Photo: Alysse Gafkjen, Domenic Cicala, Sasha Israel, Thomas Crabtree, Heather Evans Smith

Fifty years ago, the Liberated Woman’s Songbook compiled 77 “singable folk songs” featuring female protagonists and women’s labor songs. A rarity within a music space otherwise dominated by men, the volume is a repository singularly focused on women’s centuries-long fight for representation, equality, and freedom.

Today, the dazzling success of modern traditional country and folk music arises from its crisp fidelity to the music’s oldest traditions, as well as harnessing a razor sharp immediacy; the successful end-run it’s done past the country music establishment; the sheer size of the cohort making the music—and perhaps most surprising of all, the fact that much of the revival has been led by women artists who cast off outdated prescriptions to seize the moment and tell new stories.

Now, all at once, five singer-songwriters have harnessed unique storytelling frames to examine and highlight women’s place in history and music. Gorgeous, thoughtful and unapologetically, cheekily, feminist, here are five concept albums that are pushing the genre ever forward.

Roadrunner! Kaitlin Butts

Growing up, Kaitlin Butts loved the drama and spectacle of musical theater and when she pivoted to country music, she kept the pizazz. Now for her third studio album, Butts harkens back to the musical she used to see every summer: Oklahoma!. With Roadrunner!, Butts re-fashions Oklahoma!’s themes into a long-form country ballad sung in signature red dirt country style and reimagined from her 2024 feminist perspective.

Together, the album’s 17 tracks are a spectacular display of Butt’s impressive stylistic range, nodding at everything from Deana Carter and Carrie Underwood’s ‘90s/2000s country sound to C.W. McCall’s trucker anthems and including a barn-burner country cover of Kesha’s “Hunt You Down.” Whereas the women in Oklahoma! are often defined by the men in their lives, Butts’ women take charge: they’re out there asking the men for dates (“Other Girls (Ain’t Havin’ Any Fun)), offering comfort (“Come Rest Your Head (On my Pillow)” featuring Vince Gill), rejecting traditional misogynistic tropes (“That’ll Never Be Me”), and making it clear they’re taking no guff (“You Ain’t Gotta Die to be Dead to Me”).

“It really does at times feel very empowering to sing about,” Butts says. “They didn’t have what we have now, and have the right to go up to a boy themselves or not just be a wife. And so writing from that perspective, and then in today’s world, was something that was important to me.”

Roadrunner! also became a home for several songs Butts has had in her repertoire for years. Channeling the quirkiest freewheelin’ corners of country music, in “Wild Juanita’s Cactus Juice,” Butts’ conjures the psychedelic tale of a backcountry roadside joint character, Wild Juanita, whose magic elixirs might just save the world. “It could make enemies call a truce / It’ll make you feel good but you don’t have to fear it / It enlivens your body, mind and spirit,” she sings. But Butts saves her sweetest character for the very end of the album, recalling with “Elsa,” a woman she met while playing a retirement home in Oklahoma City. In a profoundly poignant and reverent first person reflection through Elsa’s eyes, Butts looks back over a life well-lived begging herself never to forget its best moments.

Butt’s Roadrunner! is a feminist western of sorts, where the women get to have all the fun. In it, both she and her women stand on their own two feet, clear what they want and what they’re worth, with a dash of humor about it all, too.

Dawn Landes – The Liberated Woman’s Songbook

A few years ago, Dawn Landes found a copy of The Liberated Woman’s Songbook at a used book store. The collection, compiled in 1971 by folksinger and teacher Jerry Silverman is a dense trove of women’s labor songs from over the last few centuries – “Seventy-seven singable folk songs about women and their battles with husbands, lovers, the devil, the system…and themselves,” according to the cover. The book sat on Landes’ shelf until during the pandemic she challenged herself to learn one song a day. After an archives collaboration fell through, she decided to record a standalone album, her own Liberated Woman’s Songbook.

“I was just really grasping for something to feel hopeful about in the wake of the fall of Roe,” Landes says of her passion-project turned album. “Women’s reproductive rights are really important to me, and myself and so many women that I know,  I just felt like we were really struggling to understand why this was happening and to feel hopeful.”

Covering everything from monotonous tyranny of housework, calls to unionize and for suffrage, factory girl anthems, and the satirical “Keep Woman in Her Sphere,” Landes’ 11 tracks are a chronological survey of women’s songs, updated for a modern audience and constitute a gratifying, rousing mixture of joy, commiseration, hope, and defiance.

Landes also included two songs on the album which align thematically with the original songbook, but were not included. Written in 1852 by abolitionist and suffragette Fannie Gage, “One Hundred Years” imagines a world free from prison, cheating, fraud, vice, and war. Both prescient and poignant, some 170 years later it feels nearly as urgent as it surely did when first written. And “There Was a Young Woman who Swallowed a Lie,” retools the cumulative children’s rhyme as the triumphant story of a woman who rises to her own rescue at the last minute: “it wasn’t too late to liberate. Regurgitate!” The song winds in reverse as the young woman emerges triumphant: “she will not die!”

The most enduring folksongs often evolve in meaning as society changes. Landes’ interpretations lift her carefully-curated selections squarely into 2024: “When you’re struggling, you feel all those emotions, you feel despair, you feel angry, feel triumph, occasionally,” she says. “I was just trying to capture it all somehow.”

The Rise and Fall of American Kitch, Karen Jonas

When, in 1956, Elvis Presley gyrated across American home TV screens, a scant ten years after World War 2’s end, his music was a release from the clench of frugal, buttoned up war years, and an immediate threat to the status quo. Ushered in atop cataclysmic shifts in the country, Elvis’ opulent presence arrived at the opening of a floodgates of American consumerism; manufacturing capacity coupled with a booming economy and rapid innovation and change, meant that if you wanted it, you could buy it, in a way like never before. It’s that big bang moment that Karen Jonas chose to inhabit as she reckons with America’s obsession with materialistic accumulation on her latest album, The Rise and Fall of American Kitsch.

“Elvis himself is not kitschy,” Jonas says. “But I think the culture that was created around him is just a moment of kitsch: our ability to manufacture junk and sell it, our ability to have extra money to purchase this stuff. They would sell ‘I love Elvis’ pins and ‘I hate Elvis’ pins; whatever you would spend $1 on, they would sell it to you.”

More pithy than caustic, Jonas isn’t completely indicting consumerism, she too derives joy from buying things and surrounding herself with them. Rather, she carefully unfurls a technicolor dreamscape world in which dopamine is cheap and consequences sparce as a means of unpacking the allure of a cheap dopamine hit that lurks in the shadows of American consumerism run amok.

“I’m not an activist, but I am a person who lives here, and I have four kids, and I’m an observer of things, and just can’t help but notice how much shit we throw away all the all the time,” Jonas says.

Jonas starts the album with the Carter Family’s rags-to-riches story, in “Rich Man’s Valley,” before visiting with Elvis as he rises – “Four Cadillacs,” “Shake Bump and Grind Show” – she then stops off in the neon-lit dream world of a night in Vegas where anything is possible, “Gold in the Sand,” and skewers the monotony of suburban life in “Let’s Go to Hawaii,” as a housewife hoping to entice her bored husband to a fantasy vacation.

Slowly easing into darkness, the album pivots mid-song as the narrator of “Plastic Pink Flamingos,” reveals herself to be not a quirky lawn ornament collector but rather a delusional recluse who personifies and prizes her flamingos above all else. From there, it’s a short jump to the cloyingly upbeat “Call Dr. Nick,” who will prescribe “cotton candy pills /in little orange bottles  / just what you need,” and Elvis’ self-destruction with “Black Jacket/Red Guitar” and “Mama’s Gone.”

“The whole record, I think, is about answering hard questions with the wrong answers,” Jonas says.

To end the album, Jonas jumps forward to her own vices; “Online Shopping,” and an introspective spoken word rumination on her relationship with stuff, “American Kitsch,” in which she imagining herself looking down at her life from outer space, brutally, thoughtfully dissecting the meaning and meaninglessness of the stuff she’s accumulated in her life. Drawing a  through line from the explosive purchasing of the 1950s to the sheer tonnage of cheap junk available with the click of a button in 2024, Jonas offers a whimsical, fun, thoughtful exploration of a reality whose reckoning is only just beginning.

There’s Always a Song, Kelsey Waldon

This past spring, by decree of the Governor, Kelsey Waldon became a Kentucky Colonel, a mantle which is in her own words, the highest honor a Kentuckian can earn. More than worthy of that title of ambassador and guardian of Kentucky culture and folklore, Waldon’s latest album, There’s Always a Song, is an homage to the Kentucky and American folk music that’s shaped her own. To honor what came before her and the deep lineage of music history, Waldon pulls in heavy-hitting collaborators including Margo Price, Amanda Shires, and S.G. Goodman, reviving several seminal but obscure folk and country songs along the way.

“It helps me stay creative,” Waldon says. “It must be the reason why like Willie Nelson or Charlie Crockett or anybody would do a bunch of other people’s songs. It’s really to show a lot of gratitude to the music that means so much to me.”

Waldon starts the album’ s A-Side and B-Side each with powerful acapella renditions Jean Ritchie’s “Keep Your Garden Clean,” and Hazel Dickens’ “Pretty Bird,” respectively. Each is a fierce rallying cry to women everywhere to protect herself and her freedom above all else. Rooted in a deep folk tradition of protest music and feminist movements, Waldon’s versions anchor the album in the convictions of the many women singer-songwriters whose voices echo behind her. “I call it hillbilly feminism,” she says. “I always say it’s like gangster as shit, gangster as hell, because it’s just raw and it’s just mean as hell to me, all that music.”

For the rest of the album, Waldon selected folk classic “Hello Stranger” (specifically the Hazel and Alice version), on which Goodman joins her; Kentucky country singer Molly O’Day’s hard-driving “Travelling the Way Home,” accompanied by Price; Bill Monroe’s “Uncle Pen,” with Shires on fiddle; 49 Winchester’s Isaac Gibson joins Waldon for Ralph Stanley’s “I Only Exist” (actually written by his wife); and Waldon goes solo on Ola Belle Reed’s “I’ve Endured” and Doc Watson’s “Your Lone Journey.”

“With my whole heart and soul, I love country music. Especially doing an album of old-time and fiddle tunes and bluegrass tunes, really to me that music is so communal,” Waldon says. “It all of a sudden becomes this thing where we’re just enjoying making music because we love it, which is really sentimental.”

Folk and country music has always been played together and passed around, each new player and generation leaves a mark as a song endures through time. Joined by her friends, Waldon’s versions of classic songs feel aptly both of the musical moment and timeless. “These songs are deep. They were here long before me, and they will be here long after I’m gone, after any of us are here. They will survive the test of time,” Waldon says. “It’s like they live in some kind of universe that just survives forever. These songs know the secrets to life.”

All My Friends, Aoife O’Donovan

“All my friends, all my friends will meet the end someday / Through the violet highs and the ochre lows / My load feels heavy most days,” Aoife O’Donovan sings, setting the scene for her latest album, All My Friends. At dawn, the suffragettes whose story she’s chosen march across farm fields on a Tennessee summer day in 1920, demanding their state become the 36^th to ratify and thus pass the 19^th Amendment, securing their right to vote.

The idea for the album came after O’Donovan was commissioned to write five songs commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment. Through the original tracks and the album, she builds out the story of Carrie Chapman Catt, a president of National American Woman Suffrage Association, who in 1916 declared women’s rights to be a crisis in America, affirming “The Woman’s Hour has struck” to spearhead the final push to suffrage.

“I was so struck by the idea that there were so many OPPOSED to suffrage for women- it reminded me of so much of what we face today,” O’Donovan writes in a note accompanying the album.

Drawing from Chapman Catt’s writing and speeches, O’Donovan sings the “Crisis” of oppression as Catt outlined it and with “War Measure,” O’Donovan evokes Woodrow Wilson, an ally of suffrage. She imagines what Catt’s mother’s dreamed for her daughter in “Someone to Follow;” Catt’s slow growth into a leader in “The Right Time;” and sings to the “Daughters” of suffrage and modern day, imploring us not to leave the fight for equality to future generations.

The album’s last few tracks vault forward into the present day and its parallels to that precarious summer more than a hundred years ago when suffragettes made their last ditch plea in Tennessee. In the album’s penultimate track, “Over the Finish Line,” O’Donovan implores, “The power is ours / But we’d rather stare at our phones,” and she covers Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” to close. But it’s suffragette Catt’s own words, which bookend the album’s third to last track, “America, Come,” that linger long after the album’s notes fade:

What is the democracy for which the world is battling

and for which we offer up our man power, woman power,

money power, our all?