Country Music’s Female Revolution

Going all but unnoticed behind the dazzling show and undeniable substance of Nashville’s female revolution is a profound makeover of the country music male.

Supermacho Hank Williams Jr., for example, has been banished from big time country radio, at least for now, and left to concentrate on his cheerleading for ABC-TV’s Monday Night Football. Today’s successors to the other country outlaws and honky-tonk hellions of the ‘70s and ‘80s have undergone ‘90s-guy sensitivity training.

Big Bad John has become Mr. Mom.

“Even though they’re still walking around in cowboy boots and hats, the men now are the nurturers and caretakers, the ones who express concern about health and home,” observes Bill Ivey, executive director of Nashville’s Country Music Foundation. “It’s the women who are carrying the message of assertiveness and rebellion and independence.”

Paul Hastaba, vice president and general manager of the country music video channel CMT, reflects on the visual image of today’s male country stars and agrees.

“How many videos have you seen now(adays) depicting the artist with a small child, like they’re all of a sudden tending to the upbringing of the children?” Hastaba says. “Before, they were in bars.”

Nashville long has prided itself on mirroring the life of the America Between The Coasts (the Real America). Country music’s U-turn in the late ‘90s away from a tradition of viewing the sexes as good-hearted women and good-timing men indicates that the tenets of the nation’s 25-year gender revolution have sunk in deeply along Main Street U.S.A.

Getting revolutionized has paid off well for certain Nashville record companies. A host of new and briskly selling female stars - from flashily feisty Shania Twain and Mindy McCready to dynamic teens LeAnn Rimes and Lila McCann, from progressive-oriented lyric-lovers Deana Carter and Trisha Yearwood to such more traditional-tinged counterparts as Patty Loveless and Lee Ann Womack - are admired for everything from intelligence and integrity to the bodies with which they appear increasingly comfortable.

The unceremonious change of direction isn’t without trauma for the opposite gender. When women jumped off their time-honored country pedestal, nervous male record and radio executives didn’t throw away the pedestal. They just replaced its female occupants with young Hollywood-handsome males, saddling them with many of the same sort of strictures that used to harness females.

Looming somewhere in the near future may be a weird sort of reverse sexism with a paradoxical touch: It will be instituted by the male-dominated hierarchy that always has ruled Nashville’s Music Row, a coterie whose intelligence hasn’t always been universally recognized. Discussing traditional Nashville wisdom on female matters, Yearwood recalls being told early on that women performers couldn’t be too attractive or too sexy in a photograph because women were buying the records and you didn’t want to alienate anybody.

“I don’t know why anybody ever thought that,” she says. “If that was the case, a woman would never buy Vogue magazine.”

Prominent Nashville publicist Evelyn Shriver contends that the town’s female revolution might not have occurred at all had the male hierarchy been paying enough attention to botch it up.

“Up until the past couple of years, women were always dismissed as being opening acts that would never sell many records or be able to sell out a concert,” Shriver says.

“So the girls were given a certain amount of freedom over the last few years because there were never any expectations put on them. Now that they’ve really started paying off, watch the shift as to what they’ll be allowed to do. Whoever the (record) labels think they’re going to make money off of are the ones that get that intense kind of interference.”

Of course, with the amount of money it takes to launch a new star these days - $500,000 to $1 million, by conventional estimates - almost every star gets some of that interference, but most seems currently aimed at the young hunky-tonkers that Nashville’s conventional wisdom thought could catch the eye of the suddenly frisky female audience.

To eliminate any risk of offending these women, though, the message of the average young male has been crafted so blandly that it has prompted both sexes to express widespread boredom with much of today’s male country music. According to some recent reports, it also has caused waning interest on the part of much of country radio’s male listenership.

Sony Music’s Nashville boss, Allen Butler, says his firm’s research shows men listeners are becoming very “restless” with the increasingly female-aimed fare they’re hearing on country radio. He says they view country music as getting too “gooey.”

Mercury-Nashville chief Luke Lewis says he hears from radio programmers that country is now a “female format.” He says they reason that, just as in the nightclub business, “if you own a bar and a lot of women hang out there, the men will come.

“My answer to that,” Lewis adds, “is that if you book the Chippendales (male exotic dancers) to get the females in the building, the men aren’t going to come.”

Gleaned from several recent interviews and taken together, the observations of a variety of industry people paint a sharper picture than the prevailing one, which assumes that the strange changes going on in Nashville are occurring just because women’s songs in the ‘90s “have more to say” than men’s.

The reality seems to be that today’s country women have “more to say” because today’s women in general, having spilled into so many areas of life that had been for men only, are exercising much more of a say in everything, spawning new national attitudes about topics from national politics to the local workplace.

This is potentially disturbing not only for males in country music, but also for male-dominated Nashville as a whole.

Lewis says he can envision “frightening” prospects for the next several years as Nashville zeroes in on a single consumer, the 30-year-old woman. He adds that he knows a major country station in conservative Texas that in researching audience reaction to its playlist seeks the approval of only women listeners, and he cites John Anderson’s “Somebody Slap Me” as a male country record that got good airplay and sold well until it ran afoul of all-female research. He mentions that CMT targets the same sort of female demographic.

CMT’s Hastaba says that both female and male viewers are served through the aiming of different parts of the TV day at each: Morning through midafternoon for moms and other women, late-afternoon and evening for kids and husbands as well as the moms, then late-night for harder-kicking, more male-oriented sounds.

Hastaba adds, however, that he can say “pretty confidently that, more than any other cable network, we know who our audience is” - and reveals that CMT, now in more than 40 million of the 70 million American cable homes, has named its composite representative of that audience “Debbie.” He adds that she’s in her 30s and has been married a decade or more.

“She can be from Birmingham, Ala., or Syracuse, N.Y.,” he continues. “She’s got two kids, her husband likes to hunt and fish, their credit card is Visa rather than American Express, they’re a $30,000-plus income household, they own their own home and have a pet in the house.”

Such marketing cross-hairs disturb the artist-nurturing instincts in recordman Lewis.

“If you’re making music and have that (demographic) in the back of your mind - or maybe the front, depending on who you are - at the very beginning you can’t help but make a judgment about whether a particular song will or will not appeal to that particular demographic,” Lewis says. “It’s in a very overt sort of way making its way into the creative process.”

Thus the record company asks the publisher for that kind of song and so the publisher asks the songwriter for that material. Soon everything from the writing of the song to the marketing plan for the album begin to be female-driven.

Where does that leave male singers, who still make up the majority of Nashville’s record-company rosters, and 40 percent or more of radio listeners who are masculine?

Roger Sovine of the huge Broadcast Music Inc. music-licensing organization, son of one of country music’s most traditional stars of yesteryear, seems to think singers and listeners might as well resign themselves to a larger fact of ‘90s life being mirrored in today’s “disposable” young male performers: A “disposable society” made up of disposable companies employing disposable workers.

Lewis, asked if there may someday be a gender-based split of the country radio format, thoughtfully replies “maybe,” because country music’s male constituency is “too big to ignore.” After radio’s winners of the female majority audience are decided, other stations might try to pick up what’s left and program for men, he says.

Some of the answer for the dilemma increasingly facing country music’s male listener, though, may eventually lie in Debbie herself. Since she is suddenly being targeted so heavily, her long-run opinions - as compared to Nashville recordmen’s early conjectures about those opinions - could be unpredictable.

Matraca Berg, writer of the smash Deana Carter hits “Strawberry Wine” and “We Danced Anyway,” told the Tribune in a March interview that she has noticed that many of the callers to country radio request lines these days are “young girls” and, therefore, that there is probably “a place in the format” for the young hunky-tonking male.

“As a female listener,” though, the 31-year-old Berg said she herself is “tired of it.

“I personally like grown men,” she added with an ambivalent giggle. “I request a song from a grown man.”