Go West – Country Stars

Taylor Swift: From Country singer to the biggest pop star of our age

Taylor Swift “The Eras Tour,” the most commercially successful concert tour of all time, has cemented her status as the biggest pop star of our age, selling over six million tickets across 152 shows in 54 cities worldwide. The U.S. Travel Association estimates the tour’s economic impact at $10 billion. As a child, Taylor Swift sang country hits by artists like Shania Twain and Dolly Parton. “Country is all about the lyrics,” she once said. “You sing about what happens in your life. I don’t drive a tractor, but I see myself as a country singer because I set my everyday American life to music.”

The daughter of an investment banker, her parents supported her financially from an early age; to further her career, they moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville, the capital of country music. At fourteen, she landed her first songwriting contract. She spent the next two years honing her craft, singing in Nashville’s live bars until her début album, “Taylor Swift,” released when she was sixteen, shot to number one in the country charts. Like her idol Shania Twain, she broadened her repertoire to include pop music in 2014 in order to reach a wider audience. Today, she has 283 million followers on Instagramalone. Behind the glitz and glamour of her stage shows, the 14-time Grammy winner remains down-to-earth. She cultivates a strong bond with her loyal international fanbase, the Swifties, posts cat videos and invites fans over for home-baked cookies. Swift peppers her songs with hidden messages, which she calls Easter eggs, These cryptic clues always trigger a viral scavenger hunt as fans race to decode their meaning. Her lyrics are being studied in literature classes at U.S. colleges, while Stanford and Berkeley run courses that explore her marketing and branding strategies.

Because of the way she negotiated better deals with record labels and streaming services, the granddaughter of an opera singer is also seen as a Robin Hood for artists’ rights. Swift’s influence extends to politics. Historians will judge whether and to what extent the singer, who has around 105 million Spotify listeners per month, has influenced the most recent U.S. election – as she did in 2020. Within 24 hours, her post endorsing Kamala Harris on Instagram in mid-September drove over 400,000 people to visit the vote.gov website, the largest U.S. voter information site.

Keith Urban: A country music favorite

More familiar to some as “Mr. Kidman,” the Australian singer has been a country music favorite for nearly 25 years, with four Grammys and 15 Academy of Country Music Awards to his name. To support his new album “High,” he will be making five guest appearances in Las Vegas.

Born in New Zealand in 1967, Urban moved to Australia with his family as a child. His parents owned and operated a grocery store. His father was an amateur drummer and country music fan.

“Johnny Cash and his ‘At Folsom Prison’ album was a household staple.” – Keith Urban

He began playing ukulele at four and guitar at six. The family made regular trips to the annual Tamworth Country Music Festival, the second largest in the world after Nashville. Urban entered and won a talent contest there at the age of nine. He went on to build a reputation in the country music scene, releasing his debut album in 1991, which yielded four hit singles.

The move to Nashville a year later was a bumpy one. The musically unorthodox “Kiwi,” who includes not only country music but also Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Fatboy Slim among his influences, was not taken entirely seriously. He first tried to prove himself as a songwriter and played in various bands. His breakthrough as a solo artist came in 1999 when he was named Best New Singer by the Academy of Country Music for his album “Keith Urban.” In 2009, Taylor Swift opened for him on his tour, and the two have been close friends ever since. “His melodies and his tone influenced me a lot because they were so different from what I was hearing in the country scene at the time: He brought rock, pop and blues into the mix,” Swift told Rolling Stone. “He completely redefined the genre for me.”

Urban married Nicole Kidman – and is father to their two children – in 2006. Kidman recently posted a romantic photo on Instagram to mark her 18th wedding anniversary. She is lying on a wall by the sea with Keith Urban sitting next to her playing guitar. Two happy people from Down Under who found themselves and each other in the U.S.

Clint Eastwood: Cult figure of the Western genre

In 1964, Sergio Leone’s “Dollar” trilogy introduced Clint Eastwood as the laconic, poncho-clad “man with no name” wearing a Stetson and smoking a cheroot. The movies quickly established him as a cult figure of the Western genre. He was 34 and had been a moderately successful actor for ten years when the then completely unknown director offered him the lead role in “For a Fistful of Dollars.” Leone couldn’t afford stars like Henry Fonda or James Coburn. Neither of them initially displayed much enthusiasm for the other. Leone teased Eastwood about his acting – he said that Eastwood has two facial expressions: with and without a hat – while Eastwood had his doubts about an Italian making a Western movie.

At the time, no one would have guessed that the trilogy would make Eastwood one of Hollywood’s most successful and enduring heavyweights. He also showed he could hold a tune when he played a burnt-out country singer in his 1982 film “Honkytonk Man.”

“The political correctness era is really not doing anyone any good.” – Clint Eastwood at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival

His movies won 13 Oscars. He received the first four for his Western “Merciless” (1992), which he directed and starred in. At the age of 94, Eastwood is still active as an actor, director, film composer and producer. His last work, the courtroom drama “Juror No. 2,” was recently released in cinemas.

It wasn’t until 1995, with the hit film “Bridges of Madison County,” that Eastwood started to leave his tough-guy image behind and took on his first romantic role. He had discovered a theme that would define his work: exploring the complexities of American morality through everyday heroes, from the compassionate boxing coach in “Million Dollar Baby” to the reformed racist in “Gran Torino.” Clint Eastwood was never woke, however. He is regarded as one of Hollywood’s few outspoken conservatives and is an advocate of controlled but free gun ownership. The cowboy ethic, which says that only the good guy with a gun can stop the bad guy, has never left him.

Dolly Parton: The country music legend

With 25 number 1 hits, 100+ million album sales and eleven Grammys, the long and successful career of this singer-songwriter has made her a country music legend. Her trademarks: a high-pitched voice, blonde wigs, buxom figure and over-the-top outfits.

“It costs a lot of ­money to look this cheap.” – Dolly Parton

“The way I look and the way I looked then was a country girl’s idea of glam, just like I wrote in my “Backwoods Barbie”song,” she says in the documentary “Dolly Parton:Still Rockin,” which was released in 2024. “I didn’t know any screen goddesses, so I really patterned my look after the town tramp in our hometown. Soon people were saying ‘She’s nothing but trash,’ so I thought: Well, that’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.”

A master of self-irony, Parton has managed to delight loyal fans in both the arch-conservative Bible Belt and the LGBTQ+ scene for more than 50 years. For some she embodies the American Dream; for others, she’s a drag queen in a woman’s body. As the fourth of twelve children in a poor farming family from Tennessee, country music was her only escape. At 18, she moved to Nashville. Her first self-penned hits were “Coat of Many Colors” and “Jolene.” Even Elvis Presley wanted to record her third number 1 hit “I Will Always Love You,” but on terms she found unacceptable. It was not until 1992, when Whitney Houston covered the song in the movie “Bodyguard,” that it became a worldwide hit. “When Whitney came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland,” Parton later remarked.

During the pandemic, her donation of $1 million made a significant contribution to the development of the Moderna vaccine. Her iconic status was such that, in 1996, her name was used, albeit without her knowledge or consent, for the world’s first cloned sheep in a politically incorrect nod to the mammary glands from which it was developed. In her “Dollywood” theme park in Tennessee, she has placed a song in a box that will not be opened until her 100th birthday. Only Dolly knows the melody and content of the song, which she wrote to be released as her last. It’s called “My Place in History.”

Lily Gladstone: The first Indigenous actress to win a Golden Globe

Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” sheds light on a dark chapter in American history, revealing the violence and systemic racism inflicted by settlers on the Indigenous population. Lily Gladstone plays the film’s proud heroine, Mollie, an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically murdered by her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle (Robert De Niro) in a scheme to inherit her family’s oil-rich land in Oklahoma.

This year, the 38-year-old became the first Indigenous actress to win a Golden Globe for the role and was also nominated for an Oscar. Gladstone is a woman who defies Hollywood stereotypes. She grew up on the Blackfoot reservation in northern Montana. Her father is a descendant of the Canadian tribal leader Red Crow and her mother is white with British roots. When she was eleven, the family moved to Seattle, where her father found work in a shipyard and her mother worked as a teacher. After graduating from high school, Gladstone studied theater and Native American studies at the University of Montana. Rather than seeking fame and fortune in Los Angeles or New York like so many actors, she remained in Montana, working in theater, teaching acting workshops to Indigenous children and advocating for the LGBTQ+ movement.

“I knew Hollywood would find it hard to cast me.” – Lily Gladstone

She distrusted the Hollywood system and feared the frustrations it might bring. “I just knew that I would be difficult for Hollywood to cast,” she says. She gained wider recognition in 2016 for her performance in the critically acclaimed indie film “Certain Women,” which garnered numerous festival awards. The film was seen by Scorsese, who found her intense screen presence hard to resist. Gladstone never had to go to Hollywood; Hollywood came to her. Reflecting on her career path, she once joked that her father’s Native American wisdom had proven true: “The prey runs to the hunter.” In her new movie “Jazzy,” Gladstone plays a member of the Oglala, the best-known of the Lakota tribes. The coming-of-age drama explores the lives of today’s Native Americans. The film had its world première in June at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, although a cinema release date had not yet been set.

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Beyoncé: The first African American to reach number 1 in the U.S. country

“Cowboy Carter” is the eighth successive album that Queen Bey has taken to the top of the international charts. She was also the first African American to reach number 1 in the U.S. country charts. Even the cover is like a carefully composed painting, iconic from the moment it was released last March. Beyoncé on horseback, sitting sideways in a stetson hat, a silver wig fluttering in the breeze alongside the American flag. In the U.S., the self-assured symbolism is politically charged. How can Black artists, who have historically faced challenges breaking into the genre, contribute to its evolution?

In 2016, the singer’s first foray into the genre that is so popular in her hometown of Houston, Texas, proved to be an unsettling experience. Beyoncé received Grammy nominations in the fields of rock, rap, R&B and pop for her crossover album “Lemonade.” The only genre that didn’t acknowledge her was country music. Her surprise performance with the Dixie Chicks at the 50th Country Music Awards in Nashville drew record-breaking TV ratings but was met with a fierce backlash from conservative fans. In response to the racist calls for a boycott, their joint performance of “Daddy Lessons” was later banned by the Recording Academy and the video was removed from social media. Subtext: Given her generous donations to movements like Black Lives Matter and her songs about police violence, Beyoncé is an outsider in the largely conservative white milieu of country music fans and performers.

“The beauty of making music: There are no rules.” – Beyoncé

The experience of being “not welcome,” Beyoncé wrote on Instagram, inspired her to explore the genre further and push boundaries. She spent five years working on the “Cowboy Carter” album, a deeply American, 27-song opus that retells classic myths in a fresh light. Stories in which Black and Native American cowboys as well as female ranch hands and wranglers also have their place. But she also made it clear: “It’s not a country album; it’s a Beyoncé album.” Big country artists like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Miley Cyrus lend their support with guest appearances, and the project includes a collaboration with Linda Martell, an African American singer who succeeded in making the breakthrough into country music in the 1970s. It is perhaps no coincidence that Beyoncé’s longtime friend Pharrell Williams, now the creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, sent Black cowboys down the catwalk when he unveiled his second collection in Paris.