The Rise and Fall of an Ozark Princess
David with some thoughts on Chappell Roan, her new single and Missouri Origins
As a lifelong Midwesterner, and fellow Missourian, I love that Chappel Roan titled her breakthrough album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. That “Midwest” is a little indeterminate, a little generic, but in a way that in American terms feels expansive, open-armed and open-ended, an ideal match for the album’s big, queer, pop ambition. It tracks, too, that a Princess of the Midwest variety would experience her fortunate fall into drag queen aesthetics, as Roan says she did, at the Kansas City, MO, location of drag-themed restaurant chain Hamburger Mary’s. Still, I must admit that I’ve wished more than once that her title had been a bit more biographically precise: The Rise and Fall of an Ozark Princess. Maybe swapping Midwest for the-closer-to-hand Ozark, with its hillbilly connotations and associations with The South more generally, was a necessary first step on her journey out of the Ozarks and towards Hollywood.
I thought of Roan the Ozark Princess again last week when she released her queer country hoedown “The Giver,” a studio version of the song she’d debuted on SNL back in November. The record’s most obvious foremother is the anthemic fiddle-and-stomp of Shania Twain. Like most everything off her album last year, “The Giver” also sounds like Roan crammed the Taylor Sift songbook pretty hard, just as millions of other young women have done this past decade, and like she knows her Chicks well too. (I also hear a lot of Madonna in her work, speaking of midwestern princesses.) But her latest song’s chorus, and those “Na-Na-Na’s,” had me flashing specifically on drag-queen adjacent Dolly Parton-hits from the late ‘70s. Those men’s voices chanting “She gets the job done” called to mind the campy (but don’t tell them that!) Big & Rich.
Such country-pop precedents are just part of the atmosphere throughout the Midwest but even more so in the Ozarks where Roan grew up. Down there, whether you like it or not, hearing country music is as inescapable as the “amber clay roads” of southern Missouri she misses in her song “California.” Country radio is as familiar down there as knowing that your hometown is the birthplace of both Bass Pro Shops and cashew chicken. Many people, Roan included, keep talking about “The Giver” as her country turn. Maybe re-turn is more like it.
Chappel Roan, nee Kayleigh Amstutz, grew up in the Missouri Ozarks—specifically in Willard, Missouri (population 6,521. Salute!). Willard’s a small town like maybe you’ve heard sung about, but like so many American small towns, it’s not super rural. Rather, it’s a suburb of Springfield, the Show Me State’s third largest city and part of a metro area now pushing half a million people. In terms of geography and relative population, Springfield (where Roan’s folks owned a veterinary practice) is to Kansas City and St. Louis what Knoxville is to Nashville and Memphis. Situated along the old Route 66 (now officially the College Street Corridor, so sad), Springfield is the home of Brad Pitt and Kathleen Turner as well as Roan’s exact contemporary, Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny, who competed against Roan in Springfield talent shows: “She would always win,” Spaeny told People.
To the extent this part of Missouri is known nationally, it's for country music and hillbilly tourism. The 1950s TV program The Ozark Jubilee was recorded at Springfield’s Jewell Theater, hosted by Red Foley and starring, for a time, a young Porter Wagoner. Brenda Lee and Wanda Jackson, each an early propagator of old-school-straight-girl-styled “HOT TO GO!” energy, got their breaks on the program, as well. The old Gillioz Theater, where parts of the “HOT TO GO” video were shot (featuring guest spots from her grandparents), sits a block west from where The Jewell once stood.
Even more on point here, both Branson (the G-rated “Vegas of the Midwest” and home of legacy country stars) and Silver Dollar City (the proto-Dollywood amusement park) are nestled amidst wooded hills and ridges just 45 minutes or so straight south from Springfield. Branson and Silver Dollar City are major tourist attractions, traps if you prefer, and related varieties of hickface are on display throughout the region. The Dogpatch cosplay of Roan and her band’s SNL performance differs from normal Ozark hickface mainly by degree: She leans harder into the artifice, she’s more gender and genre fluid, she sure looks like she’s having more fun. Joy—needing it, seeking it, finding or inventing it, sharing it—is a through line in her work.
The other important context to understand about the world Roan felt she had to leave is how pervasive fundamentalist Christianity is throughout the region—and how culturally and politically conservative it is. Branson made national headlines in 2018, when Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede dinner theater belatedly dropped the “Dixie” from its name, and again in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter moment, when a store, Dixie Outfitters, refused to cease selling Confederate flags. In Missouri last year, Donald Trump received 71% of the vote, but in Greene and surrounding counties down to the Arkansas state line, he got nearer to 90%. Before the election, Roan announced she was voting for Kamala Harris but declined to endorse the Democratic candidate. "Fuck Trump for fucking real,” she said at the time. “But fuck some of the shit that has gone down in the Democratic Party that has failed people like me and you — and, more so, Palestine, and more so, every marginalized community in the world.” Sounds like the right answer to me. But just keep in mind the dozens of personal, and perhaps even intimate, Greene County bridges she’s likely burning by saying all that out loud. Maybe you know the feeling.
(It’s been impressive to me how often Roan has the right answers—and how sound her instincts are even when, to my mind, she gets it wrong. Her call that fans shouldn’t feel entitled to paw celebrities, for instance, was a righteous stand for a young star to take. Her call from the Grammy stage that the music industry needs to provide health care, including mental health care, for developing artists was righteous, too, but didn’t go nearly far enough. After all, tying health care access to employment generally and to corporations specifically is a major part of the problem. Up-and-coming musical artists do need health care, of course, but you know who else needs health care? Fans. Also: Everyone else.)
Springfield is home to the national headquarters for the Assemblies of God. Roan has said when she was a kid her family went to church three times a week. (I don’t know to what denomination the Amstutzes belonged, but that detail does echo what my family did when we attended the Assembly of God in Grandview, MO when I was a tween.) Evangel University, the Assemblies of God theological seminary, is located in Springfield, as well. The Assemblies of God presence and influence in the area is heavy. On the other hand, the Christian values of southern Missouri sometimes manifest in ways that feel more cartoonish than devout. Just an hour west from Willard, in Carthage, MO, you can enjoy baby Bible-story drag at the Precious Moments Chapel and Garden, where the embrace of cutesy artifice is all there is.
But the region’s fundamentalism is more often oppressive in ways that go far beyond aesthetics. Before Roan, the most famous person ever to come from Willard was the state’s former Governor and U.S. Senator John Ashcroft, himself the son of an Assembly of God minister. As U.S. Attorney General, Ashcroft covered the bare breast of the Spirit of Justice statue during press conferences and banned acknowledgements of Gay Pride in the George W. Bush Justice Department. In 2006, when Roan was eight, Missourians voted overwhelmingly to add an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting gay marriage. Roan’s own uncle, Darin Chappel, is currently a Republican state rep with a rep for sponsoring anti-abortion bills.
(Not directly relevant but not irrelevant either: In a real-life case of Footloose just an hour south of Springfield, the Purdy, MO school district won the right to prohibit student dancing in a 1990 Supreme Court decision.)
We could go on and on like this, but you get the idea. Roan’s conservative Christian background is already well known by fans—she’s talked about it often—but I wanted to share more details of her world, the better to underscore specifically what it was she was running from in that “dying” Missouri town, as she’s sung, and the multiple cruel roadblocks to her dreams coming true there. And also why the most immediate concern for the version of herself she’s playing in “Pink Pony Club” is to worry about how shocked her mom will be when news gets around. The locale in that song, by the way, was at least partly inspired by The Pony, a now defunct strip club tucked into a Springfield strip mall. (Today the space houses a Rumors Cabaret, across the street there from an O’Reilly Auto Parts; if you get to the Kum & Go you’ve gone too far.)
I also wanted to suggest that Chappell Roan’s return to the country music she grew up with, whether “The Giver” is a one-off or gets folded into a larger project, is perhaps a way of reminding herself that, even though she had to leave it, she found plenty of joy in her old hometown. People she loves live there still, parts of herself she loves began there, and she can always come and go as needed. I can confirm from personal experience that she wouldn’t be the first small-town kid to embrace country music that way.
Of course, the “strip mall town of dreams” Roan sings about in “The Giver” could be located almost anywhere in in the Midwest, or in most of America for that matter. But it sure sounds like Springfield to me, “Queen City of the Ozarks.”
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I grew up in Carthage, worked summers in factories and at the city pool in Monett while in Fayetteville and Springfield for college, taught at Springfield Parkview from 1984 to 1990 (Chappell's dad Dwight Amstutz was a junior class officer under my sponsorship in 1989-1990, and her mom was a freshman there that year)--and yeah, you nailed it first sentence to last. She's a reason for me to be proud to be a Missourian--there aren't as many as I would like, that's for sure.
Loved this, David, as always when you write about place, class, and country. One thought: I take your point re: Roan's Grammys health-care speech, but I looked at it more like she was staging a workplace action - the bosses who potentially could change health-care arrangements for musicians were *there in that room*, so while it would have been better if she'd added something like "until we have universal health care across the nation", it made sense to me that she was addressing what the music industry *itself can change, *now, in the absence of that broader change. After all, the only change on that front coming from Washington today would be for the worse. I was more disappointed that she and everyone else didn't directly confront that regime in their speeches - though she did address the trans part, on the red carpet - but she was taking the opportunity to say something practical and also obviously very personal to her.