Margo Price is the real deal. In an industry where some artists have carefully crafted personas, others are formed by life’s hard knocks and setbacks. For the latter, it is their authentic, unvarnished selves that can shine. Margo Price is very much the latter type of artist.

The evidence for all this is found in Price’s newly released memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It (University of Texas Press). Starting with her family tree and childhood in rural Illinois, Price tells us, with breathtaking honesty and courage, her story to achieve a sustainable career as a singer-songwriter. Through all manner of struggles, humiliations, disappointments, and personal tragedies, Price maintains her perseverance despite being tested to the core.

While dealing largely with the travails of an upstart musician up against the monolithic music industry, from the book’s earliest pages, Price also sheds light on the issue of poverty in America. Price’s parents, despite their industriousness, suffered natural and financial hardships that forced them off their generations-held family farm in the Illinois breadbasket. The trauma of that loss, both material and psychological, affected three generations of Price’s family, including the author herself.

Later in the narrative, Price and her husband Jeremy Ivey have to work multiple jobs just to make the rent and put food on the table. It’s a story reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, an unflinching and compassionate look at America’s working poor. Like the Price parents losing their farm, Price and Ivey’s financial straits don’t result from lack of effort, but largely from hard luck.

Another common thread in the book is substance use. Price is unabashed about her continuous use of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, mushrooms, and other drugs. Price’s book isn’t quite as forthcoming as Mike Doughty’s brutally honest 2012 memoir The Book of Drugs, but it comes close. Although Price touts her use of psilocybin for discovery of purpose, there are also some low points. Her detailed writing is so evocative, right down to the stench of cigarettes clinging in one’s hair, the dizziness of a bad high, or the depths of a brain-busting hangover.

Life’s circumstances, however, challenge Price the most. There’s the sexism she has faced in the music industry. One instance recounts a chilling episode with a would-be agent who proves horribly untrustworthy. Price also describes how one label rejected her album because the imprint already had “two girls” on its roster. “That specific rejection stuck with me for a long time because it wasn’t personal, it was sexist,” Price writes. “I wondered how many other talented women out there weren’t being signed simply because they were women. I carry that moment with me today, known that I’ve always had to work twice as hard as the men to get what I want. But the way I figure, twice the work means twice the practice, and maybe that just makes me stronger in the end.”

She details how the structure of the music industry made fitting in difficult, not only due to sexism but to genre. “We booked more shows around [Nashville] but had a hard time finding a scene that accepted us,” Price writes. “We were too country for the rock scene and too rock for the country scene.”

Not that it’s all gloom. Price writes nostalgically about a coast-to-coast tour she took with her first viable band, a four-piece called Buffalo Clover. Although the shows they played were lightly attended, Price was inspired by the highway. “I had a moment where I thought, If these wheels ever stop rolling, I might die,” she reflects. “I was addicted to the road, to traveling, to meeting new people, to seeing new things. I knew I had to find a way to do this for the rest of my days.”

Later, Price confirms her feelings. “I felt like I had found a community in our traveling band. I felt oddly at home on the road,” she writes. 

Nevertheless, Price is determined to build a home and family with Ivey. We see a couple facing the usual pitfalls — and an ineffable tragedy that would tear apart most people — yet they stick it out. And when the section about her big break finally comes, and it does, it makes reading difficult due to tears of joy. “Everything happened very fast,” Price recalls. “Everything just clicked.”

In Andrew Collins’ 1998 biography of Billy Bragg, Still Suitable for Miners, Bragg is quoted, “I was hugely influenced by Bob Dylan, but I knew [nothing] about him. In the end, he turned out to be a bloke who wrote songs.”

Also hugely influenced by Dylan, Price is far more than just a person who writes songs. What we find in Margo Price is a 21st-century Johnny Cash: someone who’s been there, who knows your pain and so much more. When she sings, sure, it makes you move your feet, but it also moves your heart. Reading Price’s book makes her songs resonate more than ever.

A full 95 percent of Maybe We’ll Make It details Price’s struggle to attain a viable career, and even though we know the outcome, Price keeps us in suspense till those final pages — cheering for her all the way.

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External Links

Margo Price - official site

Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It - University of Texas Press site