MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

RaeLynn’s “God Made Girls” and Maddie & Tae’s “Girl in a Country Song” (2014) reignited conversations about sexism in country music, with critics debating whether the songs subvert or reinforce the genre’s dominant “bro” culture. Robert Oermann and Mary Bushwak state that “The history of women’s music reveals a rich vein of positive images, self-assertive lyrics, and strong female performers” (Finding Her Voice xiv). Riding a surge of second-wave feminism, Jeannie C. Riley’s country hit “Harper Valley P.T.A.” (1968) told the story of a widowed mother who confronts sexism in her community. This and several of Riley’s follow-up songs feature a strong adolescent female narrator, possibly the same girl who was influenced “the day [her] momma socked it to” the “Harper Valley hypocrites.”

Riley’s narrator is often subversive, a girl who breaks silences. In “We Were Raised on Love,” she stands up to an oppressive grocer; in “Edna Burgoo,” she tells of an awkward girl who defies prejudice to become the school’s basketball star; in “The Girl Most Likely,” she critiques the community’s presumptions of her promiscuity; “What Was Her Name?” elegizes a girl at school who was killed by an abusive boyfriend.

As strong as they are, Riley and her characters were also confined: Riley’s abuse upon her arrival in Nashville, her anguish over the sexualized marketing of her image, and the way female characters in her songs sometimes compete against other girls while seeking liberation testify to this bind. Even in “Raised on Love,” the young narrator only imagines the heroic scene in which she speaks up to the domineering shopkeeper. While Riley’s narrators are a precursor to the country girls of today who challenge societal norms, they also illuminate the challenges girls face achieving real equality beyond the fiction of “Harper Valley” and its wish-fulfilling, locked grooves.