From Kitty Wells to Trans Rights

The History Behind "Honky Tonk Farms & Apothecary"

Jun 17, 2025

Names are important. They’re what people know us by. They often have deeper meanings or are just something fun. The name of my farm is a bit of both.

If you knew me back when Twitter was alive and well (RIP), you knew me when I adopted the username, “honkytonkwitch,” which followed me to Instagram and TikTok as well. I can’t even remember really how it started, but I know I wanted something other than my full name as my username, and the timing coincided with my deep dive into music history and dabbling with witchcraft (as one does).

When I decided I would one day start my own business, “Honky Tonk ___” became the placeholder name, and it stuck. When I created my LLC, I knew the name would be “Honky Tonk Farms & Apothecary”; it wasn’t really a choice. The name goes a lot deeper, however, than a joke from the bygone days of Twitter or WitchTok. It’s my attempt to honor trailblazers and to situate myself, and all my identities and passions, in the South. To understand why the name has stuck, we have to take a trip back in time, to 1952.

On May 3, 1952, Kitty Wells recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” a song Rolling Stone called “country’s greatest diss track.” It was a direct response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” which blames a woman for leaving her husband for the night life at a time when divorce rates were rising. Wells’ rebuttal challenges the notion that it’s always the woman’s fault, arguing that “from the start most every heart that’s ever broken / was because there always was a man to blame.” That was a bold line to sing in 1952, especially in country music, but despite NBC banning the song from airplay and the Grand Ole Opry refusing to allow Wells to perform it (until audience demand forced their hand), “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” kicked “The Wild Side of Life” out of the No. 1 spot on the country charts and became the first single by a solo woman artist to achieve that No. 1 spot. Kitty Wells inspired more women to join country music, including Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette, whose supergroup called themselves the “Honky Tonk Angels” in Wells’ honor.

Women didn’t fit the image of the stereotypical country music star at the time, which isn’t surprising given country music’s inability to reckon with its origins. Nashville’s false narratives, to me, are summed up in one highly-contested instrument: the banjo.

The banjo is perhaps the quintessential piece of bluegrass music, which is often credited as being the precursor to modern country music and given origins in Scottish and Irish immigrants. As multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens points out, the banjo was firstly the instrument of West African griots. Enslaved Africans, with their incredible musical knowledge and skills, brought with them their memories of this instrument and recreated it as the banjo in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Music historian Francesca T. Royster writers that, “for its first one hundred years in the United States, the banjo was seen by white commentators as primarily an instrument of Black people.” White people didn’t pick up the banjo until they wanted to use it to humiliate Black people and culture through minstrelsy. Then, white people could pretend they created the banjo and learned to play it all on their own, erasing the Black inventors, musicians, and teachers entirely from the story.

Now, even today, Black banjo players like Giddens, Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla continue to tell the real history, all the while country music’s white executives and fans deny it. Country music’s racism started long before Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter. Long before Linda Martell became the first Black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry in 1970 (before subsequently being blackballed by her former manager at Plantation Records). Long, even, before Nina Simone (who called herself primarily a folk artist), coined the term “United Snakes of America” or received broken copies of her 1963 “Mississippi Goddam” in the mail from the Southern radio stations she sent the records to.

If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering how this music history lesson relates to farming. I opened by saying the name of my farm is an attempt to honor trailblazers, some of whom you’ve just read the names and stories of, as well as to orient myself in this world. At the same time that I took the name “honkytonkwitch,” I came out as “something not quite cisgender.” I would experiment with pronouns, gender labels, and even names, all while watching white, colonial, Christian nationalism preach the evils of “transgenderism,” much like they preached against abolition, women’s suffrage, desegregation, sex work, queer sexuality, Islam, and undocumented immigration status.

If women were one of the national scapegoats of the fifties, then trans people are one of the national scapegoats of today. Last year, the hot topic was trans women in sports; earlier this year, it was pro-Palestinian activists with student visas; and, at the time of this writing, the young terrorist organization, ICE, is rounding up our undocumented immigrant neighbors (and any brown or Black person they want to under that excuse).

Agriculture in the US, like country music, has also refused to tell the truth about its history and is another field in which cishet white men remain the poster children. Even movements that position themselves as opposing conventional agriculture don’t tell the full stories. Namely, that the farming practices that make up modern “organic agriculture” are ancient Indigenous practices. Building healthy soils, regenerating grazing land, sustaining the environment through farming (and, yes, even permaculture) are the ways Indigenous peoples across the world have always farmed: from the Ovambo peoples’ raised beds in present-day Ghana & Namibia and the interplanted milpas used throughout Turtle Island to the Amazon’s black earth and the terraced orchards of Palestine. Even before the creation of the USDA’s National Organic Program, these farming practices were revitalized in US agriculture decades before by Black farmers and scientists like George Washington Carver.

I don’t really know what place any of us will have in whatever type of country this will become, but I know I want to cultivate a place where the scapegoats of the world can be safe and tend to the earth and each other.

Dolly Parton, whose own style was inspired by a sex worker in her hometown, took the name “Honky Tonk Angels” as a badge of honor. Nina Simone took every returned, broken record as a sign her message was making an impact (even if the radio executives were completely missing the point). She channeled her anger into her art.

I may be too young to have ever two-stepped in a real honky tonk, but I hope I'm creating a space in agriculture with room for everyone who may not fit the stereotype. I hope I can play a small part in making my community a better place.

And I hope that Honky Tonk Farms & Apothecary will be my own diss track to the lie that trans people don’t belong in farming or in the South. We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere. Pick up a banjo or a hoe, or get out of our way.

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