Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby sets up the arc of her moving, charming, outsider-insider’s memoir Girl to Country poignantly in the prologue, when she considers what she might say to explain herself to Hazel Smith, who she calls “the Grande Dame of Music City,” while cheekily describing her “like…one of the Gabor sisters, if they’d been from Kentucky instead of Budapest.”
“I just want to earn a living!” I wanted to shout. “But I also want to be AN ARTIST—to create work that no one else has ever thought of doing. In addition, I’d like L-O-V-E and/or S-E-X, to live in a decent home, and to raise a happy child to adulthood. All while looking cool. That isn’t too much to ask, is it? IS IT?”
When the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau reviewed Rigby’s solo debut Diary of a Mod Housewife in 1996, giving the album an A and eventually naming it his second favorite disc of the year, he wrote, “Personalizing the political for a bohemia that coexists oh so neatly with structural underemployment, thinking harder about marriage than a dozen Nashville homilizers,” he had no idea he was predicting Rigby’s next career move. For she would leave the crudy-but-cosy comforts of New York (read all about her exciting exploits there in Rigby’s first memoir, 2019’s Girl to City) for Nashville, hoping her gimlet-eyed, catchy tunes might land her a publishing deal, and therefore steady money.
Care to read the rest than do so at California Review of Books.
