Lavender Country: the Counter-Cultural Album That Pioneered Queer Country Music

Abstract

In 1973, Washington native Patrick Haggerty assembled a band and produced a record titled Lavender Country. It is widely considered the first openly gay country album, and its 1,000 copies were sold in secret through ads in underground queer magazines. Haggerty and his group toured and performed a few more times, but soon disbanded, and the record became an obscurity until it was rediscovered in the early 2000s. Haggerty’s album adds invaluable context to a genre steeped in tradition. His lyrics demonstrate a wide and forthright rejection of establishments such as the masculine/feminine dichotomy, conversion therapy, and the need to pass as heterosexual, but simultaneously, his music embraces the symbolism that nature lends in storytelling, the sincere and sorrowful soul of a lover’s lament, and even the power of the blues to tell a grim tale. Lyric analysis, interviews, and a comparison to the societal norms established by the genre reveal that Lavender Country utilizes the instrumentation, form, harmonic/melodic practices, and storytelling tropes of its contemporaries, yet it defies almost every value and teaching embraced by the conservative culture of country music, a genre that caters to its audience, celebrating heteronormative and patriarchal gender roles, images of home and of life as a laborer, and God-and-Country patriotism.