Country Queer’s Showcase Inspires, Brittney Spencer & Co. Invigorate

We got our AmericanaFest 2021 in-the-field experience underway early on a beautiful and brisk Thursday evening with the Rainbow Happy Hour showcase presented by Country Queer, an outstanding online pub that centers LGBTQ voices in country and Americana, at East Nashville’s Vinyl Tap. The event was a welcome mix of emotional moments and tunes for which the only appropriate response was hearty stomping. The lineup included familial duo The Whitmore Sisters, harpist and guitarist Lizzie No, country guitarist and singer Jett Holden, folk singer and guitarist Mya Byrne, classic country band Paisley Fields, soulful and folk-y Lilli Lewis and indie singer and guitarist Izzy Heltai. The combination vinyl shop, bar and venue, which resides in the original home of the late, great Family Wash, was full up — a welcome problem after 2020.

Among the highlights was Lewis’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” a song about the pain of being made to feel like an outsider, which she dedicated to untold stories about queer people, misfits, immigrants and people experiencing homelessness. Lewis also sang “Copper John,” a tune about unhoused people who helped her through a dark time. She was accompanied by Joy Clark on electric guitar, who peppered the performance with grooving, rollicking solos. Later, several audience members had tears in their eyes during Heltai’s set. Along with Byrne, Heltai is one of the first two transgender artists known to be booked for an AmericanaFest showcase, and he sang about believing at one time that he wouldn’t be alive today since the life expectancy of trans kids is so low.

No, whose work is in a contemporary folk mode, sang her moving original “The Killing Season” about perpetual and systemic violence against Black people in America. Holden followed her, and was later called back up to sing again because so many new people had filed into the venue. He played his debut single “Taxidermy,” which also speaks about the murder of Black people.

Paisley Fields, which shares its name with its singer and keys player, blends a variety of classic country styles in their music, including a healthy dose of honky-tonk. They brought down the house with “Jesus Loving American Guy,” written about hypocritical folks who “pushed me into the wall in junior high.” The crowd held up their hands in response to the line, “I’m coming in hot, with a limp wrist,” and did the signature hand movement with hoots of joy. The show, clearly a healing moment for many in attendance, was originally scheduled to end at 7 p.m., but the staff were willing to stay overtime for the oversize crowd.

A little while later at 3rd and Lindsley, a quartet of extraordinarily gifted women jointly and separately showed what country music is at its core and can and should be better known for — if only the industry would stretch its arms and embrace the time travelers and dreamers just outside the comfortable circle of safe pablum it manufactures.

Brittney Spencer, a favorite of The Highwomen, showcased her church-trained voice and her funny, clever, heart-wrenching songs that twirl so gracefully between country and soul and folk and gospel that no genre except one so broad as Americana could possibly hold her. That breathtaking voice, so obviously hewn in the pews and the choir loft of her AME church in Baltimore! Soulful when it needs to be, soft when it has to be and full of praise for life, no matter the challenges it brings. An artist’s artist, for sure, as proven when Highwoman Amanda Shires joined Spencer onstage and gushed with praise for her. The pair dueted on a Christmas song (shh: it has a bad word in the title!) they wrote in June when Spencer thought she was just going to Casa Shires y Isbell simply to swim. The best Christmas songs are written in the summer (just ask Irving Berlin) and this one, in a just world, would join the pantheon. Spencer closed her set with her single “Sober and Skinny,” a song that reads as a more pessimistic retelling of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and is rightfully getting a dose of commercial rotation.

It’s hard to think of a recent country album as excruciatingly personal as Ashley Ray’s celebrated 2020 release Pauline. She is rightfully proud of the largely autobiographical disc, a mournful celebration of her family and her hometown of Lawrence, Kan. The rawness of it all — particularly the titular tune, about her namesake grandmother, and the excellent “St. Patrick’s Day,” dedicated to her late father — is not unlike the cathartic bloodletting of the better emo songs (though Ray’s songs are much, much better).The jangling, echoey guitars and dark bass even evoke thoughts of New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen. Doing country. It works, though, and it works even on the woman who wrote the songs. Playing “Pauline,” Ray literally wept onstage while the audience gave the kind of earnest applause every singer-songwriter dreams about.

Leah Blevins would not sound out of place on The Porter Wagoner Show, such is the 1970s country-hitmaker quality of her voice. And her songs are on par with the best of that era too: funny and smart pieces about being a woman in a man’s world and charmingly jolly diversions about the silliness of being in love. Her set was more of a beer-soaked rollick than Ray’s, but a complementary one, because country music can contain multitudes.

Kelsey Waldon, a favorite of the late John Prine, closed the night. Prior to 2019, she was already known to those who are on the lookout for fine songwriting, but emerged into the broader consciousness when the great man invited her to duet on “In Spite of Ourselves” on the Grand Ole Opry, just after she’d signed to his label Oh Boy Records. The whip smart AmericanaFest crowd that stuck through until 11 p.m. was overjoyed with her tight trip through her catalog, with tunes dating back to 2014’s excellent and recently reissued The Goldmine through her latest release, 2019’s White Noise / White Lines. Waldon, like Prine, writes wickedly intelligent lyrics and borrows generously from all sectors — the badass ladies that came before her like Tammy and the Chicks and the envelope-pushing preservationists like Uncle Tupelo.

Yes, as the true believers often argue: Country music is still alive and it’s still an organic evolving thing, not a cold mass-produced consumable. And it’s always nice to be reminded.