This July, a new collaboration debuted at the Newport Folk Festival. The name? The Highwomen, a riff off the original supergroup of country renegades, The Highwaymen. The players? Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires, with a host of supporting characters that counted Yola and Sheryl Crow in their ranks. The uniform? Pantsuits. Morris wore a pink one adorned with bedazzled vaginas. The vibe? Empowered. Reminiscent of the Women’s March–a similar energy bewitched the respective crowds: excitement, yes, but also understanding, the bond of shared experience transmuted in the knowing smiles, spontaneous cheers, and tears of strangers turned suddenly into sisters. I know this, because I was there. And I’m proud to say I only cried five times.
The Highwomen maximized their forty-minute set with the kind of efficiency one could only expect from mothers, performing the entirety of their eponymous album, The Highwomen, which was released September 6th and went on to top the country charts (thank you very much). As we quickly learned on that hot day in July, The Highwomen is a masterclass in songwriting, album engineering, and goose-bump giving. Reflective of the emotional whiplash women often experience over the course of a lifetime or a single day, the album oscillates between poignant ballads and self-referential country rockers. The thread connecting these twelve songs is, naturally, womanhood, but instead of performing the tired cliches often expressed in the country music, The Highwomen reveals the depth, nuance, and intersectionality of modern feminism. Motherhood isn’t always a beautiful blessing, especially if you’re hungover (“My Name Can’t Be Mama”). The token love song is crooned by a woman, for a woman (“If She Ever Leaves Me”). The token feisty-break-up song isn’t about getting revenge, it’s about getting your self-worth back (“Loose Change”). And sure, women sometimes clean the kitchen and buy eleven pairs of the same shoe, but they’ll also break every jello-mold you throw at them. They’re saints, and they’re surgeons. How do they do it? (“Redesigning Women”).
But the song that made the biggest impact on the women of the Folk Festival, and on me, was “Highwomen,” the album’s opening track and the song through which the rest are conjured. Rolling Stone reporter Marissa Moss describes “Highwomen” “…not only the tale of the band in classic response-song style, but also the story of how women, throughout history, have often sacrificed everything for a good greater than themselves.”
The response in question is to “Highwayman,” originally written by Jimmy Webb in 1977 and rocketed to fame in 1985 when it became the swashbuckling origin story of The Highwaymen aka Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. “Highwayman” is a pretty straightforward song as far as songs about reincarnation go. Each of the group’s famous heroes sing a tale of masculine bravado: Nelson is the highwayman, stealing jewelry from hapless young maids until “the bastards” hang him; Kristofferson is a sailor (hornpipe included) who falls off a mast; Jennings slips off the Hoover dam and dies in wet concrete; Cash is…a starship captain? The twist is, none of these badass dudes have died in any finite sense, they’ve just been reincarnated into other badass dudes and come back again. And again. And again. You get the point.
“Highwomen” is also a straight-forward song, but instead suggesting a literal act of reincarnation, the return promised in the refrain is the enduring resistance of women. They also raise the stakes. None of the Highwomen die from slipping.
Carlile starts things off, singing as a Honduran immigrant with the kind of intimate intensity I largely associate with campfires. Her voice is clean, stripped back to give her tale the respect it deserves: a mother sacrificing herself at the border so her children can survive. Shires is a healer, emoting girlishness and grace defiled by (male) voyeurism and condemned by (male) intolerance; hanged in the Salem gallows not for thieving, but for being a witch, for being a woman. Yola is a freedom rider, belting out the power of protest, and the painful reasons we protest in the first place; shot dead in a Greyhound bound for Mississippi. Hemby is a preacher, convicted and condemned for her conviction; she chooses peace and dies a martyr.
The refrain hits hard enough to knock you right off the Hoover dam and into some wet concrete:
We are The Highwomen
Singing stories still untold
We carry the sons you can only hold
We are the daughters of the silent generations
You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations
It may return to us as tiny drops of rain
But we will still remain
And we’ll come back again and again and again
See why I’m proud I only cried five times? The lyrics alone are a force, evoking the pathos of protest and offering a hopeful vision of the future through the spirit of a powerful past. Musically, the Highwomen sound like a legion, the convergence of voices akin to a spiritual experience. Sheryl Crow sings back up!
Comparisons to the original suddenly feel awfully unfair. How could the bravado of a chaotic thief or a hapless sailor stand up to the bravery of the silent generations? How can you recover from a burn like “We carry the sons you can only hold”? I’m sorry, but literal reincarnation is just not as compelling as a philosophical rumination of what it means to be a woman, and, more importantly, what it means to be women. According to sister Marissa Moss, this distinction of plurality is what ultimately gives “Highwomen” its edge over “Highwayman”: “The chills come in the tiniest details: in the original version […] the song closes with Cash singing “I’ll be back again.” On this one? It’s “we’ll be back.” That may seem like a trivial change, but it’s the crux of what this band is all about” (Rolling Stone).
“Highwomen” is not the origin story of a band, it is the origin story of us, and in this sense of historical togetherness dwells the real magic of the Highwomen; they may have made their debut at Newport, but by the end of their set they felt familiar, like long lost sisters or old friends. Every time I have listened to The Highwomen since, the power of that camaraderie reactivates: We’re here. We’ve been here. And together, we remain.
We are the Highwomen.
The Highwomen is available for download on all major streaming platforms. For the latest information on The Highwomen, visit www.thehighwomen.com
References
- “Hear the Highwomen’s Gender-Swapping Remake of the Highwaymen’s Theme Song” (Rolling Stone)
- The Highwomen’s Debut Album: Track-by-Track Guide (Rolling Stone)
- Country Music Is a Man’s World. The Highwomen Want to Change That. (The New York Times)
