It is hardly surprising within the closed world of country music to come across fathers infantilising their young. Daughters typically bear the brunt of such ostentatious displays of masculinity, with songs like ‘Daddy’s Girl’ by Red Sovine serving as staples of country radio in the hard trucking, heavy drinking, frequently philandering, altogether dirty South.
But why do the women themselves so often get in on the action? Truly the psychological traumas inflicted by systems of patriarchy know no bounds. They even seep into creative endeavours, just like the seed of man seeps willy-nilly into all sorts of nooks and crannies until what do you know, the average southern belle has only gone and borne six or seven kids.
Whether they’re lamenting their own departed husbands or fondly reminiscing on all those times they were harshly scolded in their youth, abusive and absconded daddies litter the songs of our country music queens. There’s Dolly Parton’s ‘To Daddy’, covered in all of its agony by dear Emmylou, Tammy Wynette’s ‘My Daddy Doll’, ‘Buy Me A Daddy’, and ‘She Didn’t Color Daddy’, which together find her daughter as though stuck on repeat, and Loretta Lynn’s ‘They Don’t Make ’em Like My Daddy’, which reads more like an ode, Lynn evidently suffering from something like Stockholm syndrome.
If daddies – for the most part – are always up to no good, why keep calling them daddies? When does a daddy become just another damn man? And what a shock it is to contemporary society when even Beyoncé, the gurning face of female empowerment, expresses clinging devotion to her daddy too.
The track ‘Daddy Lessons’ was released back in April as part of the cinematic opus Lemonade. It finds Beyoncé yee-hawing and namechecking her Texas roots, before subverting expectations in the worst possible way. A militaristic manifesto on the unbreakable bond between a stern daddy and his striving little girl, Beyoncé overlooks her father’s faithless transgressions all because he made her like a soldier, strong, tough, and in this case utterly tasteless.
With a nod to the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, Béyonce invokes the Bible and shoots her rifle gun. ‘Daddy Lessons’ was performed by Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards at the start of November. Alongside the usually similarly tenacious Dixies, tearing down the patriarchy should have been like so many fish in a barrel, but with this pastiche of old country, Beyoncé has instead set the women’s movement back years.
