Rising Country Star Margo Price on Why She Feels ‘Like One of the Men’
Margo Price‘s tattoos tell her story. She has nine of them, some of which you can’t see, like the words “gypsy wanderer of the world” emblazoned on her left foot. There’s a buffalo on her left thigh, memorializing Buffalo Clover, her old country-soul band. Her biggest tattoo, on her left shoulder, is a huge tree circled by three birds, representing herself and her twin sons, Judah, who’s now five, and Ezra, who died in 2010, two weeks after he was born. His death kicked off a long, painful, self-destructive period. “That took me out of the game for a while,” says Price, in a booth at a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, country bar, sipping a frozen coffee with a shot of whiskey. “There were times I was feeling so terrible, all I wanted to do was drink to forget.”
Price’s debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, on Third Man Records, is a diary of her 12 years of striking out and living hard in Nashville. “I used to write story-songs, about a couple robbing a bank or whatever,” says Price, 32. “But I decided I’m going to go ahead and lay it all out on the line here. And it felt really good, really therapeutic.” Price’s bare honky-tonk confessions recall Loretta Lynn’s autobiographical hits of the Sixties. But Price makes clear that she also points to Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings as her biggest heroes. “A lot of times, people say, ‘You’re so much like Loretta or Tammy Wynette,'” says Price. “But I feel kind of like one of the men. I’m like David Allan Coe. I’ve been to prison, man! I think that’s what separated me from the Kacey Musgraves, stuff like that. There’s not a lot of glitter or girly bows and stuff.”
Price grew up in Buffalo Prairie, Illinois, on a farm her family was forced to sell when she was two. Her dad later went to work as a prison guard. “It took the wind out of the whole family,” she says. “We were still surrounded by cornfields and cattle, and it was really hard for them.” She dropped out of college and moved to Nashville at 20, inspired by her great-uncle Bobby Fischer, who wrote hits for George Jones, Conway Twitty and Reba McEntire.
Price wound up working odd jobs – teaching tap dance, playing Gretel at a local children’s theatre – and “living in a double-wide with a dude.” Things improved when she met a different dude, local country singer Jeremy Ivey. They moved into an East Nashville home together and started a band. “I had a hard time meeting people that would help me out that were genuine,” she says. “There were so many traps.” On “This Town Gets Around,” a track from Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Price references the story of how an early manager invited her to his mansion outside Nashville to meet with a potential co-writer. After a couple of glasses of sangria, Price started feeling woozy and disoriented, and asked if they had put something in her drink. “They said, ‘We put some vodka in there, because we didn’t think you’re having enough fun.'”