Taking a pretty big risk with her debut single, which ended up being a massive hit.
Gretchen Wilson released her debut single “Redneck Woman,” which was included on her debut album Here for the Party, in 2004. She co-wrote the song with half of Big & Rich duo John Rich, and it remains her only number-one single on the US Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart. It was minor crossover hit, too and reached #22 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It earned her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance at the 47th Annual Grammy Awards in 2005, and of course, remains her signature song to this day. I was a kid when this song came out, but I have vivid memories of hearing it on the radio, both country and Top 40, all the time… I think I had those words memorized before I was even 10 years old, if that gives you any indication of how I grew up.
During a recent interview, Gretchen talked about how she just felt like women like her, who wanted a simple life that included raising kids and dogs out in the country, and who didn’t look like Faith Hill, weren’t represented in mainstream country, and deserved to be celebrated too.
She wanted to write something that was true to who she was, and the women that she knew back home, and “Redneck Woman” was born… but it wasn’t an instant radio success. Of course, at this time in the early 2000’s, getting your song played on the radio was everything, especially for a young artist like her, so having so much pushback with her first single definitely wasn’t ideal.
But actually, it was her fans who helped make it the radio it that the song ultimately became, because they constantly called and requested to hear it, and eventually, programmers had to give in. And as she explained it in the interview, they did not like that the word “redneck” was used in the title, because they felt that it presented a stereotype to the world that they had worked hard to disassociate with country music.
Gretchen explained that it became up to her to define “redneck” as something other than what might’ve been portrayed in movies and TV in terms of those types of people being racist, closed minded, dumb, or any other word we might associate there. She felt that word had value, because it was about people who worked hard and lived a simple life, and it took a lot of “you know what” to fight through that and change their minds:
“No, the fans loved it. Yes, the fans loved it, and if it hadn’t been for the fans calling local radio stations and demanding it, I’m not sure that it would have gone the way it did. Program directors didn’t really love it that much. I mean, we got phone calls back at at the label that I was hearing about, you know, some some of them saying things like, ‘We’ve been working for 20 years to get this ‘redneck’ word out of our listeners‘ mouth.’
And it was really kind of up to me to define ‘redneck.’ It’s like, you guys have just decided all across this country that it’s a bad word and that it means racist, but that’s not what it means. It’s not at all what it means. I mean, being a redneck has value, it’s about where you come from and it’s really about being out in the field farming all day. Coming back in the house and having a redneck from being out on a tractor all day long, that’s what it’s about.
It has nothing to do with racism, and I became kind of the face of having to explain that to the world. Even the radio stations didn’t want that word, and so to present myself as the redneck woman and it took a lot of of you know what.”
It kind of reminds me of what a young Kacey Musgraves had to fight through with her debut single “Merry Go ‘Round,” as well as her single “Follow Your Arrow,” which were both controversial in their time in different ways. And of course, Loretta Lynn before them… she was the queen of pushing boundaries.
For a young lady to start their career fighting for a song that radio people really didn’t want to play her music, for whatever reason, really does take a lot of “you know what,” to use Gretchen’s phrase, and it goes to show the importance of following your gut and advocating for yourself and what you think is right for you. Particularly for Wilson, though, it’s impressive that she was so willing to go to bat, so to speak, for this song, and take it upon herself to change the conversation around a word that had become sort of taboo.
Wilson could’ve easily been painted as “problematic” or “difficult” because of the fight she put up, and very well could’ve been blacklisted from radio early in her career, but she knew what she had would resonate and be successful once she got some of them to take that risk with her.
She wore it as a badge of honor, in a sense, rather than allowing others to paint it as some backwoods person who couldn’t function in normal society or have a decent life like everyone else, and clearly, it’s something so many people can relate to, regardless of race or anything like that. It’s impressive to listen to her talk about it now, over 20 years later, because I had no idea that was all such a big part of the start of her career in terms of the controversy.
I forgot how good the music video is, too… you might see some familiar faces in Kid Rock, Hank Jr. and Tanya Tucker too:
