Share on X Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Written by Rachel Glodo April 21, 2024 Rachel Glodo attended “Trailblazing Women of Country - A Tribute to Patsy, Loretta, and Dolly” at McCarter Theatre on April 14, 2024. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Princeton, where she studies Russian music, ballet, and American roots genres. This essay is part of The Scholar’s Take Series. Beyoncé’s making headlines—again!—this time stirrin’ up the country music crowd with her new album Cowboy Carter (2024). This album is packed with tracks, so you’d be forgiven if you missed the 22-second clip Queen B. slips in right after “Bodyguard.” It starts with a strangely familiar guitar lick: is that what you think it is? Yes, ma’am: that right there is the famous opening to “Jolene,” and who should pop in to introduce it but the original Queen of Country herself:Hey Miss Honey B, it’s Dolly P. You know that hussy with the good hair you sang about? Reminding me of someone I knew back when, except she has flaming locks of auburn hair, bless her heart. Just a hair of a different color, but it hurts just the same.Different hair, different woman, different decade...but it hurts just the same.And that right there is the key to women’s country music—thank you Dolly! The details might be different, but it’s all the same story, and that story is by, about, to, and for other women.In the 1980s, writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined a term to describe social relations between members of the same sex that are not romantic or sexual in nature. She called it homosociality (literally “same-sociality”), and since then, scholars have employed this idea to highlight the unique relations that emerge in same-sex contexts, from sports teams and women’s colleges, to monasteries and prisons.As a musicologist, I like to think about women’s country music from the perspective of female homosociality. It’s a beautifully rich and nuanced concept, one that ecompasses a huge variety of relationships between women: not only deep bonds like friendship, mentorship, and family, but also more ambivalent ones like rivalry, antagonism, and betrayal. It is activated in female-led spaces (like grandma’s beauty parlor and modern women’s health centers), emerging especially in situations where women band together for support, celebration, and resistance.And last week, I literally saw women “band” together at McCarter’s recent showcase, Trailblazing Women of Country. Featuring vocalists Miko Marks and Kristina Train, the concert paid homage to three outstanding leaders of country music: Patsy Cline (1932-58), Loretta Lynn (1932-22), and Dolly Parton (1946-). Marks and Train performed a rousing collection of the artists’ greatest hits, channeling—or to use Marks’s phrase, “summoning”—the musical presence of “Patsy, Loretta, and Dolly.”Equally remarkable were the musicians behind the soloists: a five-member, all-woman band, backing the singers with a panoply of instruments—piano, fiddle, organ, electric and acoustic guitar, upright and electric bass, drums, and slide guitar. As I whooped and clapped after particularly rousing solos, it struck me that their collective music-making tapped into some pretty deep aspects of female homosociality. This wasn’t a concert: this was a cross-generational, homosocial conversation.It wasn’t simply that women musicians were visually present together on stage together. Rather, it was that the music itself participated in—even embodied—the diverse relations that exist between women.Each singer has a unique vocal range, spanning from the lowest to highest notes they can sing. Due to the physiology of the female vocal apparatus, women’s ranges tend to overlap a lot, meaning that all-women groups tend to share more of their ranges than all-male or mixed-voiced groups. So when soloist Kristina Train crooned “She’s got you,” the band members responded with vocalized “ahhs” that overlapped Train’s pitches, reiterating, participating in, and strengthening the singer’s sentiments. This type of overlapping “call-and-response” style is a characteristic form of communication in many women-centered spaces. (How often I’ve heard women say, “mmhmm!” or “I know!” as they listen and converse with each other!) Moreover, the band’s melodic instruments—especially the fiddle and slide guitar—played in female vocal ranges, imitating the timbre and phrasing of the singers. Through these musical features, both singers and instrumentalists imitated and embodied female conversion.This genre is absolutely filled with songs about and to other women. Take, for example, Loretta Lynn’s feisty hit, "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man).” The singer may be warning her rival away from “her man,” but she does so with a tongue-in-cheek vocal delivery that undercuts the competition between them. The singer creates a musical space that allows her to speak directly to the “other woman,” activating a homosocial back-and-forth that privileges female perspectives, desires, and relations. Perhaps nowhere is this woman-to-woman address more potent than Parton’s “Jolene,” whose narrator begs her rival not to “take her man.” Both Lynn’s and Parton’s songs push the male lover to the edge of story, instead using music and text to center women’s relations with each other, even when they seem predicated on competition.Introducing “A Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Mika Marks described how she related the song to her own upbringing as a young Black woman in Michigan. “The details might be different,” she explained, “but it’s the same story.” (Here’s to bettin’ Ms. Marks has been listening to Cowboy Carter!) A lot of these songs refer to pretty specific circumstances and characters—Jolene’s “flaming locks of auburn hair,” for instance—yet they are remarkably universal in terms of their emotional and experiential scope. They give voice to sentiments and experiences shared among women from all walks of life, including heartbreak, joy, family pride, love, competition, and self-respect.As a woman listener, I find that the power of Patsy’s, Loretta’s, and Dolly’s songs comes from the sense of self-recognition they trigger among women of diverse regional, generational, racial, and individual backgrounds. When we “summon” the voices of country women singers, we actively construct a cross-generational, homosocial collective of women’s voices, voices that engage with one another in generative, encouraging, and uplifting ways.I’m sitting here alone, but I swear I hear voices. It’s Mika and Kristina and Patsy and Loretta and Dolly (and Tammy and Wynona and Reba and Linda and Nanci and Emmylou and Alison and, yes, Beyoncé)...“If you need a love that's trueNeed someone to stand by youHere we are, oh here we are, here we are.”The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University. GradFUTURES Stories & News Social Impact Fellow Laurel Cook writes about NJ housing shortage for New Jersey Future June 16, 2025 The Scholar's Take: ‘A Play is a Thousand Stories’ — Lottie Page on Primary Trust June 6, 2025 Graduate Students Examine ‘Tech and Society’ Issues in the GradFUTURES Responsible AI Learning Cohort May 27, 2025 The Scholar's Take: Sylvia Onorato on Primary Trust May 27, 2025