the Dixie Chicks, in 2003, when they got blackballed after speaking out against the Iraq War.
Morris had recently had a few skirmishes online with right-wing influencers—notably, Brittany Aldean, the maga wife of the singer Jason Aldean. Morris had called her “Insurrection Barbie”; in response, Jason Aldean had encouraged a concert audience to boo Morris’s name. Both sides had sold merch off the clash. The Aldeans hawked Barbie shirts reading “don’t tread on our kids.” Morris fans could buy a shirt that read “lunatic country music person”—Tucker Carlson’s nickname for her—and another bearing the slogan “you have a seat at this table.” (She donated the proceeds to L.G.B.T.Q. charities.) A few months before “Love Rising,” Morris had done an interview with one of the event’s organizers, Hunter Kelly—a host on Proud Radio, a queer-themed channel on Apple Music—and had told him that she wanted to be known for her songs, not her Twitter clapbacks. But, she added, she wouldn’t apologize for having political opinions: “I can’t just be this merch store on the Internet that sells you songs and T-shirts.” Within the context of Nashville, she explained, “I come across a lot louder than I actually am, because everyone else is so quiet.”
Near the end of the concert, Morris, a petite brunette in a floor-length tuxedo coat with a tiny skirt, sang “Better Than We Found It,” a protest song, inspired by her newborn son, that she’d written after the death of George Floyd. During her opening banter, she had told a sweet, offhand story about watching her now three-year-old boy standing in awe as drag queens got ready backstage, amid clouds of glitter and hair spray. “And, yes, I introduced my son to some drag queens today,” Morris added, sassily. “So Tennessee, fucking arrest me!” The next day, Fox News fixated on the moment.
After the concert, Adeem’s Realpolitik echoed in my head. For all its warmth and energy, “Love Rising” hadn’t sold out the Bridgestone Arena. And Adeem wasn’t the only one leaving Tennessee: Hunter Kelly was moving to Chicago with his husband, frustrated that artists whose work he had celebrated for decades, like Parton and Miranda Lambert, weren’t speaking out. That night, I caught a glimpse of the other side of Nashville, down the street, at the honky-tonk bar Legends Corner. A rowdy crowd was dancing and drinking, screaming the lyrics to Toby Keith’s old hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”—an ass-kicking, jingoistic number that, twenty years ago, had helped knock the Chicks off the radio.
You notice certain things about a city when you’re an outsider. There was the way everybody ended their description of Nashville the same way: “It’s a small town inside a big city. Everyone knows everyone.” There was the fact that every other Uber driver was in a band. There were the pink stores, with names like Vow’d, selling party supplies for bachelorettes. Above a coffee shop with a #BlackLivesMatter sign was a taunting billboard flacking a proudly “problematic” weekly. I had originally come to the city to meet a set of local singer-songwriters whose presence challenged an industry long dominated by bro country—slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks. This new guard, made up of female songwriters, Black musicians, and queer artists, suggested a new kind of outlawism, expanding a genre that many outsiders assumed was bland and blinkered, conservative in multiple senses. What I found in Nashville was a messier story: a town midway through a bloody metamorphosis, one reflected in a struggle over who owned Music City.
Every city changes. But the transformation of Nashville—which began a decade ago, and accelerated exponentially during the pandemic—has stunned the people who love the city most. “None of this existed,” the music critic Ann Powers told me, pointing out swaths of new construction. There had been a brutal flood in 2010, and early in the pandemic a tornado had levelled many buildings, including music institutions like the Basement East. But the construction went far beyond rebuilding; it was a radical redesign, intended to attract a new demographic. In hip East Nashville, little houses had been bulldozed to build “tall and skinnies”—layer-cake buildings ideal for Airbnbs. The Gulch, a once industrial area where bluegrass fiddlers still meet at the humble Station Inn, was chockablock with luxury hotels. Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks, had become NashVegas, a strip lined with night clubs named for country stars. Only tourists went there now. Mayor Cooper, meanwhile, wanted to host the Super Bowl, which meant building a domed football stadium big enough for sixty thousand people, which meant that the city needed more parking lots, more hotels—more.
This physical renovation paralleled a political one. The city, a blue bubble in a red state, had long taken pride in its reputation for racial comity, for being a place where people with disagreements could coexist: the so-called Nashville Way. Then, in September, 2020, the right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro and his media empire, the Daily Wire, moved in from Los Angeles, followed by a large posse that included the online influencer Candace Owens, who left Washington, D.C., for the wealthy Nashville suburb of Franklin. This crew, along with other alt-right figures—the commentator Tomi Lahren, executives at the social network Parler—joined forces with maga-friendly country stars, such as Kid Rock and Jason Aldean, who owned clubs on Broadway. Under Governor Lee, who took office in 2019, Tennessee politics were blinking bright red: abortion was essentially banned; gun laws were lax; Moms for Liberty was terraforming school boards. Now the state wanted to ban drag acts and medical care for trans youth. When Nashville’s city council, which leans liberal, refused to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, Lee vowed payback—and tried to cut the size of the council in half. A week after the “Love Rising” concert, a shooter—whose gender identity was ambiguous—murdered six people, including three children, at a local Christian school. The gun-control protests that flooded the Capitol felt like a cathartic expression of a population that was already on edge. At one rally, the country singer Margo Price played Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage.”
All through the pandemic, newcomers kept pouring in—a thousand a month, by some calculations. Sometimes it felt as if California had tilted, sending refugees rolling eastward like pinballs, and although some of these new Nashvillians were wealthy Angelenos fed up with living in a fire zone, there were more complex attractions. Tennessee had no state income tax, and Nashville had dropped its mask mandate. It was now possible to work from home, so why not try Music City? When Shapiro announced his move, he called himself “the tip of the spear”—and, if your politics leaned right, Nashville was a magnetic force, with the whiteness of country music part of that allure.
For Nashville musicians, 2020 became a dividing line. Big stars died, among them John Prine, the flinty songwriter, and Charley Pride, the genre’s first Black star. With tours cancelled and recording stalled, artists had time to brood and reconsider. Some got sober, others got high, and many people rolled out projects reflecting the volatile national mood. After Maren Morris wrote “Better Than We Found It”—which has charged lyrics such as “When the wolf’s at the door all covered in blue / Shouldn’t we try something new?”—she released a video featuring images of Black Lives Matter posters and Nashville Dreamers. Tyler Childers, a raw, bluegrass-inflected singer-songwriter from rural Kentucky, made a video for his song “Long Violent History” in which he encouraged poor white Southerners to view their fates as tied to Breonna Taylor’s. Mickey Guyton, just about the only Black woman on country radio, released a song called “Black Like Me.” The Dixie Chicks dropped the “Dixie”; Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A. Everywhere, cracks were appearing in the Nashville Way.
The same year, Morgan Wallen—a native of Sneedville, Tennessee, who had been signed by the bro-country institution Big Loud Records in 2016, when he was twenty-three—got cancelled, briefly. In October, Wallen had been due to perform on “Saturday Night Live,” but after a video showed him out partying, in violation of covid restrictions, the invitation was revoked. Then, after he apologized and appeared on the show, a second video emerged, in which he used the N-word. Country radio dropped him; Big Loud suspended his contract; Jason Isbell donated profits from “Cover Me Up”—the song that Wallen had recorded—to the N.A.A.C.P. And then, in a perfect inverse of what had happened to the Chicks, Wallen’s album “Dangerous” shot up the charts. When I asked an Uber driver, a woman in her sixties with a scraped-back ponytail, what music she liked, she said, “Morgan Wallen, of course.” Asked what she thought about the scandal, she said, in a clipped voice, “He come back up real quick. They didn’t get him for too long. He’s No. 1 again.” When she dropped me off, she added, sweetly, “You have a blessed day, Emily.”
Leslie Fram, a senior vice-president at Country Music Television and a former rock programmer who moved to Nashville in 2011, put it plainly to me: Wallen had split the city. To some, he was a symbol of Music Row bigotry; to others, of resistance to a woke world. He’d apologized, sort of, but he hadn’t changed—not changing was a big part of his appeal. There was no denying his success, however, or the savvy of his handlers. His songs, starting with the 2018 hit “Whiskey Glasses,” which opened with the line “Poor me—pour me another drink!,” were all about the desire to drink the past away. His latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” thirty-six songs deep, with lyrics by forty-nine writers—which followed a stand-alone single called “Broadway Girls,” a collaboration with the trap artist Lil Durk that contains repeated mentions of Aldean’s bar—ruled the charts. In March, a few weeks before the “Love Rising” concert, Wallen announced a pop-up concert at the Bridgestone; it set an attendance record for the arena. In January, Wallen had headlined Governor Lee’s inaugural banquet.
When Holly G., a flight attendant, was grounded by the pandemic, she sank into a depression. For nine months, she holed up at her mother’s house in Virginia, soaking in bad news. In December, 2020, she found herself watching a YouTube video of a shaggy-haired, sweet-faced Morgan Wallen, seated on a rural porch and crooning the song “Talkin’ Tennessee” to an acoustic guitar: “What you say we grab some tailgate underneath the stars / Catch a few fireflies in a moonshine jar.” Holly played the video on a loop, soothed by its gentleness. “It was what got me out of that funk, listening to music,” she told me. “And then, in February, he was caught saying the N-word.”
Before 2020, Holly had never thought deeply about what it meant to be a Black fan of country music: it was just a quirky taste that she’d picked up as a kid, watching videos on CMT. Now the national racial reckoning had her questioning everything. Wallen’s behavior felt like a personal betrayal; she’d started reading widely, learning more about the history of country music. The genre had started, in the early twentieth century, as a multiethnic product of the rural South, merging the sounds of the Irish fiddle, the Mexican guitar, and the African banjo. Then, in the early twenties, Nashville radio producers split that music into twin brands: race records, marketed to Black listeners (which became rhythm and blues and, later, rock and roll), and “hillbilly music,” which became country-and-Western. By the time Holly started listening, the genre had long been coded as the voice of the rural white Southerner, with a few Black stars, like Pride or Darius Rucker or Kane Brown, as exceptions to the rule.
In the spring of 2021, Holly created a Web site for Black country fans, Black Opry, hoping to find like-minded listeners. Unexpectedly, she discovered a different group: Black country artists, a world she knew less about. Among them was Jett Holden, whose song “Taxidermy” was a scathing response to hollow online activism, sung in the voice of a murdered Black man: “I’ll believe that my life matters to you / When I’m more than taxidermy for your Facebook wall.” Holly became an activist herself—and then, to her surprise, a promoter, compiling a list of hundreds of performers and booking them across the country, as a collective, under the Black Opry brand. On Twitter, she embraced her role as a mischief-maker—and when she moved to Nashville, in 2022, she changed her Twitter bio to “Nash Villain.” By then, she was embedded in the politics of Music City, meeting with executives at labels and at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Long-simmering debates about racial diversity had intensified in the Trump era. At the 2016 C.M.A. Awards, a week before the election, Beyoncé and the Chicks performed their red-hot country collaboration, “Daddy Lessons”; Alan Jackson, the traditionalist curmudgeon who popularized the nineties anti-pop anthem “Murder on Music Row,” walked out.
“Sounds delicious, but I’m just going to grab some French fries.”
Cartoon by José Arroyo
In January, I visited Holly’s home, in East Nashville, where members of Black Opry were gathering to pregame before heading to Dee’s, a local music venue. We sat on an overstuffed couch, and Holly showed me some videos on her TV. One was a song called “Ghetto Country Streets,” by Roberta Lea, a warm, twangy portrait of a Southern childhood. (“I can hear my momma say, get your butt outside and play / And don’t come back until those lights are on.”) We all laughed and swayed to “Whatever You’re Up For,” an infectious dance-party number by the Kentucky Gentlemen, stylish gay twins who shimmied around a stable wearing leather pants and leopard-print shirts. The twins had the commercial bop of country radio, Holly said, but they were in a definitional bind. White stars often fold trap beats or rap into their songs, but, as the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted, the music still counts as country—it’s “hick-hop.” When Black men sing that way, their music is often characterized as R. & B. or pop. And gay stars—particularly Black gay stars—are a rarity, even in the wake of a trickster like Lil Nas X, who hacked the country charts in 2019, with “Old Town Road.”
After we finished some videos, a singer named Leon Timbo picked up his guitar. A big, bearded man with a warm smile, he harmonized with the Houston-raised singer Denitia on a slow version of a classic R. & B. song by Luther Vandross, “Never Too Much.” The cover, which he performed at Black Opry events, had been Holly’s suggestion: an object lesson in musical alchemy. Timbo said, “It’s difficult to take the song from its former glory, because in my house we know it by the beginning of it.” He imitated Vandross’s original, with its rowdy disco bounce—boom, boom, boom.
Holly said, “To me, a cover like this is bridging the exact gap that we need. Because Black people love some fucking Luther, and to take it and make it Americana—it takes it to a place they wouldn’t have thought of. And, then again, it is also an example to white people, wondering what our place is in the genre.”
If genre distinctions weren’t so rigid, Timbo said, people might see Tracy Chapman—who was inspired to play the guitar by watching “Hee Haw” as a child—and Bill Withers as country legends. They would know about Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry. A purist nostalgia about country music was ultimately indistinguishable from a racist one: both were focussed on policing a narrow definition of who qualified as the real thing.
After the show at Dee’s, the group—several of whom were queer—hung out at the Lipstick Lounge, a queer bar with karaoke and drag shows. The queens did a rowdy call-and-response with the crowd: “Lesbians in the room, raise your hands!” In the vestibule to an upstairs cigar bar, I spoke with Aaron Vance, the son of a preacher with a radio ministry. Vance, a lanky man in his forties with a low drawl, was one of Black Opry’s more old-school members. A Merle Haggard-influenced singer, he’d written droll numbers such as “Five Bucks Says,” in which he imagined drinking with Abe Lincoln at a dive bar, talking about the racial divide. When Vance moved to Nashville, in 2014, he had been treated as an oddity, but in the farm community he came from, in Amory, Mississippi, it wasn’t unusual to be a Black man who loved country. His grandfather, a truck driver, had introduced him to Haggard. Vance considered his music his ministry, he said, and the Black Opry collective had freed him to pursue his mission on his own terms. “You can’t tell a wolf he’s too much of a wolf,” he said with a laugh—in other words, you couldn’t tell Vance that he was too country. When I asked him what his karaoke song was, he smiled: it was “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie,” by Hank Williams, Jr.
On a bright spring morning, Jay Knowles picked me up in his red truck and drove us to Fenwick’s 300, a diner where Music Row executives take meetings over pancakes. A Gen X dad with messy hair, Knowles had grown up in Nashville, with country in his blood. His father, John Knowles, played guitar with the legendary Chet Atkins, who helped pioneer the Nashville Sound—the smooth, radio-friendly rival of Willie Nelson’s gritty “outlaw” movement. In the early nineties, when Jay went to Wesleyan University, he felt inspired by the rise of “alt-country” stars, such as Steve Earle and Mary Chapin Carpenter, who had clever lyrics and distinctive voices full of feeling. It felt like a golden age for both mainstream and indie musicians, as each side sparred over who was a rebel and who was a sellout—a local tradition as old as the steel guitar.
Knowles returned home and went to work on Music Row, becoming a skilled craftsman who joked, in his Twitter bio, that he was “the best songwriter in Nashville in his price range.” He had scored some hits, including a 2012 Alan Jackson heartbreaker, “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,” which was nominated for a Grammy. But, looking back, he was troubled by how the industry had changed since marketers rebranded alt-country as Americana, in 1999, and bro country took hold, a decade later. The genre’s deepening division had been damaging to both sides, in his view: Americana wasn’t pushed by the market to speak more broadly, and Music Row wasn’t pressured to get smarter. It was a split that replicated national politics in ugly ways.
Knowles’s job was, in large part, still a sweet one: he met each day with friends, scribbling in a notebook as younger collaborators tapped lyrics into the Notes app. His publisher paid him monthly for demos, and arranged pitches to stars. But no writers got rich off Spotify royalties. Knowles had watched, with frustration, as the tonal range of country lyrics had shrunk, getting more juvenile each year: for a while, every hit was a party anthem, with no darkness or story songs allowed. Recently, a small aperture had opened for songs about heartbreak, his favorite subject. But after years in the industry he was wary of false hope: when his friend Chris Stapleton, a gravel-throated roots rocker, rose to fame, in 2015, Knowles thought that the genre was entering a less contrived phase. But on the radio sameness got rewarded.
One of the worst shifts had followed the 2003 Dixie Chicks scandal. At the time, the group was a top act, a beloved trio from Texas who merged fiddle-heavy bluegrass verve with modern storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, just as the Iraq War was gearing up, the lead singer, Natalie Maines, told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. Bush. The backlash was instant: radio dropped the band, fans burned their albums, Toby Keith performed in front of a doctored image showing Maines alongside Saddam Hussein, and death threats poured in. Unnerved by the McCarthyist atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered at an indie movie house for a sub-rosa meeting of a group called the Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It was kind of like an A.A. meeting—‘Oh, y’all are drunks, too? ’ ”
But a meeting wasn’t a movement. For the next two decades, the entire notion of a female country star faded away. There would always be an exception or two—a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the spitfire Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” became a hit—just as there would always be one or two Black stars, usually male. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew lots of talented women his age who had found the gates of Nashville locked. “Some of them sell real estate, some of them write songs,” he said. “Some sing backup. None became stars.”
Knowles felt encouraged by Nashville’s new wave, which had adopted a different strategy. Instead of competing, these artists collaborated. They pushed one another up the ladder rather than sparring to be “the one.” “This younger generation, they all help each other out,” he said. “It feels unfamiliar to me.”
Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.
People I spoke to in Nashville tended to define Americana as “roots” country, as “progressive-liberal” country, or, more recently, as “diverse” country. For some observers, the distinction was about fashion: vintage suits versus plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label had always been a grab bag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel to blues, Southern rock, Western swing, and folk. But the name itself hinted at a provocative notion: that this was the real American music, three chords and the historical truth.
The blunter distinction was that, like independent film, Americana paid less. (The singer-songwriter Todd Snider has joked that Americana is “what they used to call ‘unsuccessful country music.’ ”) Not everyone embraced the label, even some of its biggest stars: five years ago, when Tyler Childers was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Awards, he came onstage wearing a scraggly red beard, and growled, “As a man who identifies as a country-music singer, I feel Americana ain’t no part of nothin’ ”—a reference to the bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s gruff dismissal of modern artists he disdained.
Maybe, as Childers later argued, Americana functioned as a ghetto for “good country music,” letting “bad” country off the hook. Or maybe it was a relief valve, a platform for musicians who otherwise had no infrastructure, given the biases of Music Row. Marcus K. Dowling, a Black music journalist who writes for the Tennessean, told me that, not long after the death of George Floyd, he’d written a roundup of Black female country artists, highlighting talents like Brittney Spencer, a former backup singer for Carrie Underwood, in the hope that at least one of them would break into mainstream radio. “Almost all of them ended up in Americana,” he said, with a sigh.
Getting signed to Music Row demanded a different calculation: you became a brand, with millions of dollars invested in your career. The top country stars lived in wealthy Franklin, alongside the Daily Wire stars, or on isolated ranches whose luxe décor was shown off by their wives on Instagram. This was part of what made the bro-country phenomenon so galling to its critics: white male millionaires cosplayed as blue-collar rebels while the real rebels starved. The comedian Bo Burnham nailed the problem in a scathing parody, “Country Song,” which mocked both bro country’s formulaic lyrics (“a rural noun, simple adjective”) and its phony authenticity: “I walk and talk like a field hand / But the boots I’m wearing cost three grand / I write songs about riding tractors / From the comfort of a private jet.”
“She’s cute and everything, but between you and me we have no common interests.”
Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski
When Leslie Fram first moved to Nashville, a decade ago, to run Country Music Television—the genre’s equivalent of MTV—she studied Music Row like a new language. “I understand why people who aren’t in it don’t get it,” she told me, over a fancy omelette in the Gulch. “I didn’t get it!” Fram, who has black hair and a frank, friendly manner, was born in Alabama but spent years working in rock radio in Atlanta and New York; she arrived in Tennessee familiar with Johnny Cash and a number of Americana types, like Lyle Lovett, but few others. It took her a while to grasp some structural problems, like the way certain songs never even got tested for airplay if the men in charge disapproved. Unlike a rock star, a country star required a radio hit to break into the touring circuit—so it didn’t matter much if CMT repeatedly played videos by Brandy Clark or the African American trio Chapel Hart. Most maddeningly, if women in country wanted to get airplay, they needed to be sweet and bat their eyes at the male gatekeepers at local radio affiliates. According to “Her Country,” a book by Marissa R. Moss, Musgraves—who had made a spectacular major-label début in 2013, with her album “Same Trailer Different Park”—saw her country career derailed when she objected to a creepy d.j. named Broadway ogling her thighs during an interview. Then the nation’s biggest country d.j., Bobby Bones, called her “rude” and a “shit head.” After that, her path forked elsewhere.
In 2015, a radio consultant named Keith Hill gave an interview to a trade publication, Country Aircheck Weekly, in which he made the implicit explicit: “If you want to make ratings in Country radio, take females out.” For a station to succeed, no more than fifteen per cent of its set list could feature women, he warned—and never two songs in a row. He described women as “the tomatoes of the salad,” to be used sparingly. Fury erupted on social media; advocacy organizations, like Change the Conversation, were formed. In 2019, the Highwomen released “Crowded Table,” a song that imagined a warmer, more open Nashville: “a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.”
Fram, who had recently launched Next Women of Country, a program aimed at promoting young female artists, was initially excited by what became known as Tomatogate. The controversy at least made the stakes clear. For the next decade, she met with other top brass, working to solve the gender puzzle. Did the proportions shift when Taylor Swift left the format? Was it residual resentment over the Chicks? Nothing that Fram or the others did made a difference—and radio play for women kept dropping. Finally, a top radio executive told Fram, “Leslie, A—the program directors are tired of hearing about this. Right? B—they don’t care.”
Hill, who started working in country radio in 1974, has moved to Idaho, where he is thinking of retiring. During a recent phone call, he presented himself, as he had in the past, as the jocular id of country radio—the last honest man in a world of “woke jive.” The demographic for country stations was narrow, he told me: white, rural, and older, skewing female. He conducted focus groups in which he pinpointed people from specific Zip Codes who listened to at least two hours of a given radio station a day. Based on their feedback, his advice to programmers was firm: no more than fifteen per cent women, never two in a row. Country music was a meritocracy, Hill insisted. He was just presenting data.
Hill did love one hip-hop-inflected new artist, he told me: Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed white singer from Nashville who had a moving life story about getting out of prison, kicking hard drugs, and finding God. He was country’s “most authentic” new artist, in Hill’s estimation, with an outlaw story to rival Merle Haggard’s. Could women be outlaws? “You know, in central casting? I have my doubts,” Hill said. He blamed one woman after another for blowing her chance at success. The Chicks had “opened their big mouths.” Musgraves had “self-inflicted wounds.” Morris had “injured herself significantly”—she’d shift to pop, he predicted. He saw a cautionary tale in the divergent careers of two Black artists, Kane Brown and Mickey Guyton: Brown, a shrewd bro-country star, knew how to play the game, but Guyton had “hurt herself by being a complainer.”
The longer we talked, the more elusive Hill’s notion of merit became. When he praised someone’s authenticity, he didn’t mean it literally—everybody faked that, he said, with a laugh. It wasn’t about quality, either. Even if an artist was generic, and sounded like “seven Luke Bryans slurried in a blender,” his songs could become hits—if he knew how to act. “Repeat after me: ‘I wrap myself in the flag,’ ” Hill said. “Whether you are religious or not, when there’s September 11th or when train cars overturn, you better be part of the damn prayer.” He could have saved the Chicks’ career, he bragged: they should have talked about bringing the troops home safely. Such constraints applied only to liberals, he acknowledged. If you had “South in your mouth,” the way Aldean did, your highway had more lanes.
Eventually, Hill stopped speaking in code: “You got thugging in the hood for Black people, and you got redneck records for white people.” That was just natural, a matter of water flowing downward—why fight gravity? “Your diversity is the radio dial, from 88 to 108. There’s your fucking diversity.”
Jada Watson, an assistant professor of music at the University of Ottawa, began studying country radio after Tomatogate. What Hill called data Watson saw as musical redlining. The original sin of country music—the split between “race records” and “hillbilly”—had led to split radio formats, which then led to split charts. Never playing women back to back was an official recommendation dating to the eighties, formalized in a training document called the “Programming Operations Manual.” The situation worsened after 1996, when the Telecommunications Act permitted companies to buy up an unlimited number of radio stations; the dial is now ruled by the behemoth iHeartRadio, which has codified old biases into algorithms.
Since 2000, the proportion of women on country radio has sunk from thirty-three to eleven per cent. Black women currently represent just 0.03 per cent. (Ironically, Tracy Chapman recently became the first Black female songwriter to have a No. 1 country hit, when Luke Combs released a cover of her classic “Fast Car.”) Country is popular worldwide, performed by musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of rural people everywhere—but you’d never know it from the radio.
All parties agreed on only one point: you couldn’t ignore country radio even if you wanted to—it drove every decision on Music Row. As Gary Overton, a former C.E.O. of Sony Nashville, had put it in 2015, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Not enough had changed since then, even with the rise of online platforms, like TikTok, that helped indie artists go viral. Streaming wasn’t the solution: like terrestrial radio, it could be gamed. When I made a Spotify playlist called “Country Music,” the service suggested mostly tracks by white male stars.
One day, I walked down to Music Row, a beautiful, wide street of large houses with welcoming porches. On every block, there was evidence of prosperity: a wealth-management company, a massage studio. I passed Big Loud, which had a sign outside touting Wallen’s hit “You Proof”—one of the street’s many billboards of buff dudes with No. 1 singles. Nearby, I wandered into a dive bar called Bobby’s Idle Hour Tavern, which seemed appealingly ramshackle, as if it had been there forever. In fact, it had moved through the neighborhood; it was torn down to make way for new construction and then rebuilt to maintain its authentic look, with dog-eared set lists pinned to ratty walls. It felt like a decent metaphor for Nashville itself.
Inside, I ran into Jay Knowles, the Music Row songwriter. (It was a small town in a big city.) We talked about Nashville’s recent reputation as “Bachelorette City,” for which he offered a theory: although more than a quarter of Nashville was Black, the town was widely seen as “a white-coded city.” “I’m not saying this is a good thing,” he emphasized, but tourists viewed Nashville as a safe space, a city where groups of young white women could freely get drunk in public—unlike, say, Memphis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.
At the bar, I also met two low-level Music Row employees, who worked in radio and helped companies handle V.I.P.s. They happily dished, off the record, about clashes on the Row, but added that there was no point bringing their own politics into their jobs. It was like working for Walmart—you had to stay neutral. The problem with country radio wasn’t complicated, one of them said: the old generation still ran everything and would never change its mind. When I explained that I was headed to Broadway to meet bachelorettes, they rolled their eyes. Avoid Aldean’s, they said.
They weren’t alone: every local I met had urged me to go only to old standbys like Robert’s Western World, where I’d spent a wonderful night with Tyler Mahan Coe—the rabble-rousing son of the outlaw-country artist David Allan Coe—who hosts a podcast about country history called “Cocaine & Rhinestones.” “I hate nostalgia,” Tyler told me, spooling out a theory that true country music derived from the troubadours, whose songs had satirical subtexts and were meant to be understood in multiple ways. Bro country lacked such nuance—and so did the new Broadway.
Even so, Broadway charmed me, for a practical reason: there were no velvet ropes. Each night club had at least three stories. On the ground floor, there was a bar and a stage where a skilled live musician covered hits. On the second floor, there was another bar, another musician (and, in one case, a group of women toasting me with grape vodka seltzers). Above that, things got wilder, with a rowdy dance floor and, often, a rooftop bar. There was a campy streak to the scene which sometimes echoed the Lipstick Lounge: when the d.j. played Shania Twain’s classic “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” he shouted, “Do any of the ladies feel like a woman?” Loud cheers. “Do any of the men feel like a woman?” Deeper cheers. Call me basic, but I had a good time: in Manhattan, a slovenly middle-aged woman in jeans can’t walk into a night club, order a Diet Coke, and go dancing for free.
Everywhere, there were brides in cowgirl hats or heart-shaped glasses, and in one case a majestic rhinestone bodysuit worthy of Dolly. On a bustling rooftop, I chatted with a group holding fans printed with the face of the groom—who, they insisted, looked like Prince Harry. At a club named for the band Florida Georgia Line, a screaming woman threw silver glitter into my hair. Every local whom I’d spoken to loathed these interlopers, who clogged the streets with their party buses. But when you’re hanging out with happy women celebrating their friends, it’s hard to see the problem.
The bar at the center of Jason Aldean’s was built around a big green tractor. The bathroom doors said “southern gentlemen” and “country girls.” The night I went, the crowd was sedate—no bachelorettes, just middle-aged couples. The singer onstage was handsome and fun, excited to get a request for the Chicks’ “Travelin’ Soldier.” When someone asked for “Wagon Wheel,” a 2004 classic co-written by Bob Dylan and covered a decade later by Darius Rucker, the singer spoke nostalgically about passersby requesting the song when he busked on Broadway years ago, before the streets were jammed with tourists. “It just goes to show you that with a lot of dedication and hard work and about eleven years’ time, you can go about a hundred feet from where you started!” he said. “So here’s a little ‘Wagon Wheel’ for you!” Feeling affectionate, I looked up the singer online. His Twitter page was full of liked posts defending anti-vaxxers and January 6th rioters.
Taylor Swift got discovered at the Bluebird Café. So did Garth Brooks. A ninety-seat venue with a postage stamp of a stage, it’s tucked between a barbershop and a dry cleaner, but it’s a power center in Nashville—a place ruled by singer-songwriters. In January, Adeem the Artist wore a flowered button-down over a T-shirt that said “This Is a Great Day to Kill God.” They were playing their first Bluebird showcase, performing songs from their breakout sophomore album, “White Trash Revelry.” Some were stompers, like the hilarious “Going to Hell,” in which Adeem fact-checks the lyrics to Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” with the Devil himself: “He seemed puzzled, so I told him the story, and he said, ‘None of that shit’s real / It’s true I met Robert Johnson, he showed me how the blues could work / But white men would rather give the Devil praise than acknowledge a black man’s worth.’ ” Other songs were reveries about growing up amid “methamphetamines and spiritual madness.” They were folky tunes played on acoustic guitar, with witty, pointed lyrics. The people in the crowd seemed to be into it, even when Adeem took jabs at them.
Adeem grew up in a poor evangelical household in Locust, North Carolina, singing along to Toby Keith—the self-declared “Angry American”—on the car radio, in the wake of 9/11. They dreamed about becoming a country star, but as their politics veered to the left they felt increasingly at odds with the genre. Then, in 2017, they won a ticket to the Americana Awards, and were struck by the sight of the singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, of the band Hurray for the Riff Raff, sporting a hand-painted “Jail Arpaio” shirt, and by the Nashville bluegrass performer Jim Lauderdale taking shots at Trump. “I was just, like, ‘Man, maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I belong,’ ” Adeem told me. Americana had another source of appeal for Adeem, a D.I.Y. artist with a punk mentality: you could break in on a shoestring budget. Adeem, who was barely scraping by painting houses in the Tennessee sun, had spent years building a following by uploading songs to Bandcamp. They budgeted what it would take to make a splash with an album: five thousand dollars for production, ten thousand for P.R. They held a “redneck fund-raiser” online, asking each donor for a dollar, then recorded “White Trash Revelry” independently. (The album was distributed by Thirty Tigers, a Nashville-based company that let them retain the rights.) Adeem’s strategy worked astoundingly well: in December, Rolling Stone praised “White Trash Revelry” as “the most empathetic country album of the year,” ranking it No. 7 on its year-end list of the twenty-five best albums in the genre. This year, Adeem was nominated for Emerging Act of the Year at the Americana Awards, and had their début at the Grand Ole Opry.
After the Bluebird gig, I joined Adeem at an Airbnb nearby, where they were experiencing some “visual distortions” from microdosing shrooms. Over pizza, they spoke about their complicated relationship with their extended family, back in North Carolina, some of whom believed in QAnon conspiracy theories. Adeem’s relatives were thrown by, but not unsupportive of, their choices: when their uncle insisted that Adeem’s gender identity was a rock-and-roll performance à la Ziggy Stardust, Adeem’s father defended his child’s authenticity, in his own way. “He said, ‘No, no, I think he really believes it!’ ” Adeem told me, with a laugh.
There had always been queer people in country music. In 1973, a band called Lavender Country put out an album with lyrics like “My belly turns to jelly / like some nelly ingenue.” But there were many more ugly stories of singers forced into the closet—and even now, after many top talents, including songwriters such as Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, had come out, old taboos lingered. You could be a songwriter, not a singer; you could sing love songs, but not say whom you loved; you could come out, but lose your spot on the radio. When T. J. Osborne, of the popular duo Brothers Osborne, confirmed that he was gay, in 2021, his management company arranged a careful campaign: one profile, written by a sympathetic journalist, and one relevant single, the rueful but vague “Younger Me,” which felt designed to offend no one.
Adeem, who is inspired as much by Andy Kaufman’s absurdism as by John Prine’s smarts, was part of a different breed. Queer Americana had plenty of outspoken artists, from River Shook, whose signature song is “Fuck Up,” to the bluegrass artist Justin Hiltner, who wrote about AIDS in his beautiful single “1992.” These artists, all left-wing, came from backgrounds like Adeem’s—small towns, evangelical families, abuse and addiction. It was Adeem’s biggest gripe: Music Row was marketing a patronizing parody of their “white trash” upbringing to the poor. Adeem’s own politics weren’t a simple matter. When they objected to Tennessee laws against trans youth, it wasn’t as a liberal but as a parent and a redneck suspicious of government control: “It’s, like, stay away from my kids! Stay out of my yard, you know?”
At the Airbnb, Adeem’s transmasculine accompanist, Ellen Angelico, known as Uncle Ellen, pulled out a deck of cards: a beta version of Bro Country, a Cards Against Humanity-style game based on actual country-radio lyrics. The group got loose and giggly, shouting out clichés—“tin roof,” “red truck”—to form silly combinations. In one way, the game mocked country radio; in another, it paid tribute to it—you couldn’t play unless you had studied it. Like hip-hop, country had always been an aggressively meta-referential art form; even bro country had become increasingly self-aware.
On bad days, Adeem had told me, the two sides of Nashville seemed locked in a “W.W.E. wrestling match,” playing cartoon versions of themselves. Adeem had engaged in a few bouts themself, lobbing attention-getting songs online, such as “I Wish You Would’ve Been a Cowboy,” which slammed Toby Keith for wearing “my life like a costume on the TV.” Still, Adeem sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to meet Keith. They wanted not a fight but a real conversation—a chance to tell Keith how much his music had meant to them, and to ask if he had regrets.
In mid-May, at the Academy of Country Music Awards, Music Row was out in force. Bobby Bones, the d.j. who’d insulted Musgraves, was backstage, interviewing stars. Wallen won Male Artist of the Year. Aldean sang “Tough Crowd,” dedicated to the “hell raisin’ . . . dirt turnin’, diesel burnin’, hard workin’ nine-to-fivers” who “make the red white and blue proud.” (A few weeks later, he released the repellent “Try That in a Small Town,” an ode to vigilantism.) The show’s highlight was a fun come-on called “Grease,” by Lainey Wilson, who won four awards, including Female Artist and Album of the Year. Wilson, a farmer’s daughter from Louisiana, was Music Row’s latest female supernova, a devotee of Dolly Parton (one of her early hits was “WWDD”) who’d moved to Nashville after high school. A decade of hustle had paid off: by 2023, she had a role on “Yellowstone” and a partnership with Wrangler jeans. Maren Morris wasn’t around: that week, she was in New York, accepting a prize at the glaad Awards. On Instagram, she’d posted a video of herself in a recording studio with the indie-pop guru Jack Antonoff. At a concert a few weeks later, she sang a duet with Taylor Swift.
The A.C.M. Awards’ final number was the live première of Parton’s new single, “World on Fire,” from an upcoming rock album. When the lights came up, Parton was wearing an enormous, rippling parachute skirt printed with a black-and-white map of the globe—and then, when it tore away, she was in a black leather suit, chanting angrily as backup dancers strutted in Janet Jackson-esque formation. For a moment, it felt like a shocking departure—a political statement from a woman who never got political. Then that impression evaporated. Politicians were liars, Parton sang; people should be kinder, less ugly. What ever happened to “In God We Trust”? Four days later, on the “Today” show, Jacob Soboroff asked Parton which politicians she meant, and she replied, breezily, “All of them, any of them,” adding that if these unnamed figures tried “hard enough” and worked “from the heart,” matters would surely improve.
The performance reminded me of Keith Hill’s advice to the Chicks: they should have sprinkled some sugar. Parton had been the biggest letdown for Allison Russell and the organizers of the “Love Rising” benefit, who told me that they’d “begged and begged” her to sing at the Bridgestone, or plug the event, or Zoom in. She’d performed with drag queens many times; she’d written an Oscar-nominated song, “Travelin’ Thru,” for the 2005 film “Transamerica.” As Parton herself had joked, she was a kind of drag queen—a “herself impersonator,” as Russell had put it. If the most powerful country star on earth wouldn’t speak out, it was hard to imagine others taking a risk.
Another song performed that night had a different feel: “Bonfire at Tina’s,” an ensemble number from Ashley McBryde’s pandemic project, a bold concept album called “Lindeville,” which featured numerous guest artists. The record had received critical praise but little radio play. During “Bonfire at Tina’s,” a chorus of women sang, “Small town women ain’t built to get along / But you burn one, boy, you burn us all.” In its salty solidarity, the song conjured the collectives emerging across Nashville, from “Love Rising” to Black Opry, groups that embodied the Highwomen’s notion of the “crowded table.” You could also see this ideal reflected in “My Kind of Country,” a reality competition show on Apple TV+, produced by Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, that focussed on global country acts and included the gay South African musician Orville Peck as a judge, and in “Shucked,” a new Broadway show with music by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which offered up a sweet vision of a multiracial small town learning to open its doors. Mainstream country radio hadn’t changed, but all around it people were busily imagining what would happen if it did.
McBryde, who grew up in a small town in Arkansas, had spent years working honky-tonks and country fairs, a journey she sang about in the anthemic number “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” She was a distinctive figure in mainstream country, a brunette in a sea of blondes, with arms covered in tattoos. When we met backstage one night at the Grand Ole Opry, she was playing in a memorial concert for the character actor and pint-size Southern sissy Leslie Jordan, who had created a virtual crowded table during the pandemic, through ebullient Instagram videos, then recorded a gospel album with country stars such as Parton.
Unlike Jordan’s joyful quarantine, McBryde’s pandemic had been “destructive,” she told me: unable to work, she drank too much, feeling like a “sheepdog that couldn’t chase sheep.” “Lindeville” had been the solution. During a weeklong retreat at an Airbnb in Tennessee, she had written for up to eighteen hours a day with old friends, among them Brandy Clark and the Florida-born performer Pillbox Patti. The result was a set of songs about distinct characters—songs that were blunter and less sentimental than most music on country radio. The album, which was named for Dennis Linde, the songwriter behind the Chicks’ feminist revenge classic “Goodbye Earl,” had a spiritual edge, McBryde said. She had grown up in a “strange, strict, rigid” place where she was taught that “everything makes Jesus mad,” and it felt good to envision a different kind of small town. “The fact that God loves stray dogs, people like me, is so evident,” she said. “There are things that I’ve survived, especially where alcohol was involved, that I shouldn’t have.”
McBryde, who called herself as “country as a homemade sock,” had no plans to shift to pop, as peers had done. But she had a pragmatic view of the industry to which she’d devoted her life. Making music in Nashville, she joked, could feel like adopting a street cat, only to have it bite you when it turned out to be a possum. “He’s a shitty cat, country radio—but he’s a good possum,” she said. To build a big career, you had to keep a sense of humor: “I won’t name her, but there’s another female artist who has a very vertical backbone, like I do. And we joke with each other and go, ‘What are they gonna do— not play our songs?’ ”
I’d attended a staging of “Lindeville” at the Ryman Auditorium a few weeks earlier, shortly after Tennessee’s first anti-drag ordinance passed in the State Senate. The event was framed as an old-fashioned radio show, with an announcer and whimsical ad jingles. T. J. Osborne and Lainey Wilson were among the guest stars, creating a feeling of Music Row camaraderie. During McBryde’s hilarious “Brenda Put Your Bra On,” in which women in a trailer park gossip about neighbors—“Well, did you hear that? There went the good dishes / I hope they don’t knock out the cable”—fans threw bras onstage.
At one point, McBryde serenaded a small child, who was seated at her feet. The show’s climax was “Gospel Night at the Strip Club.” Sung on an acoustic guitar by the Louisiana musician Benjy Davis, the tune was about having a spiritual experience in an unexpected place. As Davis sang the key line, “Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers,” spotlights illuminated part of the audience. The congregation of the Church of Country Music looked around for what had been revealed, then gasped: five drag queens, scattered among the Ryman crowd, stood up, their gowns glittering like sunlight. ♦
An earlier version of this article misspelled T. J. Osborne’s name and misstated the date of Governor Lee’s inaugural banquet and the title of a song by Adeem the Artist.
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