As a child, Melissa Carper liked to listen to vinyl records by lying on the living room floor with her head under the family record console. Above her, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Sr. and Loretta Lynn spun country standards and stories of love and loss. She liked the sad love songs best, fixating on the longing in Williams' "Wedding Bells" and Cline's "You're Stronger than Me." At 9 or 10 years old, Carper already knew she was attracted to other girls and doubted she'd ever be able to have a happy love song kind of love.
"I think a song like 'Wedding Bells Are Ringing In The Chapel' — I was already relating to it. I was thinking I'm not gonna ever be able to marry this person," Carper says. "I was taught it was wrong to to be gay."
The musical styling and simple, profound storytelling Carper heard in those early listening sessions still inspires, imbuing her own music with a distinctly vintage sound palette. Listening to Carper, it would be easy to imagine yourself in a smoke-filled juke joint or gathered around a crackling family radio broadcast of the Carter Family. But her lyrics are a rarity in country music — especially for a woman.
With an effortless grace that makes it easy to overlook, Carper writes songs about her life that neither sexualize nor aggrandize women, frequently wandering into realms typically reserved for male singers: the romance of the open road and vehicles she's owned. Carper wields a cheeky wit, packed into tight, sly turns of phrase, penning sweet, happy — and yes, sometimes sad — gay love songs, naturally bending a traditionally heteronormative genre to fit her own experience.
"She's just speaking her truth in a very matter of fact way; it's really clever the way that she makes no apologies for saying, 'this is my damn song,'" says Chris Scruggs, who's played steel, acoustic and electric guitars on Carper's most recent records — Ramblin' Soul and Daddy's Country Gold.
Country music is rooted in simple yet evocative storytelling, but it thrives on its ability to make you feel. With forthright, thoughtful lyrics, Carper seems to sit right down next to the listener and say, "Hey, I've been there too." In a raspy, lilting twang reminiscent of Lynn's and possessing a chameleon-like ability to shift from country to blues to jazz to western swing, Carper freely samples from, and combines genres to fit her purpose.
"I feel like it's hard to separate the styles from one another, they all really blend into each other and they were influenced from one another," Carper told GRAMMY.com.
Carper's fourth studio album, Ramblin' Soul, released on Nov. 18, contains a little bit of everything. Its title track, "Ramblin' Soul," is a bluesy, steel-guitar driven celebration of Carper's love for the open road, that then leads into a plucky, jazzy "Zen Buddha," which lends levity to the pain of an unrequited crush. Carper slows down for the mournful "Ain't a Day Goes By," a bittersweet, universally relatable reminiscence about a lost love – in this case, Carper's cherished, deceased, dog.
From there, Ramblin' Soul jaunts through tracks with elements of country shuffle, 1930s pop, and swampy blues rhythms, and includes a cover of the Odetta classic, "Hit or Miss," culminating in an offbeat country love song by Americana singer-songwriter Brennen Leigh, about the irreplaceable value of quality.
"It's just these are the stories I have to tell, this is my experience. And I happen to love really old music, so that's what it's gonna sound like," Carper says. "It's really nothing that I've planned out to do. It's just all my influences combined with my experiences."
Carper shrugs off the rarity of her ability to pull effortlessly from a variety of music traditions, but it so impressed Scruggs that he dubbed her "Hillbillie Holiday." "She could sing [Kitty Wells'] 'It wasn't God who made Honky Tonk Angels' and she could also sing [jazz standard] 'Here's That Rainy Day,' and not have to change her voice at all, and make both songs sound equally convincing," he says.
The dividing line between genres has long been only as clear as the marketing requires it to be. In the 1920s, when commercially recorded music started to be available to the general public, record companies created artificial genre lines to distinguish between hillbilly (country and Western) music intended for white audiences and "race records" (blues, R&B and gospel) marketed to Black listeners. But the genres continued to influence each other. For example, as Scruggs points out, B.B. King grew up listening to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts and Bob Wills rode for miles to hear Bessie Smith sing blues music.
Although upright bass is her stage instrument, for the album, Carper handed the bass strings over to revered Nashville musician and producer Dennis Crouch and focused on vocals. Crouch's bass and Scruggs' guitars join drums and percussion, piano, organ, fiddle, clarinet and rhythm and nylon string guitar, all recorded in the same room, lending the album an energetic, retro sound.
Scruggs, a Nashville-based session musician and the bass player for Marty Stuart's band, the Fabulous Superlatives, is the grandson of legendary three-finger banjo picker and early bluegrass masthead Earl Scruggs. But Scruggs credits his mother, Gail Davies, who was country music's first female producer, with his love of music.
Growing up in Nashville, Scruggs marveled at the music history around him and gravitated toward traditional-sounding music — including artists like Carper, in whose work he hears threads of that history. "A lot of my favorite artists today … sound like if you took my favorite parts of my record collection, and put it in a blender," he says.
Carper grew up in North Platte, Nebraska, where she and her brothers and sister sang gospel songs at local churches and rest homes. Her mother and brother taught her to play guitar, and in fourth grade she learned the upright bass (on which she eventually earned a college scholarship to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln). Starting around age 12, up until she left for college, Carper toured with the family country band, playing electric bass guitar on country classics on the Elks, Moose, and American Legion hall circuit.
After a couple years of college, Carper dropped out and moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she busked on the street and joined a local bar band. For the first time she met openly gay people and gradually it started to seem normal enough to her that she felt she could come out to the people closest to her.
When she was in her early 20s, Carper's dad gave her a complete set of Jimmie Rogers albums. Rogers, often considered the father of country music, recorded many traditional country songs for the first time, as well as his own, now-classic tunes like "Blue Yodel" (better known as "T is for Texas") and "In the Jailhouse Now." In his versions, Carper found simple concepts and chords she could grasp and a sound she wanted to emulate.
"I felt like I was attempting to go back to the very roots of country music to understand what the roots were," Carper said. "It wasn't something I was really thinking about so much as instinctively being obsessed with." In the course of her research, Carper discovered that many of Rogers' hits were co-written by his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams. While she often didn't ask for credit, McWilliams left a mark on the genre and an impression on Carper.
The obsession deepened over the summer Carper spent in Alaska working in a fish factory. She listened most closely to Woody Guthrie, whose song, "Jackhammer Blues," inspired her second songwriting venture (her first song was called "Mamma Tortilla,"), "Fish Slimin' Blues," an ode to her assembly line station, where she scraped the blood from fish backbones for hours on end.
Over the years, Carper amassed credits in string and roots music bands; performing Americana music as a founding member of the Maybelles and as part of roots band Sad Daddy; started the Carper Family band; and is one half of string band duo the Buffalo Gals Band with her partner, fiddle player Rebecca Patek. She released her first solo studio album in 2015.
When she moved to Austin, Texas in 2009, Carper met fellow musician Brennen Leigh at the now defunct Somnio's Café, where they both waitressed. Through the city's tight-knit bluegrass and roots music scene, they got to know each others' music and now perform together and co-write regularly.
"The way that she strings words together, I've never heard anyone else do that. It's simple, natural country songwriting," Leigh said.
Avoiding the stereotypical song topics often expected of female songwriters, Carper's written a series of songs dedicated to loving vehicles — just not the ones you'd expect. Whereas countless country songs glorify big trucks, and more than a few pop songs have been written about sports cars, Carper chooses typically mundane vehicles: vans and one old, worn-out farm truck.
"I'll never have as strong of an attachment to any vehicle as I did to those two vans," Carper says. "And also, they're cool. The way they used to make cars, they were beautiful and cool-looking."
Under the sway of nostalgia, utilitarian transportation vehicles can assume mythic proportions because of the formative experiences they carried us through. Tapping into that power, Carper memorializes her first car, a "beautiful big brown" maxi van, which she inherited from her parents, who used it to cart around the family country band.
"A 1980 Dodge Van was my very first car / I drove her around just everywhere / Had 300,000 hard miles on that motor," Carper sings in "1980 Dodge Van," off Ramblin' Soul. "I'd hobo round with my home parked on the street / From town to town, buskin' and livin' free / Yeah my first ramblin' days / Were in the Dodge Van Mom and Daddy gave me / And I drove here proud up and down, all across the land."
"The way her mind works is very unique; I think she writes everything very thoughtfully. But there's no pretense in what she's writing," Leigh says. Because of that, "there's certain songs I just need her for."
Together Leigh and Carper wrote "Billy and Beau," about a boy and a girl who both have a crush on the same friend, Beau. To the first verses of the song, Carper added a delicate, subtly-wrenching moment when Billy, full of joy from a day at the zoo, puts his arm around Beau, "sayin' 'Beau, I sure had fun.'" The gesture conveys the full weight of awkward, shy teenage emotions complicated by confusing and (potentially) unrequited feelings.
Not only has Carper mastered the ability to tug at your heartstrings — equally willing to commiserate and celebrate — she deftly dispenses humor, too. Levity is an underused and underrated tool in country music, often squandered on cheap punchlines when it's used at all. Carper, however, employs its full capacity to deliver lines that might otherwise go unsaid.
Ramblin' Soul includes "Boxers on Backwards," an instantly lovable track which invites the listener to laugh and sing along with an inherently unsexy, potentially embarrassing moment, because of Carper's cheeky, self-deprecating delivery: "some girls like ya stinky and drunk with your drinky / But I ain't a drinkin' tonight / I'm stone cold sober and I dance like an ogre / I ain't gettin' lucky tonight."
Carper wrote the song not long after a breakup, after literally waking up with her boxers on backwards. She recalled being so deep in the backswing of the recent separation that even if someone had been interested in her, she wouldn't have noticed. It's not a moment many people would choose to venerate, but the straightforward honesty in the song's lyrics transform a private moment into a laughable, relatable story.
"So I woke up and I had my boxers on backwards. And I was like, 'Oh, how did this happen?" she says. "And I went from there, just started to put the song together – a lot of times my songs are quite literal. I'm a bit of a literal writer, like a linear writer."
Whether she's writing humor, chronicling heartbreak, relating personal experience or celebrating the joy of life, Carper's power as a songwriter comes from her ability to be whatever you want her to be. She manages to be mutable without compromising who she is as an artist, Scruggs believes.
"Nobody else in the world could have written that song," he says. "To me, that's the sign of a great songwriter, when they write in their own language. Nobody could have written 'Dang Me,' other than Roger Miller; nobody could have written "She's Not for You,' other than Willie Nelson; [and] nobody could have written "Boxers on Backwards' other than Melissa Carper."
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