4 - A Double-Edged Sword

Summary

In September 2007, Rissi Palmer’s debut single “Country Girl” entered Billboard’s Hot Country Song (HCS) chart, making her the first Black female artist to chart in twenty years and one of just seven Black women in the history of the industry. With short life cycles on the chart, their songs left faint data trails making their time in the industry. As a result, their careers received limited attention from the press, their music was not widely distributed, their contributions went unrecognized by the industry, and, as a result, they remain unknown to country music fans. In an industry tightly centered around documenting, preserving, and promoting its heritage, these women have been largely expunged from the genre’s historical narrative. Drawing on intersectional theory and feminist scholarship on institutional discrimination (Collins 1990; Ahmed 2014, 2019), this chapter analyzes sixty years of chart and award history data, to offer a framework for considering how industry data shapes cultural heritage, dictating whose stories get preserved.