She might not look like or sound like what you think of when you think of outlaw country. But Mickey Guyton is an outlaw.

Not only that, but she’s the biggest, baddest outlaw artist the genre has seen in decades. Hear me out.

February 2020: Mickey Guyton Debuts “What Are You Gonna Tell Her” at CRS

Back in February 2020, Mickey Guyton walked into a crowd of music industry insiders during Nashville’s Country Radio Seminar (CRS), ready to kill her career.

On that stage, she debuted a freshly-written song called “What Are You Gonna Tell Her.” For an industry showcase that artists often use to preview songs they’re hoping will head to country radio, it was a telling choice.

“What Are You Gonna Tell Her” is, to put it mildly, not country radio’s kind of song. It’s not uptempo, it’s not feel-good, and it doesn’t include a single mention of trucks or beer or boots.

It’s about growing up female and Black, raised to believe you can do anything, and then confronted by a world and an industry that will never offer you the same chances it will afford your white male counterparts.

“I was very much walking in there thinking, ‘Alright, this is the death of my career right here,'” Guyton tells Taste of Country.

At that point, she’d been doing Nashville the Nashville way for almost a decade. She’d even broken country radio’s Top 40 with her debut single “Better Than You Left Me.” But after years of being passed over, she was ready to give up, and already making plans to quit music and move to California with her husband.

“I had nothing left anyway,” she says. “There was nothing left for me to kill…I was preparing for that. I was not preparing for the reaction it received.”

What Happened After Mickey Guyton Debuted “What Are You Gonna Tell Her”?

That reaction was a rapt audience, a standing ovation, and a whole new direction for Guyton’s career: This time, focused on songs like “Black Like Me,” “All American” and “Love My Hair,” that overtly embraced her experience as a Black artist living in America.

She still wasn’t getting radio play, but she was getting a hosting spot at the ACM Awards and gigs to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl and perform at the Democratic National Convention.

Mickey Guyton didn’t become an outlaw when she debuted “What Are You Gonna Tell Her” at CRS. She’d actually been one since the very start of her career. But it was the first time the public took notice.

What is Outlaw Country?

Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, an entirely different group of artists — Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson —were breaking away from the country industry’s rigid constraints, rejecting the then-industry-standard “Nashville Sound” for something grittier, realer, rawer.

They grew their hair long, traded the preferred clean-cut look for rock-inspired leather and denim, and recorded in different studios — often in Texas instead of Tennessee — to make music their way rather than bowing to a record label.

Read More: What is Outlaw Country Music in 2026? Three Outlaws Weigh In

The sound associated with the movement was less varnished and had more in common with rock ‘n’ roll, but most of outlaw country’s artists and heirs agree that what the music itself sounded like had little to do with the definition.

What made an outlaw an outlaw was the desire to break free from Nashville’s systems and limitations and exert creative freedom.

What is Outlaw Country Music Today?  

Many of today’s outlaws, like Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson, still fly the flag for challenging the genre on a systemic level.

But in other cases, that original definition has gotten lost. Plenty of artists today draw musical inspiration from the outlaw movement and label themselves outlaws because their sound echoes the ’70s and they project a broadly rebellious artistic identity.

But many of them don’t necessarily challenge the same systems that outlaw once did. Eric Church, Hardy and Zach Bryan are some considered “outlaw” by fans due to persona or musical style, but they don’t match the original crew’s level of system-bucking.

“When you look back at Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson and all those people…they were actually outlaws in the sense that they were willing to challenge the systems they saw were not working for people, particularly underserved communities,” says Holly G, who is an industry advocate and the founder of the Black Opry.

“It is completely ironic that…a large majority of the white men who are [positioning] themselves as outlaw are also super pro-government and supporting an administration that is taking rights away from people,” she continues.

In 2021, Holly founded the Black Opry as a collective seeking to amplify Black country artists onstage and foster connections between them. She was inspired to do so by her experience as a Black country fan feeling unsafe when she attended shows.

The group’s fan club is called the Black Opry Outlaw Fan Club, and at their very first meetup, they called themselves The Outlaw House.

“We felt like we were forced to be outlaws because we were outcasts,” Holly explains.

Black country fans are inherently outsiders, and so too are artists like Guyton, who challenge the genre’s systems simply by existing in a Black, female body as they sang country music.

Mickey Guyton Was An Outlaw Since The Beginning Of Her Career

Holly had known about Guyton since her early days, and remembers it was “exciting” to see her as the sole Black artist included in CMT’s Next Women of Country class of 2014. (This class also included Maddie & Tae and Kelsea Ballerini.) Later on, journalist Marissa Moss hired Holly to research Guyton for a book she was writing, and as part of that research, Holly read every single tweet Guyton had ever published.

Holly describes feeling like she was going through Guyton’s career with her in real time, performing at all the touchstone venues artists play as they try to climb the ranks in Nashville.

“It’s a case study in: You can do everything right, you can have all the right pieces fall into place, but if you’re not the person that Nashville wants, they’re not going to give you what they’re giving the boys,” she sums up.

Guyton says that in the beginning, she put faith in the advice that the white male executives were giving her. As years passed and her career stalled, it became increasingly apparent that they didn’t understand how her path differed from the white artists’, and they seemed unwilling to learn.

“I just thought that they knew better, and it turned out they knew nothing,” Guyton says. “And it caused me to suffer greatly. At a certain point, I was like…’You can try to fit a square in a circle all you want, but that square ain’t ever gonna fit in that circle.'”

There is one key difference between Guyton’s story and that of the original outlaws. Their move into outlaw was a venture. Hers was survival.

How Is Mickey Guyton’s Outlaw Career Different From the Outlaws of the ’70s?

Jennings was a top earner at RCA when he decided to stop doing Nashville the Nashville way. His success allowed him to parlay his existing label deal into an agreement where he could record music on his terms. He’d already had numerous radio hits.

“And he was also a white male,” Guyton deadpans.

The first batch of outlaws created a subgenre that’s now spanned decades, and was given the chance to become extremely commercially successful. In 1976, the compilation album Wanted! The Outlaws became the first country album ever to go platinum.

Read More: How Wanted! The Outlaws Made Country Music History

But Guyton wrote “What Are You Gonna Tell Her” and “Black Like Me” out of pure frustration and catharsis. Even after her bombshell debut at CRS, and all the doors that opened for her in the aftermath, there was still a ceiling for what she could achieve in commercial country. And it was pretty dang low.

Guyton thinks there “would have never, ever, ever been a world” where that standing ovation at CRS translated into radio success for “What Are You Gonna Tell Her.”

“They don’t like complicated feelings and emotions like that, especially coming from a Black woman,” she says. “They receive that from a Zach Bryan or a Jelly Roll, but there’s something about a Black woman that some people just can’t really stomach. It’s a fact.”

I asked Guyton if she thinks her decision to sing overtly about race made the path to success easier for Black male artists like Breland and Shaboozey. She replied that while that’s a “great sentiment,” country music has always had a more welcoming ear for Black men than their female counterparts.

That sounds bleak and unfair, because it is bleak and unfair. Guyton, and so many other Black women, were and continue to be stonewalled by the industry. From the moment in 1969 when Linda Martell became the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry, to Rissi Palmer‘s career to Beyoncé‘s chilly reception after Cowboy Carter, the story of Black female country music is one of artists entering a musical space where they are largely unwanted, and having to fight for every scrap of success they earn.

Read More: Beyoncé ‘Did Not Feel Welcomed’ Into Country Music

Of course Guyton grieved the career she would have had, had she not been a Black woman. She doesn’t downplay the injustices her career has handed her, but she doesn’t downplay the joy she’s found in music, either. Being an outlaw — and embracing it — has afforded her considerable freedom.

How Did Being An Outlaw Save Mickey Guyton’s Career?

Songs like “Black Like Me” and “What Are You Gonna Tell Her” might never find a major foothold in the industry, but they electrified her fan base. And without those songs, Guyton wouldn’t be doing music at all today.

For a few years leading up to 2020, she felt directionless, releasing music that didn’t seem to resonate either with her or with fans. In many important ways, Guyton rebirthed her musical identity when she stopped caring about trying to fit the paradigm, both in her lyrics and in the way her music sounds.

“I can do whatever the hell I want,” Guyton says. “Isn’t that the point of being an artist?”

“And that is absolutely a form of rebellion, because you don’t own me,” she continues. “I don’t belong to you. I belong to myself. And I will do what I want. I think every artist should do that regardless of gender, regardless of race, color, creed, everything. You should be able to do, as an artist, what you want to do.”