Country music's next round of festival lineups is rolling out, and the results are decidedly mixed when it comes to booking women. Texas' Two Step Inn, set for April 17 and 18 in Georgetown, Texas, has tapped Ella Langley to headline one night, with Brooks & Dunn anchoring the other. The bill also includes Kaitlin Butts and Carter Faith, who will perform a Dolly Parton tribute together, along with Flatland Calvary, Stella Lefty, Sheryl Crow, Michelle Branch, and first-generation Mexican-American band Los Hermanos Mendoza. The festival also gives stage time to veteran artists Jo Dee Messina, Pam Tillis, and Lorrie Morgan.
Chicago's Windy City Smokeout 2027 has similarly booked Megan Moroney as one of its four headliners, alongside three male artists.
By contrast, Stagecoach's headline slots are filled entirely by men: Riley Green, Zach Top, Garth Brooks, and Florida Georgia Line, who take the late-night slot. Gulf Coast Jam, scheduled for June in Panama Beach, Florida, follows the same pattern, with Bailey Zimmerman, Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and Zach Top headlining. Reps for Gulf Coast Jam told Rolling Stone that the festival's complete lineup will be released on the afternoon of Sept. 24.
Stagecoach's lower-billed acts tell a different story, featuring Brothers Osborne, Willie Nelson, Kelly Clarkson, Stephen Wilson Jr., Charley Crockett, Shaboozey, Maggie Antone, Butts, and Faith, along with out-of-genre names like Matchbox Twenty, the Fray, Melissa Etheridge, Sean Paul, Flo Rida, and Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. A rep for Goldenvoice, which promotes Stagecoach, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the organization Book More Women, Stagecoach's overall lineup is only 17.6 percent women, with 0.0 percent of the bill made up of nonbinary or trans artists.
The imbalance comes during a year when women have dominated country music's biggest storylines — Langley is breaking records, Musgraves has one of the genre's most talked-about tours, and Shania Twain is being celebrated anew. The source article also points to Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields as an example of a festival driven by a female artist's popularity. It notes that most festivals, including Two Step Inn, also feature no more than one or two Black country artists on their bills.
Photo: BrDen, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
