Neon purple lights bloomed out of a concrete platform, gilded with an enormous disco ball visible from the sidewalk. My body hummed with nerves and excitement as my partner and I climbed the steps into the packed plaza, exchanging disbelieving glances. We wound our way through the massive outdoor dance floor toward the central stage and squeezed into a spot by the fountain. Onstage, dance instructors – one clad in a leather vest and short-sleeved plaid button down, the other in bedazzled jeans with a cowboy hat perched on top of her waist-length hair – demonstrated seamless choreography as “Shivers” by Ed Sheeran played over the sound system.
Stud Country, affectionately known as the “queer church of line dance,” took over the Lincoln Center’s Dance Floor for a night of country and Western dance inflected with queer fashion and cultural references. For three hours, I immersed myself in the music (which ranged from classic country to 70s disco to Kylie Minogue’s viral dance hit “Padam Padam”) and the choreo (short sequences of repeating steps, punctuated with occasional breaks for freestyle and partner dances). The sea of fringed jackets, Dolly Parton T-shirts, sequined cowboy hats, and retro athleisure struck me as a true queering of country signifiers: an attempt to try on, play with, and reinterpret Western style with love rather than irony.
This sincere subversion is also at the heart of the now-defunct band Blixie – a portmanteau of Black Dixie – which insisted on the visibility of Black country fans and performers. Founded in 2003 during the country industry’s boycott of The Chicks (formerly known as The Dixie Chicks), Blixie started out performing covers and evolved into a fully fledged country band, producing two EPs and a full album of original music. Kori Graves, Holly McGee, and Tyina Steptoe, three Black women from the South, fronted the band, with two white Northerners, Dave Gilbert and Charles L. Hughes, on guitar. The five met as students in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performing at a range of local venues before disbanding.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with Hughes and McGee about their experiences performing with Blixie, and I have planned conversations with Gilbert and Steptoe later this summer. In the meantime, I’m reflecting on the rich and sometimes-contradictory emotional registers country music invites, and how both Blixie and Stud Country embody this complexity while resisting racism and homophobia in country music.