ALYNDA LEE SEGARRA:“IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO GET DOWN WITH BEYONCÉ”
DORA MORTIMER MEETS THE NATIVE NEW YORKER BEHIND COUNTRY MUSIC OUTSIDERS, HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
Country music has never been cool. I really like country music. I’ll argue against the ropes for its inherent queerness. I have a friend who switches the TV off at the slightest whiff of a six-stringed guitar. I am not that person. I am the person who asks the Uber driver to turn up Country FM.
Cut to me, very excited to be sharing a green room with Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray For The Riff Raff before their Leicester show. Along with artists like Alabama Shakes, HFTRR form part of a movement politicising country music. With its chequered nationalist history, does Segarra see herself as working within a country tradition or queering it?
“There’s the country world and then there’s the folk world and I’m somewhere in-between. I see myself as one of the outsiders of country music.”