Country radio doesn't want to play songs by women. That's been fairly obvious for years; the last time a new female solo act had two top 20 hits on country radio was in 2007. Still, programming consultant Keith Hill made an unpleasant splash last week when he seemed to endorse this status quo. In an interview with Country Aircheck, Hill said, "The expectation is we’re principally a male format with a smaller female component…. Trust me, I play great female records and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

The metaphor seems a little confused there; after all, who wants to eat bland lettuce when you could bite into a juicy ripe tomato? But at the same time, Hill's lettuce metaphor does resonate with country history. There are genres that see authenticity in terms of virtuosity, competence, and flash—Louis Armstrong in jazz or Mahalia Jackson in gospel are authentic and real in part because of their technical skill and artistry.

That's not completely foreign to country, as Bill Monroe's blazing mandolin can attest. More often, though, country has built its authenticity claims around eschewing sophistication. It has marketed itself as the simple music of rural men and women, who prefer rugged, independent, god-fearing salad without that pretentious citified tomato filigree.

Sometimes, this has been expressed through an explicit rejection of supposedly cosmopolitan values, as when the Louvin Brothers frankly warned the hellbound, in 1958, "That word 'broadminded' is spelled S-I-N." Other country stars took a lighter tack. Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl played up their Hee-Haw lack of sophistication through sophisticated self-deprecation. George Jones and Tammy Wynette, in 1974, sang, "No we're not the jet set/we're the old Chevrolet set." This I'm-just-a-rube authenticity was gloriously, decadently perfected by Dolly Parton, who coupled full-on glam presentation with constant outright assertions of the fakeness of the blonde hair, the bosom, and the entire enterprise.

In all of these instances, authenticity is figured as a distance, ironized or otherwise, from a more corrupt center; real country is about belonging to a simpler, more rural, less affluent, and less powerful community. Both men and women can be part of that community, as Parton and Wynette and, say, Kitty Wells demonstrated. There have generally been more male than female country stars, but women, from Patsy Cline to Shania Twain to the Dixie Chicks, have been successful as well. There hasn't in the past been a connection between country authenticity and maleness, specifically. Women haven't been excluded.