Lari White Revealed She Faced Gender Discrimination in Unpublished Interview

Lari White had a string of hits in the ’90s, including “That’s My Baby,” “Now I Know” and “Ready, Willing and Able,” among others. Enjoying time on the charts along with fellow female vocalists like Shania Twain, Patty Loveless, Martina McBride and more, it may seem like that decade was a time when women reigned on the radio, but the reality is it was just as hard then as it is now.

White tragically passed away on Tuesday, Jan. 23, after a valiant battle with peritoneal cancer. At the time of her death, White, married to fellow songwriter Chuck Cannon and proud mother to three children, was still performing and writing, enjoying the freedom of expressing her creativity without the constraints of a major record label.

In a previously-unpublished interview with White, Rolling Stone‘s Joseph Fenity shares what a trail-blazer the singer really was, and the challenges she overcame to become one of the leading women of country in the ’90s.

“When I first started doing my little radio tour going around to visit [radio station] program directors with RCA – before my first record ever came out ,” White recalled, “you wouldn’t believe how many program directors looked me in the eye and said, ‘You know I’d love to hear your music, but we’ve already got a female act that we’re playing’ or ‘We’re already playing two female acts,’ or ‘We’ve already got two female artists on the Top 20. So, you know, too bad!’ There were a lot of great women making a lot of great music out of Nashville in the country genre at that time. We all kind of carried each other along.”

Encumbered by the constraints of country radio, White penned “Don’t Fence Me In,” the title track of her third studio album. The song, which said, “Just turn me loose / Let me straddle my old saddle / Underneath the western sky / Let me wander over yonder / ‘Til I see the mountains rise,” became White’s anthem for making her music, her way.

“I’d had a gold record, I’d had hits on the radio and I was already kind of chafing, wanting to expand and bring some of the jazz influences and some of the other genres and styles of music that I had loved and had been a part of my musical development,” she explained. “It didn’t take very long for me to feel like the country radio box was a little too small. So that’s what Don’t Fence Me In was all about. Getting Shelby Lynne and Trisha Yearwood to come on and be guest singers, doing the whole Andrews Sisters version at the beginning of the album and then reprising it with the rockabilly version at the end. I was really trying not to have just another ten-song hoedown record.”

White may have continued chasing down big record deals, but having a child changed the entire trajectory of her life.

“It also put the whole career thing into a little different perspective,” she said. “I’d always wanted to be a mom. Actually, being a mom was always my top priority. It was like, ‘I’m going to be a star and I’m going to get done with that and then I’m going to go be a mom.’”

White was 52 years old when she passed away. Her latest album, Old Friends, was released last year.

Photo Credit: Facebook/Lari White