The Key To Kacey Musgraves' Hard-Won Country: Funny Women

Country's greatest comedian and one of the genre's most wide-ranging ambassadors was Tennessee-born Sara Ophelia Colley, a child of the Great Depression inspired by the blues and vaudeville queens of her youth to create a character whose broad gestures and cries of "Howwwwdy!" both celebrated and gently made fun of small town life. Minnie Pearl celebrated women's ways of talking by playing a rampant gossip whose flights of fancy astounded and amused, and her plain-Jane warmth allowed her to express female desire in ways that never proved threatening. Kindness was her virtue, one that Musgraves incorporates in songs like "Family is Family," which chides the tackiness of some relatives while admitting that true kinship is stronger than small-mindedness.

Gamine and sexy, but also able to use silliness and a knack for verbal sparring to fit in as one of the boys, the Carter family scion and soulmate of husband Johnny Cash was a groundbreaking comedienne in her own right. Her routines on the Grand Old Opry and other television shows brought a rock and roll-style frankness about sex to the family stage; Carter was expert at giggling through double entendres while her real message — that women sought both pleasure and respect from men — sneaked through under her breath. As Cash's partner, she laid bare the ups and downs of a long and sometimes rocky marriage in ways that made their great love story feel utterly real. Boldness was her virtue, one that Musgraves claims in more intimate songs like "Late To the Party."

No country singer has articulated feminist concerns with more consistency and power than Loretta Lynn. Emerging in the 1960s, the Coal Miner's Daughter spoke for rural and small-town women who'd never make it to a New York women's liberation march, but who nonetheless were questioning the bonds of marriage, facing abandonment through divorce and trying to cope by sneaking birth control or steeling themselves against domestic violence. One of country's most important songwriters, Lynn foregrounded political thinking within frameworks that used humor to make new ideas relatable. Plain-spokenness was her virtue, one that Musgraves employs in challenges to the status quo like "Good Ol' Boys Club."

The world-conquering crossover country star from Pigeon Forge, Tenn., isn't primarily known for funny songs; it's her whole way of being that incorporates a transformative comic touch. Taking on the character sexist men would ascribe to her — a wide-eyed bunny with a head full of air and a gold-plated heart — Parton turned that role around by out-singing, out-writing and outsmarting everyone who crossed her, all the while wearing a smile as bright as her actual brain. Parton's collaborations with comediennes like Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin allowed for other women to help in disassembling the myth of the dumb blonde, and her outrageous femininity made her an ally to queer fans by showing how gender is a bewigged construction. Her virtue is self-awareness, one that Musgraves still finds relevant in songs like the new album's title track.

Before she became an adult-contemporary pop star and an LBGTQ icon, k.d. lang was a country music outsider whose love for the genre, combined with an astonishing vocal talent, allowed her to do it proud while simultaneously exposing its inherent campiness. Established on the heels of the pop breakthroughs of gender rebels like Boy George and Annie Lennox, Lang's androgynous persona, glammed up in Nudie-style suits and the occasional wig, challenged perceptions of what a country diva could be. At the same time, the respect she and her band, the Reclines, had for the music's roots showed fans who came for the laughs that this music was much deeper than a pile of sequins. The levity that was central to lang's concert performances helped her claim a heritage previously denied unconventional people like herself, and though her presence within the genre's mainstream was short-lived, she had a lasting impact, widening country's audience and challenging the presumptions of its core. Lang's virtue is subversiveness, which she exercised in a loving way that Musgraves incorporates into playful songs like "Dimestore Cowgirl."

Shania Twain was the Madonna of country, challenging old notions of propriety in high pop style with her midriff tops and big rock and roll riffs. Her critics found her image too slick and her musical approach too contemporary, but Twain pushed country into the category-busting future by consistently projecting a bubbly sense of fun. Songs like "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" and "That Don't Impress Me Much" unfolded like musical Sex and the City vignettes, appealing to '90s women for whom success included forthright erotic self-realization. Her gift is elegance — a certain cool, amused distance that Musgraves cultivates in her gamine image and even in songs as goofy as "Biscuits."

Though her staunch Republican politics might seem a world away from the rainbow-hued messages of tolerance Musgraves puts forth, the girl from Golden, Texas does share a strong working-class consciousness with the Illinois-born Redneck Woman. Wilson's massive hits in the early 2000s reminded country fans enchanted by haute couture-clad glamour goddesses like Twain and Faith Hill that the genre had long spoken for the often otherwise voiceless women and men who work in America's factories, chain restaurants and mini-marts. The broad, raucous laughs she and fellow MuzikMafia members like the duo Big & Rich wasn't as refined as what Musgraves offers, but her insistence of the value of the unrefined — a throwback to Minnie Pearl, but with a trucker cap on instead of a straw hat — suited a nation moving toward another Great Recession. Her virtue is earthiness, a quality that Musgraves embraces in her paeans to small town not-quite-heroes, like "Cup of Tea."