American Chronicles: The Nashville Underground
The New Yorker|July 24, 2023
Tennessee's politics have turned hard red, and the ruling sound in Music City is still bro country. Can other voices grab the mike?
By Emily Nussbaum. Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson
American Chronicles: The Nashville Underground

Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks frecuented by locals, has become NashVegas, a strip lined with night clubs named for country stars.

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.

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