Nashville Didn’t Make Room for Mickey Guyton. So She Made Her Own.

Six and a half years ago, Mickey Guyton released her breakout major label single, a grand, sweeping ballad called “Better Than You Left Me.” She sang it with heft and feeling, and the melody was reminiscent of the weepy country ballads of the 1960s. It was a loud, assured knock on Nashville’s door.

Around that time, Guyton would sometimes be invited to red carpet events, and she quickly became familiar with one of the many unspoken limitations the country music business had in store for her: She could find no makeup and hair professionals with experience working with Black skin and hair.

“There were so many red carpets in the very beginning of my career where I hated how I looked. I just made the most out of what I had,” Guyton, 38, said last month over a video call from her home in Los Angeles. “I would always ask, ‘Do they know how to do Black hair? Do they know how to do a Black person’s face?’ Yeah, they haven’t.”

It took a few years, but Guyton eventually found a solution, or more accurately, a deeply inconvenient workaround: “I would wake up at like 4 a.m. and drive all the way to Atlanta, get my hair done, and drive all the way back.”

Indignities like that constituted just some of the hidden labor of being, at the time, the only Black woman on a major country music label. For Guyton, who had been signed to Capitol Nashville since 2011, there were countless other frictions. She’d begun to bristle at songwriting appointments where collaborators would suggest writing about blue-eyed protagonists. She found herself drinking an unhealthy amount. Her long-distance marriage was becoming strained. Years of writing with the goal of getting radio airplay had been met with indifference; sometimes she would send songs she’d worked on to representatives at her label and be met with silence.

In 2018, things began to change. “I don’t have blue eyes, and the person I’m singing about doesn’t have blue eyes,” Guyton recalled thinking. “So why am I chasing that?”

She decided to limit her writing sessions to a group of simpatico collaborators, and focus on topics close to her heart: her experience as a Black woman in country music, and in America. “A lot of these songs were just kind of therapy for me,” she said, recalling these times with a bit of an arched eyebrow, a sense of exasperation mixed with a sense of humor. “I never wrote these thinking that they were ever going to be heard.”

This month, finally, Guyton will release her debut album, “Remember Her Name.” It is anchored by several of those therapy songs, but is also an astute survey of ambitious country music by a singer-songwriter who’s been carefully watching from the sidelines, deciding what parts worked best for her, and what needed to be tinkered with.

The resolute, sweet “Love My Hair” was inspired by those failed experiences with Nashville glam squads: “The things I did to try to fit right in/I’ll never justify my skin again.” “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?” is a bracing ballad about the limitations society places on young women. “All American” — its title a slick double entendre — includes references to dookie braids and James Brown, writing the Black experience into the sort of country song that would ordinarily exclude it.

And then there is “Black Like Me,” the steely, sober mission statement that changed the course of Guyton’s career. She wrote it in 2019, and it became one of the songs she was sure would never be released. The lyric is simple and direct. “Broke my heart on the playground/When they said I was different/Oh now, now I’m all grown up and nothing has changed,” she sings, underscoring the connection between the callous racism experienced in childhood and the callous racism experienced as an adult in Nashville.

The song’s refrain is an elegant gut punch — “If you think we live in the land of the free/You should try to be/Black like me” — taking the familiar lingo of country music jingoism and shattering it.

When the racial justice protests spawned in the wake of the murder of George Floyd gained steam last summer, and every corner of American life was forced to confront its racism, she posted a snippet of it on her Instagram account. It immediately gained traction, and Spotify asked for a finished version to place on its country playlist, prompting the song’s completion and release.

The response was instant. Country music had already been fitfully beginning to reckon with criticisms about its fundamental exclusion of Black performers. Though individual Black singers — Charley Pride, Darius Rucker, Kane Brown — have found homes in the genre, and sometimes thrived, they are exceptions.

Thematically, country music has congealed into the soundtrack of an imagined white working class, essentially erasing the fact that the earliest country music performers drew directly from the blues and Black rural musicians. Country music, like all American music, is at its core Black music.

Whether out of genuine interest or a desire for improved optics, the country music industry has been addressing representation more directly in the last year, and has lately given space to several younger Black performers, including Jimmie Allen, Breland, Reyna Roberts, and Blanco Brown.

In the wake of the impact of “Black Like Me” — which happened without country radio, which has yet to embrace Guyton — acclaim has come fast, as if making up for lost time, or for lost history: a Grammy nomination for “Black Like Me” and a performance on the awards broadcast, a co-hosting slot on the Academy of Country Music Awards, a perhaps lightly ironic nomination for best new artist from the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards.

“I’m still writing positive, inclusive songs,” Guyton says. “You guys just never heard them.”Credit…Wulf Bradley for The New York Times

“When you’ve been told no for so long, you eventually start to believe it. And I started to believe that I didn’t deserve it,” Guyton said of the lean years that predated the current swell. Therapy, she said, had helped her untangle her dysfunctional relationship with the genre. “But you know, I’ve been in this town for a long time and I’m just as talented as everybody else,” she continued. “So I receive it and I accept it.”

And yet the genre can appear to want to have it both ways. When TMZ released video of Morgan Wallen, the genre’s biggest rising star, using a racial slur earlier this year, he was quickly publicly shunned by the business, removed from consideration for awards and banned from country radio. But fans never stopped streaming his music, and after a few months, his songs returned to the airwaves. This month Wallen’s latest release was nominated for album of the year at the CMA Awards.

Online, Guyton routinely fends off slur-filled missives from retrograde country fans who bristle at her claim to the genre or at her willingness to call out racism in its ranks.

“I’m on antidepressants because it’s been that hard,” she said.

That context renders the specific achievements of Guyton’s debut album even more remarkable. Though it tackles some deeply scarred subject matter, “Remember Her Name” is, at heart, a fundamentally optimistic album, from its resolute lyrical stands on decency and empathy to its production, which is often reminiscent of the majestic, big-tent country music of the 1990s.

“Big always feels comfortable for me,” Guyton said. “I was always thinking about the big ’90s country, that throwback.” Laughing, she added, “I even have a French tip manicure.”

The inheritances from big-voiced, emotionally colorful singers like Martina McBride are clear on songs like the inspirational “Higher,” the vivid cover of Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy” and on the title track, which plays like a superhero theme song. “Different” bridges pop brightness with off-the-cuff honky-tonk swagger. And “Rosé” is an utterly modern anthem about something to drink that’s not beer, and is also, Guyton said, a protest against the unspoken Nashville prohibition on women from singing about alcohol.

“There’s so much on this record that is so positive, that is so inclusive,” Guyton said about balancing songs drawn from her personal experience with those tackling broader themes. “It took them hearing ‘Black Like Me’ and ‘What Are You Gonna Tell Her?’ to be like, ‘Oh.’ I’ve been here all along. I’m still writing positive, inclusive songs. You guys just never heard them.”

Getting people to hear these songs is the next challenge. Country radio, especially, has consistently been a space of disappointment for female performers, even in the wake of the “tomato” kerfuffle of 2015, where a male radio consultant said women artists should be sparingly sprinkled in the country airwaves’ salad. But that obstacle has led to new opportunities for singers like Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile and Maren Morris, who have built their fan bases outside of the usual pathways, and with fewer concessions. Which means that even though Guyton’s refreshing approach to country might not be in line with what currently clogs the genre’s charts, the possibility of creating a new pathway is more viable than ever.

When Guyton was taking back control of her life, it extended beyond how she approached her music. In 2019, frustrated with the toll alcohol was taking on her, she quit drinking. “I’ve been going twice a week to therapy/Really, tryna change the way I think about the way I think,” she sings on “Do You Really Wanna Know.”

That stretch of time, Guyton said, was traumatic. “When I say I was drinking 365 days out of the year, I was literally drinking 365 days,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t be in my marriage anymore if we had been drinking during the pandemic. It just gave me such clarity. Taking that substance out of my life, it was like, phewww. And then I saw my health. I could see it.” (Guyton said she drinks occasionally now.)

But that time period was also when her husband encouraged her to write directly about her experiences as a Black woman, to embrace the things that set her apart rather than shy away from them.

“What’s being played on country radio has been played on country radio for the last 10 years — I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t do it spiritually. I can’t write songs that don’t mean something.”

In 2020, Guyton moved to Los Angeles and got pregnant. Her son was born in February. Now that’s she’s closer than ever to Nashville success, she’s also able to maintain some necessary distance from the genre and its home base. But rather than seeing that as a liability, she understands how much of a strength it can be for someone looking beyond what country music has long offered her.

“There is only one me,” she said. “I’ve never happened before.”