Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” showed up via Zoom. That night, the dominant emotion at “Love Rising” wasn’t anarchy but reassurance-a therapeutic vibe, broken up by pleas to register to vote. Let’s make it where you can bite ears! ’ ” Because all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Hey, this guy’s a really good ear biter. And if there are no rules-or if the rules keep changing according to whoever won the last fight-you’re fucked. “You bite somebody’s ear off, you’re probably gonna beat ’em. “Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re gonna win,” Isbell said, mildly, slouching against the doorframe. “The gerrymandering-how do we get past that?” “Jason, can I borrow you for a minute?” she called into the anteroom, where Isbell was hanging out with Mercy. Shires’s adopted city was in peril, she told me, and she’d started to think that more defiant methods might be required in the wake of the Tennessee legislature’s recent redistricting, which amounted to voter suppression. Surrounded by palettes of makeup, she talked about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, something that her grandmother had refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. A Texas-born fiddle player who is a member of the feminist supergroup the Highwomen, she had forest-green feathers clumped around her eyelids, as if she were a bird-her own form of drag, Shires joked. Shires, overwhelmed by the crush backstage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she poured each of us a goblet of red wine. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “ Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars-but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “ a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”-no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone-only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. Stars had texted famous friends producers had worked for free. residents-including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “ Did I Shave My Legs for This?”-a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar.
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