# Six Texas Women Carrying Country Music on Their Backs > Texas women in country music don't wait for Nashville's permission — they earn it on the Texas circuit first. From a Galveston County nurse who picked up a guitar at 50 and scored back-to-back No. 1s, to a kid from Golden who swept the Grammys, six artists show exactly how deep the pipeline runs. **By:** Marcus Bellamy Shaw **Published:** June 7, 2026 **Tags:** country music, female artists --- ## The Grassroots End: Amanda Kate Ferris and Sandee June Amanda Kate Ferris grew up in Red River, New Mexico — a no-stoplight town — but she's been Texan in every way that counts since she landed in Midlothian. The daughter of Kathy Wright, one of the original Dean Martin Golddiggers from the 1960s television era, Ferris absorbed performance from the womb. She chased Nashville in 2012, hit the honky-tonk circuit, even worked a reception desk at CMT dreaming of walking back through the front door as an artist. She left. Her mother's stage four lung cancer diagnosis pulled her home, and the tribute album they built together — _Time_ — changed the trajectory. What followed is a lesson in Texas-circuit patience. "Tequila & Jesus" hit No. 1 on the Texas Country Radio chart in May 2024, marking her first solo chart-topper, and "Same Place Twice" with the Chad Cooke Band followed it to the top of the same chart later that year. At the 2024 Texas Regional Radio Music Awards she took home New Female Vocalist of the Year. Her latest full-length, _Rope the Wind_ — featuring songs penned by Grammy winners Hillary Lindsey, Liz Rose, Lori McKenna, and Lainey Wilson — now sits past 1.2 million streams. She's also the self-described founder of the Women of Texas Country Music movement, running the [@womenoftxcountry](https://www.instagram.com/womenoftxcountry/) handle with the quiet conviction of someone who knows exactly what she's fighting for. Then there's Sandee June — and her story makes Ferris's late start look almost conventional. After spending more than 30 years raising her children and building a career in nursing, she picked up a guitar at age 50 and taught herself to play. She's a lifelong Texan from Santa Fe — the one in Galveston County, not New Mexico — a registered nurse for 26 years, with a background in cardiothoracic nursing, recovery room, and preoperative care. Her guitar strap carries the inscription "Don't die with the music still inside." Her mother put that in her head years ago. She took it literally. Her version of "Hurricane" honors her family's deep ties to New Orleans and Galveston — specifically the strength of the women in her line who lived through historic storms, including Galveston's Hurricane Carla in 1961. The song spent 19 weeks on the Texas Country chart before claiming No. 1. "Southern King" followed it there. At the 2026 Texas Regional Radio Music Awards at Texas Live! in Arlington, June accepted New Female Vocalist of the Year and told the crowd: "I didn't start a music career until I was 50 years old. I am proof that anything can happen if you put your heart and soul into it." ## The Fort Worth Line: Summer Dean Fort Worth has always had its own country music identity — dirtier than Austin, less packaged than Nashville, honest in a way that makes you put the drink down and listen. Summer Dean is Fort Worth through and through, the product of cattle country in northern Texas, nearly Oklahoma, where she grew up on her family's ranch with Western swing and Texas waltzes as the soundtrack. She taught elementary school for a decade. "That's what small-town Texas girls do," she told _Holler_ — then cashed in the money her mother had set aside for her wedding to fund _Bad Romantic_, her 2021 debut. She recorded it at Niles City Sound, Fort Worth's analog studio on the Near Southside. Texas legend Bruce Robison later heard iPhone demos of her follow-up material and immediately signed on to produce, calling the work "bracing." Dean was named Texas Country Music Awards Female Artist of the Year and 2023 Ameripolitan Honky Tonk Female of the Year. _The Biggest Life_, her second album, was cut completely analog at Robison's Lockhart studio, The Bunker. "It's the most real and vulnerable I've ever been with my writing," she said. The Grand Ole Opry has since listed her as one of the reigning queens of Texas country. At 40-something, she has three albums, a hot five-piece band, and zero plans to sand down the edges. ## The New Braunfels-to-Austin Axis: Bri Bagwell Bri Bagwell was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and moved to Austin at 18 to attend the University of Texas — majoring in marketing at McCombs School of Business, picking up a guitar for the first time in college "because it was easier to carry than a piano." The Red Dirt circuit absorbed her immediately. She released her debut record _Banned from Santa Fe_ in 2011, signed with Sony/ATV Publishing in Nashville by 2012, and then did something most Nashville-aspiring artists don't do: she came back to Texas and _built_. Texas Female Artist of the Decade and nine-time Female Vocalist of the Year, Bagwell has stacked fifteen No. 1 singles on Texas Country Radio. People Magazine puts her name alongside Ashley McBryde and Morgan Wade when writing about country music's truth-tellers. She now calls New Braunfels home, hosts the _Only Vans_ podcast — consistently ranking in global Top 10s — and plays more than 100 shows a year. For over a decade, the highway has been her studio. ## The DFW-to-Nashville Pipeline: Maren Morris Arlington doesn't get enough credit as a launching pad. One square block in downtown Arlington — Center and Mesquite streets — is where Maren Morris first performed on stage to an audience at age 11, and where she spent her teenage years hosting song swaps and playing with her band. Her parents ran the Maren Karsen Aveda salon there. She was playing Texas honky-tonks at 12. At 20, she packed for Nashville — encouraged, according to multiple accounts, by her friend and fellow Texan Kacey Musgraves. She got rejected from both _The Voice_ and _American Idol_, wrote songs for Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson, then released _Hero_ in 2016 to near-unanimous acclaim. Her lead single "My Church" earned her four Grammy nominations and one win for Best Country Solo Performance in 2017. She joined The Highwomen alongside Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and fellow Texan Amanda Shires. By 2023, frustrated with what she called the "toxic arms" of the country music industry, she stepped back from the mainstream apparatus — no award shows, no country radio submissions. Her 2025 album _Dreamsicle_ found her navigating both a divorce and a full identity reshaping, landing somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Studio 54 in her own telling. She's never stopped being a Texan songwriter. She's just refusing to stay in the box the industry built for her. ## East Texas to Everywhere: Kacey Musgraves 🌟 Golden, Texas barely shows up on a map — a Census-designated place in Wood County, about 90 miles east of Dallas, population in the hundreds. It produced one of the most decorated artists in the history of the Grammy Awards. Kacey Musgraves grew up in Golden and attended Mineola High School. She wrote her first song at age 8 for her elementary school graduation. At 12, she started guitar lessons from John DeFoore — the same instructor who taught Miranda Lambert. She and a friend formed the duo Texas Two Bits, released an independent album, and were invited to perform at President George W. Bush's Black Tie and Boots Inaugural Ball. Her grandmother served as her first booking agent, selling CDs out of the trunk. She placed seventh on _Nashville Star_ Season 5 in 2007, got discovered by producer Monte Robison in Austin in 2008, and signed with Mercury Nashville by 2012. _Same Trailer Different Park_ won the Grammy for Best Country Album at the 56th ceremony. _Golden Hour_ swept the 61st Grammys, taking Album of the Year, Best Country Album, Best Country Song, and Best Country Solo Performance — making her only the third artist ever to take home Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards, the CMA Awards, and the ACM Awards. In 2024, her duet with Zach Bryan, "I Remember Everything," became the first country music duet in 40 years to top the Hot 100, following Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers' "Islands in the Stream" in 1983. That win made her the only artist in history to receive a Grammy for Best Country Album, Best Country Song, Best Country Solo Performance, and Best Country Duo or Group Performance. Her 2024 album _Deeper Well_ added her eighth Grammy, for Best Country Song, for "The Architect." She started in a small town with no stoplight. The girl from Golden has run the table. ## The Thread That Connects Them The line between Sandee June playing her first open mic in the Houston area at 50 and Kacey Musgraves accepting Album of the Year at the Grammys is longer than it looks, but it runs straight. These six women are different stops on the same road — the Texas country music pipeline, the one that runs through honky-tonks before it hits arenas, that demands you earn every note before the radio plays it. None of them got handed anything. Most of them were told no. Most of them kept going anyway. **Which of these artists do you think deserves more national attention — and who have you seen live that surprised you?** --- **About the author:** Marcus Bellamy left Michigan in 2024 with his wife Jesi, drove south, and kept driving until the air smelled like the Gulf. They landed in Galveston and decided that was that. He writes about Texas history, culture, and the communities that make this state unlike anywhere else — a perspective sharpened by being someone who chose Texas deliberately, not by accident of birth. His interests run from Gulf Coast fishing and boating to technology, science fiction, and the kind of deep-cut local history most people scroll past. Every Bit Texas is his attempt to make sure those stories don't disappear. --- _Read the full article at [everybittexas.com/posts/six-texas-women-carrying-country-music-on-their-backs](https://everybittexas.com/posts/six-texas-women-carrying-country-music-on-their-backs)_ [← All Posts](https://everybittexas.com/posts/index.md)