Now own the other hand pop culture icons like Jana Kramer (and Julianne Hough before her) have a foot in the door to begin with as they have a pre-made legion of fans from the TV shows they were featured on. Because American Idol has become passe after so many seasons, I don’t think it carries (pun intended) the weight it once did.

Because solo female artists and female fronted acts usually only account for 10 to 20 % (usually closer to 10) of the typical Top 30 chart list, there is no reason for country radio to actively seek out more female artists. Now if Carrie, Taylor, and Miranda disappeared tonight there would be a scramble to find another three or so female artists to take their slots, but that would be about it.

When a great song like Sunny Sweeney’s “Drink Myself Single” tanks at Top 40 country radio, it just reinforces my conviction that the entire country radio establishment is controlled by AirHeads who program mediocrity to cater to their AirHead listeners. The entire format could dry up and blow away tomorrow like a tumbleweed and I wouldn’t even care…

Of course, both of them were products of an earlier era. Even Cash didn’t get that level of respect from his label in the ’80s.

Dolly Parton’s last shot at a radio hit was something called “Romeo”–featuring Billy Ray Cyrus!–when she was all of 47.

Actually, George Strait’s having a slew of top-10 and #1 hits throughout his 50′s is something unprecedented in music and radio history. It’s rather amazing that he accomplished that in this era.

I, too remember just a short while ago reading about how women were dominating country music, both artistically and sales-wise.

The people who run the record companies and radio stations put out whatever they think will sell.

It’s a shame, because I think country radio could do a better job of satisfying everybody if they were to mix in new music from Don Williams, Marty Stuart, or Rosanne Cash on occasion.

Country music was never really without female artists and some of them have always had commercial success. What Kitty Wells did was show that a female solo artist could sustain that level of success for years and even decades.

How can they be more daunting now than they were pre-Kitty Wells? Or is that big chunk of country music’s history not part of “ever?”

It wasn’t so long ago – back in those late 90s that Blake mentions – that magazines were full of stories bemoaning the dominance of women and the virtual disappearance of male artists from the country charts. I know that to someone for whom 10 or 12 years represents the great majority of their age-of-awareness years, that seems like forever and a day ago, but in the scheme of things in a genre closing in on its 100th anniversary, it ain’t. I see no good reason to believe that this is any more of a permanent trend than the female domination of the late 90s was.

More curious is how these women are being defined by such a limited character, generally a sundress-wearing, truck-driving, preacher’s daughter with a Bible in one hand and a beer in the other.

God forbid any of the Peach Pickers should read that, or that description would end up, verbatim, in one of their songs.

I think it’s revealing just how quiet all of country’s current A-list women have been with regard to Kitty Wells’ passing. In the past two days, the genre’s legends (Parton, Lynn, Mandrell), “alt” acts (Cantrell, Willis, Cook), and JV squad (Pickler, Sweeney, Roberts) have all paid respect to Wells to varying degrees, as have countless others.

But not a single one of the women who rank among the genre’s biggest stars (Lambert, Underwood, Swift, Scott, Perry, Nettles), most of whom fall within the age range of the social media generation who can’t *not* make public statements and several of whom very quickly went on record about the deaths of Whitney Houston and Donna Summer, has had anything to say about the Queen of the genre they now ostensibly lead.

Of course, no one person is obligated to share a sense of grief publicly, but the fact that *none* of the women who currently top the country charts and who contend for the country music industry awards needed to express so much as a #RIPKittyWells just seems bizarre to me. I honestly can’t imagine anything comparable happening among the current torchbearers in any other genre if a true icon of Wells’ stature died.

As far as silences go, this one just strikes me as particularly loaded and, ultimately, sad. And, taken more broadly, it would indicate the extent to which Wells’ influence and significance have, in fact, already been “swept aside.”