Hailey Whitters hails from a small town in the Midwest and embraces her roots. While others may eschew being called a “Corn Queen” as an insult, the Shueyville, Iowa, native takes pride in her rural origins. The 16 tracks on her overstuffed new record are full of coy references to her bucolic upbringing. She’s not afraid of being, well, corny. For example, she knows corn queen rhymes with porn queen and wears an embroidered pair of panties with the words spelled out on her rump. It’s funny, but it’s not, in the way sex and love make fools out of us all. She shows us her butt and that makes us the butt of her joke for just looking.
Country music and corn(y) humor have been together since the genre first emerged. The comedy emerged from observing the struggles of everyday life and sweetening and satirizing one’s descriptions of hardships. Whitters contemporizes the tradition through modern songs about shotgun weddings, getting drunk, and assorted rites of passage in small-town America.
She frequently sings in the first-person with a down-home drawl and a fiddle accompaniment that makes the Nashville transplant sound more Southern than Midwestern. That makes her protagonists more charming and perhaps more insidious in an aw-shucks kind of way. Like a wizened waitress who calls you honey and darling while refilling your coffee, one gets distracted from what one’s drinking by the charming server.
Whitters’ sonic brew is full of cream and sugar, making the music go down easily. The songs appeal to one’s sentimentality as everything from death rituals (“Casseroles”) to hard work (“Helluva Heart”) to the rebound at the end of a love affair (“High on a Heartbreak”) is treated as a worthy topic to both celebrate and mock. Much of the music’s appeal lies in Whitters’ use of wordplay to describe conflicting truths.
Songs like “Wholesome”, “DanceMor”, and the title track rely on simple comparisons “Ain’t Romeo and Juliet / More Billy Bob and Charlene”) that may seem silly on the surface but expose universal truths. Love between losers is not fundamentally different than the feelings held by the more successful and deserves our acknowledgement.
In our currently polarized America, Whitters appeals to both conservatives and liberals by highlighting how we are all fundamentally connected. We all prize the same things: love, work, family, a sense of self-worth, and so on. Whitters charms through being funny, but she’s not joking. Her humor is tempered by an emotional core that reveals a deep belief in the power of love to redeem or make fools of us.
Life itself is ridiculous. I don’t know if there are actual corn queen contexts, but as an Iowan who lives within spitting distance of where Whitters grew up, I know there are pork queens and all sorts of other agriculturally themed contests that people take seriously. They may seem strange to outsiders, but these rustic ceremonies offer relief from the routine sacraments that mark daily life.
Bluegrass star Molly Tuttle joins Whitters on guitar and vocals on “Prodigal Daughter”, and country folk artist Charles Wesley Godwin duets on “I Don’t Know You”. These two songs provide a welcome musical contrast to the other cuts on the album. These cuts are more explicitly serious and show Whitters’ ability to play and sing it straight. While 16 tracks may seem too much to put on one record, are there ever too many kernels to fit on an ear of corn? All hail the queen!