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“YOU DON’T HAVE TO JUST PICK ONE. YOU CAN BE BOTH.” She calls herself the Yeehaw Meemaw. One part yeehaw because she is twenty-seven and sings country music; one part meemaw because of the crochet, the bread baking, the gardening, the homemaking — things she describes, cheerfully, as out of style for some folks. Her fans use it now. It is the only nickname she has. In Nashville, nicknames come down from above. The town decides you are The Voice, or The Possum, or the first of something, and you carry it whether you asked for it or not. She got out ahead of that. At twenty-seven she named herself a grandmother, which is the one thing nobody was ever going to offer her. She had reason to expect the naming to go badly. She was seventeen and still in high school when she finished second on The Voice in 2015, on Blake Shelton’s team, with three of her performances charting on their own. Then nothing — no deal, no machine. What she wrote didn’t sound like what Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris were doing. She has said that girls in pop could be girly, but girls in country had to be one of the guys, and that she is tenderhearted and wanted to lean into that instead. She did it alone for ten years. Sony signed her in 2025, her first record deal, at twenty-six, and an ACM nomination followed. She is on the road right now, opening for Thomas Rhett — still the smaller name on the poster. Nashville will get around to deciding what she is. She has not left it much room.

You Don’t Have to Just Pick One. You Can Be Both.

She calls herself the Yeehaw Meemaw, and the nickname fits because it refuses to behave. One part of her is all boots, twang, and country ambition. The other part is slower, softer, and proudly old-fashioned: crochet, bread baking, gardening, homemaking. In a music world that often asks women to package themselves neatly, she chose a name that sounds like a joke and a declaration at the same time.

That choice feels even bolder when you remember how early the spotlight found her. As a teenager, Meghan Linsey finished second on The Voice in 2015 as part of Team Blake Shelton, and her run included performances that traveled beyond the show itself. She was still young enough to be told who she should become, but old enough to know when a path did not fit.

What came after was not the fast, shiny kind of success people like to imagine. There was no instant takeover, no perfectly scripted rise. Meghan Linsey has spoken about how her music did not sound like the more polished pop-country lane that was rising around her. She wanted to lean into tenderness, not hide it. That meant building a career in a way that was slower, more personal, and much harder to package.

For years, she kept going without the kind of major-label momentum that can turn an artist into a headline overnight. Then, in 2025, Sony Music Nashville signed Meghan Linsey to her first record deal. For an artist who had already spent a decade proving she could stand on her own, the moment did not read like a beginning so much as a long-awaited acknowledgment.

That same season brought another milestone: an Academy of Country Music nomination, and a new round of attention that seemed to finally catch up to the person fans had been following for years. She was also on the road opening for Thomas Rhett, still the smaller name on the poster, but no longer invisible.

A Brand That Feels Like a Truth

The brilliance of the Yeehaw Meemaw identity is that it does not ask permission. It makes room for softness and strength, domestic life and stage life, youth and old-soul energy. It says a woman can love country music and homemade bread, confidence and crochet, spotlight and quiet.

In Nashville, where labels often arrive from the outside, Meghan Linsey gave herself one first. That matters. It changes the story from “What are they going to call her?” to “What does she choose to call herself?”

You don’t have to just pick one. You can be both.

That idea may be the most modern thing about her. Not because it is trendy, but because it is honest. Meghan Linsey is not trying to fit neatly into a single lane, and that is exactly why people are paying attention now.

Some artists arrive with a machine behind them. Others arrive with time. Meghan Linsey has had to earn both patience and visibility, and she has done it without sanding down the parts of herself that make her interesting. She is twenty-seven, country, crafty, tender, and determined. The nickname may sound playful, but the message is serious: identity does not need to be simplified to be taken seriously.

 

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NEARLY TWO YEARS AFTER KRIS KRISTOFFERSON PASSED AWAY, HIS GREATEST INHERITANCE WASN’T WRITTEN IN A WILL — IT WAS HIDDEN IN CASEY’S PEN. September 28, 2024. At home on Maui, surrounded by family. Kris Kristofferson was 88. He left behind three Grammys. A Hall of Fame plaque. A Golden Globe. Twenty-nine albums and a seat beside Cash, Waylon and Willie. But none of that is what Casey inherited. His daughter with Rita Coolidge went on her first tour at seven weeks old. She spent the next four decades running from it. Punk rock. Classical ballet. She danced with the Asheville Ballet, then built a dance school in North Carolina and raised three daughters — a whole life engineered so nobody would ask whose kid she was. “Almost anything to not be recognized just for my name.” Then 2019. At 45, she walked into a studio in Asheville with her own band and made Dirty Feet — nine songs, most of them written or co-written by her. And one cover: “Me and Bobby McGee.” Her father’s song. The one she’d spent a lifetime not singing. Five years later he was gone, and the country went looking for him. His catalog jumped 2,292% in a single day — from 79,000 streams to nearly 1.9 million. The Grammys sit still. The plaque hangs quiet. But that pen? Still moving — in Casey’s hand. Some fathers leave royalties. Kris left the ache that makes you write.

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They held his funeral behind closed doors. Family, band, and crew only. No cameras, no arena, no public goodbye — the Covel family asked for that, and country music honored it. Thirty-two years. Twenty No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. Back-to-back ACM Entertainer of the Year in 2002 and 2003. A man who ran his own label because Nashville wouldn’t do it his way. He died on February 5, 2024 — one day before the final Country Music Hall of Fame ballots were delivered. CMA chief Sarah Trahern later said her heart sank knowing they’d missed the chance to tell him while he was still here. So Nashville told him anyway. In October, at the Medallion Ceremony, his widow Tricia took the stage: “He didn’t just sing those songs. He was those songs.” Then Eric Church walked out in all black and sang Don’t Let the Old Man In — the song Toby wrote about outrunning mortality, performed by a man who knew he hadn’t. The funeral had no audience. The goodbye took a year, an arena, and half of Nashville standing in for the fans who never got to say it.

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SHE COULDN’T BUY THE HOUSE — SO SHE BOUGHT THE WHOLE TOWN. 1,450 ACRES. $220,000. “She wasn’t buying land. She was buying back a childhood.” Loretta Webb was born in 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky — a coal-mining holler with no running water. She married at 15. She had four children before she turned 20. In 1966, she and Doolittle took a wrong turn while house-hunting and found an abandoned plantation home in Tennessee. Nobody had lived in it for twenty years. She wanted it immediately. But the man who owned the house also owned Hurricane Mills. The only way to get the house was to buy the entire town. They bought the town. Then she built something on that land nobody expected: a replica of the Kentucky cabin she’d grown up in. A poor girl’s shack, rebuilt on property she owned outright. On October 4, 2022, she died in her sleep in that house, with the cabin still standing outside. She was 90. The circle took ninety years to close.

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NEARLY TWO YEARS AFTER KRIS KRISTOFFERSON PASSED AWAY, HIS GREATEST INHERITANCE WASN’T WRITTEN IN A WILL — IT WAS HIDDEN IN CASEY’S PEN. September 28, 2024. At home on Maui, surrounded by family. Kris Kristofferson was 88. He left behind three Grammys. A Hall of Fame plaque. A Golden Globe. Twenty-nine albums and a seat beside Cash, Waylon and Willie. But none of that is what Casey inherited. His daughter with Rita Coolidge went on her first tour at seven weeks old. She spent the next four decades running from it. Punk rock. Classical ballet. She danced with the Asheville Ballet, then built a dance school in North Carolina and raised three daughters — a whole life engineered so nobody would ask whose kid she was. “Almost anything to not be recognized just for my name.” Then 2019. At 45, she walked into a studio in Asheville with her own band and made Dirty Feet — nine songs, most of them written or co-written by her. And one cover: “Me and Bobby McGee.” Her father’s song. The one she’d spent a lifetime not singing. Five years later he was gone, and the country went looking for him. His catalog jumped 2,292% in a single day — from 79,000 streams to nearly 1.9 million. The Grammys sit still. The plaque hangs quiet. But that pen? Still moving — in Casey’s hand. Some fathers leave royalties. Kris left the ache that makes you write.

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They held his funeral behind closed doors. Family, band, and crew only. No cameras, no arena, no public goodbye — the Covel family asked for that, and country music honored it. Thirty-two years. Twenty No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. Back-to-back ACM Entertainer of the Year in 2002 and 2003. A man who ran his own label because Nashville wouldn’t do it his way. He died on February 5, 2024 — one day before the final Country Music Hall of Fame ballots were delivered. CMA chief Sarah Trahern later said her heart sank knowing they’d missed the chance to tell him while he was still here. So Nashville told him anyway. In October, at the Medallion Ceremony, his widow Tricia took the stage: “He didn’t just sing those songs. He was those songs.” Then Eric Church walked out in all black and sang Don’t Let the Old Man In — the song Toby wrote about outrunning mortality, performed by a man who knew he hadn’t. The funeral had no audience. The goodbye took a year, an arena, and half of Nashville standing in for the fans who never got to say it.

Uncategorized

SHE COULDN’T BUY THE HOUSE — SO SHE BOUGHT THE WHOLE TOWN. 1,450 ACRES. $220,000. “She wasn’t buying land. She was buying back a childhood.” Loretta Webb was born in 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky — a coal-mining holler with no running water. She married at 15. She had four children before she turned 20. In 1966, she and Doolittle took a wrong turn while house-hunting and found an abandoned plantation home in Tennessee. Nobody had lived in it for twenty years. She wanted it immediately. But the man who owned the house also owned Hurricane Mills. The only way to get the house was to buy the entire town. They bought the town. Then she built something on that land nobody expected: a replica of the Kentucky cabin she’d grown up in. A poor girl’s shack, rebuilt on property she owned outright. On October 4, 2022, she died in her sleep in that house, with the cabin still standing outside. She was 90. The circle took ninety years to close.

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GRETCHEN WILSON HAD BEEN SINGING THAT LINE ABOUT TANYA TUCKER FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS. WITH LAINEY WILSON BESIDE HER, SHE CHANGED THE NAME. On August 11 at the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis, Miranda Lambert brought Gretchen Wilson and Lainey Wilson onstage for “Redneck Woman.” Gretchen took the lead. Miranda and Lainey sang beside her. Then came the line everybody knew. Instead of singing that she knew every word to every Tanya Tucker song, Gretchen changed it: “I know all the words to every Lainey Wilson song.” Lainey immediately smiled. The crowd erupted. Later, Lainey joined Miranda again for “Good Horses,” but that tiny change in “Redneck Woman” said something bigger. Gretchen had spent more than two decades singing the name of a woman who came before her. That night, she turned toward the woman standing beside her and sang the next name. It lasted only seconds. It felt like country music passing the torch.