Leaving No Stone Unturned: an interview with queer country musician Karen Pittelman
My phone pinged and I looked down, at the message — Cathryn sent me photos of potential outfits. We were trying to pull together loosely coordinated outfits for the Karen and the Sorrows show that night in Durham, an hour east on I-85. We’re both femmes, but that night, I decided to lean into the butch side of me— long pants, a button up, a jacket. The stone femme becomes a stone butch for the night.
Something felt right about that to me, leaning into our mutual love for butch/femme inside of our queer femme friendship, for a country show as two white southern women, one of us cis, the other trans, both of us rigorously committed to playing our part in ending white supremacy. The complicated traditions and legacies that we still find joy in and the ways we can make things for us — whether that’s country music or genders — when the powers that be would rather us be quiet, be invisible, or not exist.
We both grew up in the South, her in North Carolina and myself in Georgia, where country music was part of what we grew up on — and to have this night where country music was ours — written by folks like us for folks like us, we were ready to two-step the night away, to a home that exists in fleeting moments and the future that we long for.
On the walk from the parking deck to the Pinhook, we were arm-in-arm, laughing at some raunchy, sexual, delightfully queer jokes we both made. I turned to her and said, “I adore how we just go there.”
She turned, looked at me in the eye, and quipped, “Leave no stone unturned.”
It took a few seconds, but soon, I was blushing bright red under the street lights. I responded, “Oh, really now?”
Cathryn sweetly smiled back at me, and said, “I wondered when you were gonna get it.”
I first heard of Karen Pittelman’s band, Karen & the Sorrows, from an organizing comrade in Atlanta who invited me to an event at the local feminist bookstore a couple years back. I was slowly getting more and more into country after years of primarily listening to punk and queercore, because an ex-partner who got me into the tv show Nashville and fellow queers who loved country music, including an old friend picking out and playing Allison Krauss’ “Oh Atlanta” on a cross country because it reminded them of me. That song ended up being the one that broke my karaoke-at-the-lesbian-bar cherry at 23. I was a late bloomer on that dyke tradition.
I remember my mom having Dixie Chicks albums that we listened to on the drive from Atlanta to visit her family in South Carolina, and remembered the whole fiasco where they banished from country music radio for speaking out against Bush’s war and having lots of respect for them. But I didn’t listen to country — I felt cooler than that, like punk was the one true form of music, that country was just right wing. The truth is, I think for years, I was hiding my gender dysphoria and internalized femmephobia in punk music, the don’t-give-a-fuck ethos. Coming out changed all that.
Between coming out into myself and doing lots of healing work, there was a big shift of an internal identity wrapped in “I don’t care who I am, I just want be a part of resistance and transform the world” to “This is what and who I want to be”. I still am a part of resistance movements that work to transform the world and the places we call home — but there’s more room for me here, my longings and desires, and and more room to let the world in. Opening my heart like that sure can lead and has led to heartbreak, but I am so glad I am not missing out on so much of life — one of which is queer country, songs full of love and rage and heartbreak, songs full of the range of life, songs reminding us, we’re here with you.
The show was amazing. Cathryn and I danced all night, sung along to Karen and the Sorrows and stood jaw agape at the brilliant musicianship of Kamara Thomas who somehow seamlessly brought together doom metal and country, feeling like we somehow survived in the apocalypse, living amongst the stars. (and yes, that was a reference to Octavia Butler’s Parable series.)
Karen and I meant to have an interview together in-person, but between travel schedules — next stop on tour being Baltimore and Cathryn and I driving back home, that didn’t quite work out. However we still made it happen over email, and I’m so grateful she took the time to answer these questions I had for her. Please check out her new record, Guaranteed Broken Heart, and if she’s in your town, it’s very worth it to get your dancing shoes on and head to the show.
Jess St. Louis (JSL): How are you?
Karen Pittelman (KP): A little scattered and disorganized from working on all this stuff for the new record, to tell you the truth!
JSL: What’s the thing about the album that brings you the most joy?
KP: It always brings me joy to make stuff, to create. The things I probably love the most about the process are writing songs and being in the studio.
JSL: What is it about about a whiskey, fellow queers, and a sad song?
KP: I’m not a very good drinker — most of the time it makes me sick, so I only get to have a little bit on special occasions. But a while back, I was at a Sarah Shook show with a few of my queer country gang, and I was drinking my one rye whiskey, and Sarah was singing “Dwight Yokum,” and I was like, why do I feel so much better all of the sudden? And then I remembered, oh right! Whiskey, fellow queers, and a sad song is one of the secrets of life!
JSL: Queers have a long tradition of holding contradictions — grief and love, rage and hope — what do you think country music offers us and vice versa?
KP: I wonder if that’s also about more than being queer, if it’s also about the difference between being in power — where your humanity is celebrated and centered — versus being at the margins where your humanity is denigrated. So that in your daily life not only do you have to struggle just to survive under the constant threat of all kinds of violence, which obviously means feeling a lot of grief and rage, but you have to struggle to hold on to and hold up your own humanity and the humanity of your community, which requires so much love and hope. I think because country and the blues and gospel all come out of a common music created over hundreds of years largely by poor, rural people in the south, people who were not in power, it’s music that knows all about how to hold both grief and love, rage and hope.
JSL: What do you think is the potential of country music and specifically queers making country is for challenging and dismantling white supremacy and racialized capitalism?
KP: The “hillbilly humanism” that has always been a fundamental part of country music (this is a good link to an interview with Nadine Hubbs about that: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/class-politics-country-music-hillbilly-humanism) is so radical! That core value — that “nobody’s better than anyone else,” as Hubbs explains it — obviously isn’t the same thing as a commitment to dismantling white supremacy or a redistribution of wealth and power, but it’s a pretty good place to start. And when you combine that with the working class politics that are often at country music’s center, that spirit of “take this job and shove it,” there is a lot to build on. Country music is a powerful organizing tool. The right has proven this over the last forty years! So I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we could also use that power to help fight for a different agenda.
JSL: For me — as a lesbian and queer woman of trans experience who finds herself in butch/femme lineages — there’s something about transforming country that feels decidedly butch/femme about it — in both honoring and playing with herstory and not writing it off completely. Do you see that too?
KP: Oh definitely! I feel like country music grapples with gender roles in such intense ways, from liberating to horrifying! I find a lot of inspiration in the femme badassery of country music heroes like Patsy, Dolly, and Reba. Their style, their sharp talent for business, their musicianship, and the way they sing the truth — that’s all so core for me. I would never want to write that off. I just want us to transform country music so that we all can sing our truth! From Kitty Well’s answering back that it wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels right through to the Highwomen, I think there’s a strong tradition of country music struggling with how femininity and masculinity are constructed, and the incredible violence with which that construction gets enforced. I think there are probably more songs about women murdering their abusers in country music than in any other genre. So I guess what I hope is that we can hold that tradition — and think critically about it too, of course — and then build and expand on it, so that there is room there for more of us, and in particular room to talk about homophobia and transphobia and how gender, race, and class intersect.
JSL: Your songs carry and lyricize sadness, heart break, and deep learning. Is this a healing practice for you? Your fans?
KP: Sometimes I’m making things out of my own sadness and sometimes it’s other people’s sadness coming through me, but either way, creating the songs themselves is a really joyful practice for me. Which I guess is a weird thing to say about making things out of grief, but it’s the truth. I don’t know if I would call it healing exactly, but it makes me feel connected to something powerful and transformative. And I guess what I hope most is that these songs can be there to help keep people company if they are going through hard times. Healing can be such a tall order. Some things are so heavy, all you can really do is figure out how to carry them. I think it helps though to have a song by your side. Something that reminds you that you don’t have to carry it alone. I don’t know if I’ve ever written a song that was good enough to do that for someone, but that’s my greatest wish.
JSL: Any questions for me?
KP: What was one of the first country songs you fell in love with? And what song are you listening to on repeat right now?
JSL: I’m sure a Dixie Chicks song, but I can’t quite pick out which were the ones my mom listened. But the first one that I knew I fell in love with is, “Oh, Atlanta” by Allison Krauss. I heard it on a long cross-country drive from Oakland to Atlanta, after six months away and was longing to return back home to southern queers and organizing community. As for what’s on repeat right now, probably Brittany Howard’s ‘Georgia’.
