Margo Price’s debut opens with Hands of Time, seemingly a compendium of country cliches. She leaves home just $57 from broke, tears in her eyes, leaving the daddy who lost the farm when she was two. She goes to the city, plays the bars, meets bad men, drinks too hard, loses a baby, decides she has to make some money to buy back the farm. What’s startling is that it’s the true story of Price’s adulthood. It’s just one of many ways Midwest Farmer’s Daughter startles: as when, musically, she mixes girl-group pop with Nashville country on How the Mighty Have Fallen; the way she deals harshly with the culture of drinking (her own included) on Since You Put Me Down: “And all the vampires at the bar / They won’t ever get too far / They’re just sucking all of the good blood out of this town.” There’s an explicit debt to predecessors such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, and it’s no surprise that the album has come out – a decade after Price starting playing around Nashville – on Jack White’s Third Man records; it’s an album for whom “authenticity” is crucial, but it’s all the better for it.
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