Margo Price session

Margo Price is a country singer from the tip of her Stetson to the tapping toes of her cowboy boots – and just as unmistakably country when she’s wearing none of the above. The Nashville-based singer is so steeped in the hard-knock romance of the genre, she sold her wedding ring to pay for sessions at Memphis’s legendary Sun Studios. The resulting debut LP, mixing classic honky tonk and driving blues, is the first full-on country album to be released on Jack White’s Third Man Records.

Midwest Farmer’s Daughter sets out a backstory that couldn’t be more country if it included a song about having to eat squirrels for Christmas. The loss of the family’s corn and soybean farm, life on the road with a married man, the death of one of her twin babies, the battle with grief and alcohol and the spell in jail for drink-driving – it’s all in there, as is her negative experience of the Nashville music industry machine, including a manager who spiked her drink.

Since You Put Me Down, one of the songs Price recently performed on Saturday Night Live, is a Loretta Lynn-esque weepie about drowning the pain of being deserted (‘I killed the angel on my shoulder with a fifth of Evan Williams / When I found out you were never coming home’.) Here you can also see her perform catchy Memphis belter Tennessee Song, unleashing her prairie-spanning voice in the company of pianist Micah Hulscher. He used to work on Disney cruise ships, where we’ll wager there were rather fewer songs about whiskey.