Her Kinda Country

Hailey Whitters is a voice for a part of America that Nashville often overlooks.

- Justin Curto

WHEN HAILEY WHITTERS thinks of Shueyville, the small Iowa town south of Cedar Rapids that raised her, she thinks of her Aunt Cindy and Uncle Phil’s farm. The country singer-songwriter didn’t grow up around animals the way others in the Whitters family did, but depending on the year, Cindy would have cows, pigs, chickens, goats, turkeys, or even ducks. “She was homesteading before homesteading was cool,” Whitters jokes, pulling onto the farm’s gravel driveway in a pickup truck borrowed from her mother. In the wood-furnished kitchen of the farmhouse, fragranced by strawberry rolls rising on the counter, Cindy tells us stories about butchering chickens and giving her children milk from their goats rather than from the store. One day, as her kids were helping make homemade sauerkraut, one of them turned to her and asked, “Can we ever live like normal people?!”

Whitters’s new album, Raised, her first with a record label, Songs & Daughters (an imprint of the influential Nashville label Big Loud), is a cinematic rendering of her upbringing in Shueyville. It’s also an affecting argument that places like Iowa are country enough to sing about. Mainstream country music tends to overlook places like the Midwest (never mind Appalachia or the Mountain West) to focus almost wholly on the South. That’s not a surprise to the flyover states. As Iowa journalist Lyz Lenz recently wrote, “The Midwest is the middle child of the nation, pulled between the large population centers of the coasts, misunderstood, overlooked, and constantly whining about it.” And Nashville can be just as exclusive as the coasts—as a newcomer, Whitters remembers assuring Southerners that she was “a different kind of country” but still just as country as them.