In September 2007, Rissi Palmer’s debut single “Country Girl” entered Billboard’s Hot Country

Song chart, making her the first Black female artist to chart in twenty years, and one of just

seven Black women in the history of the Country music industry. With short life cycles on the

chart, songs by these women left faint data-trails marking their time in the industry. As a result,

their careers received limited attention from the press, their music was not widely distributed,

their contributions went unrecognized by the industry, and they remain largely unknown to

country music fans. More critically, when a campaign emerged in 2015 to address the declining

presence of women on country radio (Watson 2019), Black women had been so invisibilized by

the system that they were left out of the discussion about industry’s discriminatory culture

(Watson 2020). In an industry tightly centered around documenting, preserving, and promoting

its heritage, the careers of Black female artists have been erased from the genre’s historical

narrative.

Theories of social remembering (Misztal 2003; Strong 2011), institutional discrimination

(Collins 1990; Ahmed 2014, 2019) and digital redlining (Noble 2018) offer a critical framework

for considering the credibility of charts and industry data within cultural systems that

disadvantage white women and systematically ignore Black, Indigenous and women of colour.

Reflecting on nearly a decade of data-driven research on Country music radio, charts, and

recognition systems, this presentation considers the role of industry data in the process of

structuring and reinforcing Country music’s discriminatory culture. The title of this talk points to

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) work on the production of history, expanding on his framework

for thinking about how gaps in industry data contribute to the production of silences within

Country music’s historical narrative. In so doing, this talk aims to reframe our understanding of

industry data as an instrument that continually “remembers” and canonizes some artists, while

“casting away” or “forgetting” others, ultimately dictating whose stories get preserved.