Her Kinda Country

Hailey Whitters is a voice for a part of America that Nashville often overlooks.

- Justin Curto

WHEN HAILEY WHITTERS thinks of Shueyville, the small Iowa town south of Cedar Rapids that raised her, she thinks of her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Phil’s farm. The country singer-songwriter didn’t grow up around animals the way others in the Whitters family did, but depending on the year, Cindy would have cows, pigs, chickens, goats, turkeys, or even ducks. “She was homesteading before homesteading was cool,” Whitters jokes, pulling onto the farm’s gravel driveway in a pickup truck borrowed from her mother. In the wood-furnished kitchen of the farmhouse, fragranced by strawberry rolls rising on the counter, Cindy tells us stories about butchering chickens and giving her children milk from their goats rather than from the store. One day, as her kids were helping make homemade sauerkraut, one of them turned to her and asked, “Can we ever live like normal people?!”