I laughed when my father told us, in the dining room of his Boston-area house, he was moving to Austin. This was the early 1990s, and I laughed the way I did when he put on the country music station in the car. My brother and I had made fun of him so many times that we’d developed our own songs explicitly to mock him: Dog is dead and so is the wife / Oh no! Hit it, Joe! We didn’t know anything about the South or its music and hadn’t yet bothered to learn. Instead, we went straight to the easy jokes.
When I told my mom about her ex-husband’s upcoming move, back at our apartment in the city, she laughed the hardest.
“Y’all enjoy yourselves!” she giggled in a faux accent, like a character in a Saturday Night Live skit, that she would later replicate when I moved to Nashville in 2011 to write about country music professionally. She was wearing a thong leotard over a pair of fluorescent bike shorts, fresh from teaching a step aerobics class. “At least you can be a real cowgirl now,” she added. Then she delivered the kicker: I would be spending most of the upcoming summer down there with my dad, stepmom, and half-sister, sweating it out in the Texas heat. Forget being shipped to Vermont or Maine, as was custom for other Jewish kids on the East Coast with a humidity aversion and parents in search of quiet.
I looked at her in confusion. I had not spent more than a few days at a time with my father since my parents divorced when I was barely 2, nor had I ever been to Texas. I hadn’t been to the South at all, save for a road trip to Miami with my mom and her boyfriend at the time, when we’d driven through the Carolinas listening to Stephen King books on tape and taken a 30-minute walk around Savannah in search of a bathroom. I hardly knew anything about Texas. My embarrassingly provincial upbringing kept me tucked away from it geographically, and my obsessive MTV viewing habits distant from it culturally.
But my mother wasn’t wrong to dangle the one thing I might chase all the way to Texas: the chance to be a cowgirl. Like many other 10-year-old girls growing up in the era of fluorescent Lisa Frank stickers, Trapper Keepers, and slap bracelets, I had a love for ponies. Both of my maternal grandparents were raised on farms and showed draft horses, so I started early with lessons on an English saddle. I’d tuck giant ballooning T-shirts stolen from my older brother into tight jodhpurs and try to canter when the teacher wasn’t looking. Everyone around me was always acting precious on their horses, peeling off to dressage school and holding the reigns as daintily as they would a cup of tea. I only showed up to class as much as we could afford, and my gear came from a used sports shop in the suburbs, giving everything a scrubby patina. My black riding boots were missing eyelets and constantly untied.
At my last lesson in Boston, my riding instructor delivered a word of warning as I finished a round in the ring. I was trotting out my horse after class, the reigns in one hand, seeing how much stability I could generate through the sheer force of my thighs. I was stronger than they knew.
“Do I need to remind you that we ride English here?” the instructor asked, motioning me over. “You look like you’re herding cattle.”
Riding was different after that. I still loved horses, but I felt indelicate. Imperfect. Out of place. Heavy, even. Our budget wouldn’t allow another lesson for a while anyway, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to return.
I stopped laughing at the idea of Texas and started drifting, envisioning myself at a ranch, surrounded by girls in jeans and weathered boots with lines of sweat cutting through dusty windswept faces, imperfect and indelicate like me. Then I pictured myself in the ribbed baby tee I was wearing, holding a yellow Walkman, my brown hair curling at will, getting made fun of like Billy Crystal in City Slickers. I wondered which one was the real me, or if I could be both.
I went into the living room and turned on MTV. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” was on, and I sent myself back to imaginary Texas, on a horse running with the wind.
In 2022, I published a book about women in country music, specifically women from Texas, called Her Country. I wrote about singers who crafted artistic careers against all odds and according to their rules—singers like Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, and Kacey Musgraves. I realize this all veers into the category of irony, or maybe even karma, but I wouldn’t be the first kid to grow up yelling at their parent’s radio from the back seat only to emerge as a full-fledged country-music-loving adult. My father got the last laugh, as fathers do, but so did Texas.
People ask me constantly: How did you get into country music to begin with? What made you flip from misinformed skeptic, drowning in MTV, to dedicating your life to following these sounds, these traditions? For years, I stumbled around the question. I explained that rock music led me to Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan led me to folk, and folk led me to country—and that was true. I talked about how, as a writer, I loved the storytelling in country music—and that was true, too. It just wasn’t the whole story, or even where it began.
For years, I never thought of Texas when faced with that recurring question. Not because it didn’t leave an impression on me, but because I didn’t spend those summers in Austin listening to music or seeking out songs like I did back home. I spent those summers at a ranch called Medway, riding and palling around a barn. I remember horses more than clubs or dance halls. Music was always a background to what we were doing but never the main story: a low hum in the van, the soundtrack in the restaurant, a band on a local television show.
It took me two decades to realize that country music isn’t always something you hear. It’s someone you become. And I became that person on a spotty orange-and-white horse in the dead heat of my preteen summers, a plane trip away from everything I thought I knew.
The sky was overcast above Dallas when we flew in from Boston on that first trip to Texas. I pretended I was galloping on the clouds, trying to get a peek of the skyline. I looked for clues to my new life when we walked through the airport to make our connection to Austin but could only find a singing Southwest flight attendant who serenaded us through our landing. Austin didn’t offer direct service from Boston until my dad had lived there for a few years, so I got to know the winding walk through those terminals, buying Seventeen magazines and listening to mixtapes of En Vogue and the Pixies as I ran to make my flight, somehow always late.
When we landed at Austin-Bergstrom, I thought it was the cutest little airport I’d ever seen. This was confusing because everyone back home had reminded me over and over that everything was bigger in Texas, as if it was the only thing they knew about the place. Not that I had any room to talk.
We stayed for a few days at a residential hotel by the airport until my dad’s house, a modest brick home about 8 miles northwest of the city, was ready. We mostly drove around to get the lay of the land. We did one spin through downtown and that was about all I ever saw there, short of an outing to Esther’s Follies for a comedy show and a dip or two in Barton Springs. I liked that it didn’t feel like there was a center yet and I could make my own.
“No one told me there was a lake,” I said to my stepmom as I pressed my face against the car window on the way to a celebratory dinner heralding the big move at the Oasis on Lake Travis. I ordered fajitas and stared out onto the water while the adults drank margaritas and snapped photos with the sunset. Everything was quieter and greener than I imagined. I learned to shake out my shoes before I put them on in the morning and count on my stepmom to evict the scorpions that convened in my bedroom closet. We shopped at Central Market, where I would buy one special pomelo, peeling away the rind and convincing myself that I would never eat another grapefruit again.
Once I eased into the flow of daily life as a new Texan, it was time to head to camp and see the horses.
Medway Ranch was a spectacular property in the Hill Country along the Colorado River, built by Alexandra and John Wallace to match Alexandra’s great-grandfather’s hacienda in Batopilas, Chihuahua, Mexico. I didn’t realize at the time that it was someone’s private residence and not my own personal horse paradise. The family had transitioned it to a summer camp and horse farm sometime in the early ’80s. I eagerly signed up to go, relieved that even on horse show days you were allowed to wear a T-shirt. I could ride Western or English and learn to tack. The goal was independence, not perfection—the opposite of how things were done at the stables back home in New England.
Each weekday morning, lunch and riding helmet in hand, I would load into a white van with other local kids at a grocery store parking lot near our house and head to the ranch. It felt like hours along Bee Caves Road and then an abrupt turn onto Murfin Road, lined by live oak and scraggly, twisted cedar. I’d spend the ride trying to sleep with my head against the window while the driver, a woman maybe in her mid-30s with a photo of a child dangling from her rearview mirror, played the radio station low. It sounded just like the music my father loved, only softer: that familiar twang, without a hooky pop sheen. I bet that’s where I first heard Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, and Emmylou Harris.
For the duration of each week, every student had a horse assigned to them that they would take care of, ride, and tack. After a few trials, I ended up with Kate, a mixed breed of a paint horse and a pinto, white with large blotches of orange under her neck and a wispy copper tail. Kate had mouth ulcers, so she could no longer use a bit—just a thin white leather bridle attached to a blue rope rein. I was told, quite explicitly, that I would have to yank and nudge the heck out of her sometimes to get her to move, but not too much—because then she’d rebel.
“She’s a good Texas woman,” the counselor told me. “She does things her own way.”
Medway was more beautiful than anywhere I’d ridden in Maine, with a white barn surrounded by expansive fields and little dots of cacti and hills that arched over the river. Most of the people who worked there, at least the ones I remember, were women. They knew the right ways to throw your body into tightening the girths and hauling the saddles, how to run your hands along the back of a horse’s hind legs so they’d lift a foot and let you clean out the middle of the horseshoe. They expected you to handle your horse and didn’t judge you if you were following the rules of the ranch.
Most days were the same. I would tack Kate, ride and jump her, and then scrape her down with a tool that looked like an extended slap bracelet. Sometimes, the other girls and I would run down to the dock after, throwing whatever we had layered over our swimsuits—jodhpurs, boots, helmets—on the ground. We’d launch our bodies into the river without even testing a foot first. This was the only place I was ever hot during those Texas summers, free from the onslaught of air conditioning. At the end of the week, there was a horse show for parents to attend, where I collected a set of flimsy ribbons. No one cared where I was from, and I didn’t want to leave.
I loved Kate, but taking care of her wasn’t always easy. She often didn’t want anything to do with the jumps I was asking her to leap over, tripping on trotting poles and meandering around the ring the second I relaxed. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t like to run. I’d see her in the pasture when she was allowed to graze freely, her distinct markings blurring into a peachy whirl as she made her way across the property, disappearing as the scenery sloped down toward the water.
I tried other horses: Petey, a short, gray Andalusian who bucked me off when a wasp stung him; and a brown thoroughbred named George (after Jones?). But I always came back to Kate, with her bit-free harness and rope. I didn’t have to be precious with her. On my last week of my first summer there, the counselor let me take her out into the field to ride bareback along the cedar and patches of cacti and agave as if it were our own little course. I finally felt like a cowgirl, out loose with the cattle, doing things our own way, together.
I didn’t ride horses much after my two summers at Medway, short of an occasional trail jaunt. My father moved back to Boston in the late ’90s. I didn’t go back to Texas for over 20 years. I dreamed of it often—running along the hills with Kate, cold dunks in the water, even the van rides out to Medway in the mornings. That person slept inside me as I walked the streets of New York City in my 20s, turning abruptly at the sound of horse hooves only to see high heels along the sidewalk.
My friends in New York laughed when I told them my husband and I were moving to Nashville nearly a decade and a half ago. They laughed the way my brother and I had back in that Boston dining room, with eyes of disapproval and judgment. I didn’t care: The South captivated me. I wanted a slower and smaller life, a place where I could write about country music and actually afford to do it. Maybe, I thought, I could start riding horses again.
By then, country music had transitioned from my hobby to a full-time passion. I fell deeply in love with it, permanently and forever, when I started to learn about the women who made it playing by their own rules: Guyton, Morris, and Musgraves, but also The Chicks, Amanda Shires, Miranda Lambert, Tanya Tucker, and LeAnn Rimes. They were all from Texas, coming from Austin, Arlington, Dallas, Lindale, and Lubbock, bringing their fully realized selves to Nashville for a shot at art with a side of stardom.
In 2021, I interviewed Morris for Her Country. I asked her what it was about Texas that seemed to breed so many female artists like herself who overflow with both talent and a refusal to compromise their vision.
“There’s just something in the water,” she told me. It hit me then. I thought of all the questions about how I got here, in this genre I wasn’t supposed to love. And I realized it had been Texas all along. It wasn’t just about Kate. It was the land she was running on, the land that let women like Morris, women like me, roam as wildly, imperfectly, and freely as we wanted.
I had a little over 24 hours in Austin during August 2022 before I needed to drive to Dallas for my next book tour stop at Deep Vellum. I was staying at a hotel on South Congress Avenue, a street I never walked as a kid, in a city that looked nowhere near familiar. The only thing the same was the smell—the scent of desert willow, dry air, and tacos. I felt it in my bones once I walked from the cold burn of air conditioning to the intense heat: Ah, there it is. I was in Austin for a reading at BookWoman on North Lamar. Her Country had come out a few months ago, and I felt compelled to take it back to the place where I’d realized it had all begun. To this state. This city. These women. That horse.
Could I go back to Medway, I wondered? Make a pilgrimage of sorts? I Googled the place, wondering if it might be possible to take a trail ride before my reading. The search results dashed my daydream. At some point, Medway was turned from a thriving horse camp into an ostentatiously decorated personal residence that hit the market in 2019 for $30 million.
I contemplated driving as far out as I could go, just to get a glance of the property, or even venturing a little bit down Murfin Road. But what would be the point? Kate was dead and the ranch was now a luxury playground. That version of Austin no longer existed, and that version of my childhood was gone too. But country music isn’t just a sound, or even a place. It’s someone you become.
There I was, messy and indelicate, behind the wheel of a rental car with the windows down and The Chicks on the radio, riding with the wind.