Two women country artists, back to back atop Billboard’s biggest charts: Megan Moroney crowning the Billboard 200 with her glittery pink buzzsaw of a third album, Cloud 9, and Ella Langley reclaiming the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the improbably twangy and groovy “Choosin’ Texas.” Their feat would, unfortunately, be something of an anomaly for women artists in any genre, but in country music — where two women back to back can be explicitly verboten — it’s absolutely historic.
Gender parity has been tough to come by in country music just about since its genesis as a popular music, even accounting for the mononymous ladies in the ’90s — Faith, Shania, Reba — and the force of a pre-pop Taylor. Langley and Moroney, then, are not only compelling success stories in their own right but also potentially symbolic, beacons of better days ahead for the hundreds of aspiring women artists who decamp for Nashville in search of fame and sustainable success that’s always been far more of a longshot for them than for their male counterparts. Their enormous success challenges a Music Row status quo that’s existed for decades now: the unspoken rule that only one woman can bask in the spotlight (and get significant radio airplay) at a time.
Over the past couple decades, things for women in country music have gone from bad to glaring as those ’90s powerhouses faded and men — mostly white, often trading in the kind of pointed pop crossover that their female peers rarely get away with without leaving the format all together — began to eat up an ever-increasing majority of Nashville’s pie. That shift is attributable in part to the 1997 Telecommunications Act and its attendant corporate radio consolidation, as Marissa R. Moss describes in her recent history of women artists in country, Her Country. Slowly, what little diversity in gender and aesthetic had existed on country radio began to fade; women artists were compelled to compete with each other for space while men racked up No. 1 hits as a matter of course.
It became impossible to ignore in 2015, when country radio programming director Keith Hill referred to women as the “tomatoes of our salad” (men being…the lettuce) while describing why he’d never play two women artists back-to-back. The backlash was swift, garnering attention from the kind of national publications that tend to ignore country music. But none of it made much of a dent in the kinds of country artists who were able to cut through and succeed. So-called “bro country” was followed by the rise of Sam Hunt and his “Body Like a Back Road,” and then the stadium-sized impact of Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen — the latter now one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Combs and Wallen spurred Nashville to accept streaming, ushering in a new country gold rush that still only seemed to reward male artists, in spite of streaming’s seemingly democratic consumption model. Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini and finally Lainey Wilson traded places in the meantime, jockeying for position in a genre that left them almost no room to maneuver.
That’s why looking at most of the country charts this week is so surreal, especially for those of us who have been covering women country artists in the years since “Tomatogate.” For decades, labels, PDs, agents and other powerful figures knew that Music Row had a major problem with gender (among other things). Yet they all still continued to pass the buck when it came time to explain why artists like Kacey Musgraves, Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, Ashley McBryde and — surprisingly often — even Miranda Lambert had to fight so hard to get any kind of traction at radio.
Now, there’s something to celebrate. Ella Langley has two of the top three songs on the Hot Country Songs chart dated March 7, where you can find 14 of the 15 songs on Cloud 9 as well. Four of the five top Country Songwriters this week are women, with Moroney and Langley joined by Jessie Jo Dillon and Joybeth Taylor. The Country Producers chart, perhaps the most male-dominated of them all, features Langley and Lambert (both credited on “Choosin’ Texas,” as well as on follow-up hits “Dandelion” and “Be Her” off Langley’s upcoming sophomore album). Even country radio, which still lags behind when it comes to any kind of gender parity, got “Choosin’ Texas” to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart in just 16 weeks, lightning fast by that chart’s pace. It’s Langley’s first solo entry in the top spot; she previously held No. 1 with her Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me,” which, when it bested the chart in December 2024, it was the first No. 1 by a female artist on Country Airplay that year.
It’s still hard to be too optimistic about sweeping change in Nashville given that, for example, in spite of all the energy behind Cloud 9, Megan Moroney has just one song on Country Airplay and has still never had a No. 1 there. And beyond these two new leading lights, there’s hardly a slew of women artists on deck that have the full weight of Music Row’s marketing power behind them, in contrast to the booming middle class of male country stars responsible for the majority of hits on the Country Airplay chart.
But as country music continues to grow, it’s reassuring to finally see hard-earned room for two instead of just one, especially in a moment when even having just the one hardly feels guaranteed. Langley, Moroney, and all the other women on and off the country charts aren’t trying to be exceptions, nor are they even trying explicitly to rewrite the rulebook that’s designed to stifle them. They’re just trying to get the slice of that pie that was meant to be theirs all along. If we’re lucky, they’ll keep churning out undeniable country-pop hits, breaking rules and making a little more space at the top as they go.
