"Hands of Time," the first song on Midwestern Farmer's Daughter, tells the story of Margo Price growing up in Aledo, Illinois surrounded by cornfields and the kind of country boys who'd skip school on the first day of deer season. Her father lost the family farm after a bad summer and took up a job working second shift at a prison; Price skipped town, moved to Nashville, took up odd jobs in the suburbs, and married guitar player and songwriter Jeremy Ivey. Together, they navigated the gilded, narrow-minded music industry until the tragic death of their first-born son triggered a period of self-destructive behavior that one night landed her in the county jail. It's on the very first song of Price's debut solo album that she hopes her fate will take an unprecedented turn for the better.
"I didn't get to have a lot of the normal happiness that a lot of people have," Price says with a rural lilt during an early morning phone conversation from her house in Nashville's Inglewood neighborhood. She's lived there with Ivey and their 5-year-old son for over six yearsthe longest she's ever lived anywhere in her life. "This has been such an overwhelming amount of happiness. I keep joking that my body's gonna reject it. It doesn't seem quite real."
Midwestern Farmer's Daughter is the first country record to be released by Jack White's Third Man label, and how it landed there is a bit of a tangled tale. Price had previously played with Ivey as part of the soul-fried rockers and East Nashville bar staples Buffalo Clover; eventually, she took time to write some songs for a new band, Margo and The Pricetags, which would cater more to her rural roots. But the labels she spoke with wanted to water down her music, which owes so much to Nashville greats like Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, and Tammy Wynette. "It was like if I was a painter and I had this great painting and they were like, "Could you draw a moustache on it or something?" I was like, 'No, fuck you!"
This kind of meddling is no surprise to those familiar with the country music industry, a business that still operates under deeply patriarchal whims, despite the many women who lead the genre commercially and critically. "My fear was that I wasn't well established enough that they wouldn't want to change me," says Price. "That they'd want me to dye my hair, lose 15 pounds, or wear Ed Hardy t-shirts with rhinestones on them."
Price's then-manager was similarly concerned about the notion of her shotgunning PBRs and smoking joints in music videos. "Guys are given a lot more leeway," Price states. "I've never considered myself a pretty girl. I've broken my nose three times. I'm trying to focus things around what I'm saying and not what I'm wearing."
Third Man were the first label that didn't ask her to change anything about herself or her musicno "buts," and no conversations about how to adjust her sound to mirror whatever's trending in modern country. Which is not to say that Price makes dusty throwback music: On Midwestern Farmer's Daughter, there's a healthy mix of honky-tonk, boxcar blues, barroom soul, and folk. It's hard to pin down Price's sound because the music adapts to the mood of each song; she turns up the twang and pedal steel for the lonesome whiskey ballad "Since You Put Me Down" and opens the smirking, romantic "How The Mighty Have Fallen" by borrowing the iconic rhythm from The Ronettes' "Be My Baby."
Recorded in Memphis' legendary Sun Studios, Midwestern Farmer's Daughter was turned in to Third Man without mixing or mastering purely because she'd run out of money. Even in such a roughhewn state, though, White loved it; when Price went in for a meeting at Third Man's Nashville headquarters last summer, she was asked to cut a record straight to acetate on a whim: "They just wanted to make sure I could sing in real lifethat I hadn't just Auto-Tuned the whole thing."
White has a reputation as a supporter of supporter of American roots music and vinylin other words, all things dusty and presumably authentic. While Margo Price certainly fits into that retro aesthetic, her identity is more complicated than simply being Third Man's token country artist.
In 2011, Price gave birth to twins, but the first-born passed away when at two weeks old. Two years later, she found herself in a state of depression and self-medication that led to prison time. "I had been struggling a lot with everything that had happenedI was running myself thin and ended up in a bad situation. I didn't think that I was going to county jail, but I thought that maybe I should check myself in somewhere, and that was God's answer: 'Alright, here you go. This is where you're at. Are you sure it's where you want to be?'"
The Davidson County Jail was not where she wanted to be, but she did write the blues-laden "Weekender" while she was there by sneaking a pencil into her shirt pocket and writing 10 verses (four made it onto the final recording). Price says that her short stint in jail has inspired her to try to perform in women's prisons, too. "I have a lot of sympathy for women who end up in that situationso many times, other problems led them there. This is something that I want to do to help give back."
Before that can happen, Margo and The PricetagsIvey on bass and harmonica, Jamie Davis on lead guitar, Luke Schneider on pedal steel and dobro, and Dillon Napier on drumswill tour in support of Midwestern Farmer's Daughter. The band has gigged frequently over the last couple years, too, and all of this work will pay off this Friday, February 5, when they make their debut at Nashville's historic Grand Ole Opry.
And it's worth noting again that Price didn't need any of the city's institutional help to get there. Her refusal to capitulate to the major label machine with a record that is honest and reflective of her personality is exactly why she'll get to give Nashville's suits the kiss-off on the Opry's famous wooden circle. "There's music that people write for other people to hear," she explains, "And then there's music that people write just because they want to hear it themselves." As fate would have it, Price is having it both ways.