October 11, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic spends a night at the Grand Ole Opry during the country music institution’s centennial season, and witnesses what the genre has to offer newcomers and longtime followers alike.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Hello sparklers,

Here’s a tiny scene that unfolded in the bathroom of the Grand Ole Opry last Tuesday: A maybe-nine-year-old in a flowered dress stood diligently washing her hands at the sink. As I soaped up I glanced over to see her smiling shyly in my direction. “You’re here for Sabrina?” I said, in the form of a question, though I knew the answer already. She nodded as her face lit up all the way. “It’s pretty cool to see her in this small theater,” I replied, and she nodded even harder as she turned toward the door, disappearing into a lobby filled with tourists in Bass Pro Shop hats and clusters of bridesmaids on their phones. As she left, I noticed what she was wearing with her Sunday best: shiny white cowboy boots, clearly right out of the box.

We were 30 minutes away from Sabrina Carpenter’s debut appearance as part of country music’s most hallowed institution, and the crowd who’d gathered in the Opry’s longtime digs across from Tennessee’s biggest outlet mall was typical for a Tuesday, yet flecked with signs of change. Despite a commitment to wholesomeness that Carpenter would later note while performing a four-song set (“That’s why I’m doing the clean versions”), the Opry doesn’t normally attract kids — the shows are long, extending past most grade schoolers’ bedtimes. But plenty were there this evening, clinging to their mamas’ hands or running around in circles in front of the bars selling $20 whiskey drinks.

Often when a pop star touches down in a niche space, her fans buy up all the tickets and temporarily overrun its norms. Not at the Opry. A sacred space for country music lovers, it attracts crowds no matter who is playing, and many of those devotees had purchased tickets for this evening before Carpenter had even been announced. After praising the house band and expressing gratitude for the warm welcome she’d received backstage, she acknowledged those folks in the crowd who’d possibly never noticed the phenomenon that was “Espresso,” saying, “I know you don’t welcome people onto your stage and into your world so easily …. You being part of this music is what is continuing this legacy and allowing artists to experiment and feel inspired.”

Anyone who’d come just for Carpenter heard that too; many, maybe most, were clearly also country fans. Looking around at the moms with their kids and the younger folks in sparkly cowboy hats and fringed clothing, I noticed their enthusiasm for every act on the night’s multi-artist bill. That got me thinking about how Carpenter had already set the stage for this visit, making sure it wouldn’t feel like an invasion. Her most obvious gesture was releasing a duet version of her hit “Please Please Please” featuring Dolly Parton back in February, but she’s also often said in interviews that she’s always looked to many styles to help define her own. She’s a respectful borrower who understands that crossover hits like hers tap into traditions that, for other musicians and many fans, are the whole world. Instead of trying to claim ownership or even a long-term spot, Carpenter made clear that she’s a visitor and that connections she’s made with country music have taught her a lot. Her fans seemed to have anticipated this. Even if some, like that sweet kid I met, were likely going country for the first time, they were here for the whole experience.

When Carpenter entered after an introduction by Nashville resident Sheryl Crow — the one concession to her star status, since usually the artists take the stage for their mini-sets with no fanfare as the crew moves things around and an announcer shares Opry lore — every step she made showed care, ensuring she wouldn’t be seen as a gate crasher. Her between-song banter asserted her bona fides without claiming too much. “I’m not technically a country girl because I’m from Pennsylvania,” she quipped, “but I’ve seen a couple of cows in the middle of the road. And when you see cows in the middle of the road, you say, well I’m not in the city, so I might as well be in the country!”

It was the kind of quip Cher might have made if she’d ever guested on Hee Haw back in the 1960s, and Carpenter's dress, a black sequined number with a highly swirlable cut-out fringe skirt, would have fit right in on that versatile diva’s own variety show. Carpenter’s appearance reinforced her message that she could ride with the country mainstream for this evening without wholly committing to it. Her song selections — “Please, Please, Please” and “Slim Pickins” from her breakthrough album Short ‘n Sweet, “Go Go Juice” and “Manchild” from her current release Man’s Best Friend — played up the “a banjo, a pedal steel and a dream” side of her music, as she described it, without overstressing the twang. The songs’ arrangements highlighted fiddle and those instruments Carpenter mentioned rather than synths and bass. “Go Go Juice,” in particular, lends itself better to those arrangements than most of her songs, with a singalong chorus based around the line, “I’m just drinkin’ to call someone,” which could have been written on Music Row at any time between 1957 and now. “It’s so Shania-coded!” exclaimed a commenter on singer-songwriter Hailey Mae Campbell’s Instagram reel of the performance. Exactly.

Carpenter didn’t mention Shania in her warm comments to the Opry crowd, but she did talk about her mother playing Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and “my favorite, Dolly Parton” (with a soft “t,” not a hard Southern one, like the Pennsylvanian she is) when she was growing up. It was another case of 21st century artists extolling country’s legendary women as models not just for the genre, but within the larger pop sphere. Cline and Parton, in particular, made music that challenged narrow definitions of country while reaching the pinnacle of success within it. And in songs like “The Pill” and “One’s On the Way,” Lynn — whom Crow also mentioned in her introductory remarks — cemented her legend by engaging with hot-button issues of her day, bringing the larger world into Music Row songwriting while holding on to her “just folks” perspective.

As I watched Carpenter lead the audience a boisterous chorus during “Manchild” (a slap at inept bros that Lynn would have loved), I considered how different this appearance was from what Post Malone was doing this same week down on Lower Broadway. Opening his new bar, Posty’s, with a free concert and an official greeting that had him learning how to cut a ribbon from Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell, Post declared that claiming prime real estate within the city’s drunk Disneyland solidified “a completely new chapter for me.”

That seeming pledge to keep it country for more than one business opportunity reminded me of earlier versions of crossover, dominated by male performers who were highly invested in notions of authenticity. Even when their music challenged established definitions of the genre, outlaws and country rockers from Gram Parson to Tyler Childers have at times expressed a commitment to “real country” that suggests the music can be diluted and damaged by outsiders who haven’t lived out its widely accepted scripts. (Others defied the label even as they employed it. Remember when Willie Nelson gave us his great standards album, Stardust?) Carpenter’s Opry moment reminded me that real country has always been about wit, wordplay and spectacle as much as about hard truths and homespun wisdom. Women artists, who almost always have to fight harder than their male peers to be considered authentic, thrive by projecting a more flexible attitude, one that asserts, in the words of Carpenter’s hero Parton, that “a rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond.”

The artists who shone on the Opry stage before Carpenter appeared showed that at 100, the Opry itself maintains this more open-ended definition of country. I only caught half of the two-and-a-half hour show, but the sets I saw exemplified the programming on a stage, despite its old-fashioned veneer, is one of the most diverse in town. Marcus King could as easily be classified as a blues artist, and duetting with Opry veteran Jamey Johnson on the vintage Marshall Tucker Band hit “Can’t You See,” he reminded the audience that Southern rock claims its own territory on country’s continent. The songwriter-turned-showman Ernest, who’s most associated with hip-hop-inflected bro country, performed a classic Merle Haggard song with an unpretentious air that felt less like an attempt to be real than a signal that such gestures are unnecessary.

Best of all, rising star Kaitlin Butts dazzled in a too-short two-song set. The Tulsa native could claim her country bona-fides, no problem, but instead she’s defining herself as an adept genre expander who recognizes the inherent theatricality of Southern (and red dirt!) storytelling. Her excellent 2024 album Roadrunner! wholly reimagined Broadway’s Plains State fable Oklahoma! and gave her a viral hit with “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me),” whose comedy would have suited Ado Annie in that musical and connects with Carpenter’s playful revenge narratives. Alongside that song, Butts performed her feminist murder ballad “White River” — a twist on the AM radio classic “The Nights the Lights Went out in Georgia” that she dedicated to country’s most notorious and impactful boundary crossers, The Chicks.

Butts is one of several young women in country music who grew up with Shania Twain on their mothers’ stereos and Taylor Swift guiding their own youthful musical explorations. It’s a good time for these friendly firebrands, who are gaining support within the industry despite its continued favoritism toward men in trucker hats. I’ll shout out two whose songs I wanted to hear driving back from the mall parking lot on Tuesday. Carter Faith, whose debut album Cherry Valley mines 1960s vibes to tell stories of ungovernable women, and Priscilla Block, whose newly released Things You Didn’t See continues her streak of blending humor and pathos to reveal sometimes uncomfortable truths, are clearly looking to Parton and Lynn for guidance beyond the clichés that country can sometimes impose on its ingenues. Faith and Block, like Butts, are finding ways to build audiences despite not quite fitting into the Music Row mold.

They’ll wear those white boots, but as Nancy Sinatra sang back when country music’s outlaws were first starting to surface, they know that they’re made for walking. Nobody can fence these women in.

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