Data Journalist Jan Diehm Finds Her Country Music

Data journalists Jan Diehm and Dr. Jada Watson did a deep dive on just how often women (and other marginalized groups) are played in country radio. The results aren’t great, but they’re presented as a visual essay on The Pudding and you should read it after you read Jan’s personal essay about this project. You can read the full article on the Rainbow Rodeo Patreon! We thank Jan for generously donating this article.

I looked over at my mom and she had tears just on the edge of falling. Country music could be THIS? We were sitting in my parents’ living room streaming the Love Rising concert. Autumn Nicholas had just performed “On a Sunday,” a song about standing your ground in the face of hate and people who don’t want to see you. The song hit extra hard because I had spent the better part of the year back in my childhood home in a small town just north of Nashville. In 2019, right before the Covid pandemic, I had a run-of-the-mill 24-hour stomach bug, and then I just never completely recovered. Moving back in with your parents in your mid 30s (and leaving your wife and cats in San Antonio) reopens a lot of old wounds. Here I was driving the same backroads as I did as a closeted queer kid.

My wife and I moving back south to Texas, and then me moving back to Nashville, felt like a groundswell — something calling me back to country music. While getting treatment at Vanderbilt for what came to be diagnosed as a post acute infection syndrome, I would stop in Parnassus Books, the local shop across the street. One day, Marissa R. Moss’ new book Her Country was in the window display and I snagged it. On page 15 there’s a paragraph that talks about how spacing out women is literally written into a country radio programming handbook: “…I want to avoid having more than two female singers in a row.”

And it clicked for me as a data journalist. Not only did I have anecdotal reasons for why I didn’t see myself in country music, I now had a quantitative one. I got connected with brilliant country radio researcher Dr. Jada Watson and we started to pull daily play logs for 29 of the top country radio stations to check for back-to-back plays. I knew it was going to be bad going in — I’d heard it on the radio with my own ears, but something about seeing it in the data floored me even more. When we crunched the numbers, it was abysmal. On average, 0.5% of songs counted as women’s back-to-back plays. And these practices that limit white women further exclude other groups:

• Men of color accounted for and average of 0.4% of back-to-back plays
• On average, less than 0.1% of back-to-back plays were from LGBTQ+ men. We found a single back-to-back song pair from out LGBTQ+ men: On February 7, 2022 at 2:16pm Chicago WUSN-FM played the Brothers Osborne’s “Stay A Little Longer” followed by Hunter Hayes’ “Wanted.”
• There wasn’t a single back-to-back song (out of 182,848 spins!) for women of color or LGBTQ+ women.
• And, of course, transgender and non–binary artists weren’t played at all, let alone back-to-back.

There I was, a queer woman, erased from country music again, this time in the data. But, somehow I didn’t feel so alone. Working with the data let me see all of the other people and stories who were also erased from country music. And then I watched the Love Rising concert. My chronic illness made it so that even though I was only 30 miles away from Nashville I couldn’t physically attend the concert. (I’ll be forever grateful to the organizers who took accessibility into account — it’s rare.) But, singing along with those performers from my bed in my childhood home made me realize I had found MY country.

Looking back, I feel almost cheated. That this country music could exist and I had no idea. The thing is, my story’s not new or unique, and it’s even more compounded for Black and Brown women, for transgender individuals, and for all those in the intersections. The homophobia, the racism, the xenophobia — it’s built right into the country music industry’s DNA. I am hopeful that this data project on back-to-back plays a small role in pushing the needle. Until then, I’ll continue to do my part and “March March.” Hell, I’d follow Natalie Maines anywhere.

Check out “They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio: Examining Back-to-Back Plays by Gender, Race and Sexual Orientation” and listen to the accompanying Spotify playlist!