The old joke goes that if you listen to a country song backward, you get your girl back, then your truck back, and, finally, your dog back. The joke works, in part, because country music often expresses abstract ideas—take grief, for instance—by focusing on concrete objects. It’s a genre that likes to show first and tell second.
Thanks also to a persistent pressure to perform authenticity, country lyrics tend to be populated with the lifestyle’s—occasionally repetitive—objects and brands. Stetson hats, Ford trucks, and JBL speakers have been name-checked by the likes of Lyle Lovett, Tim McGraw, and John Morgan. Lil Nas X and Miranda Lambert are lyrically united in their love of Wrangler jeans. Recently, Texas boot companies have appeared in popular country songs by artists from Erin Kinsey to Thomas Rhett, canonizing not just the general idea of the cowboy boot but also the brands themselves, as symbolic stand-ins for country life.
“There’s a common trope that every country song is the same,” says singer-songwriter Troy Cartwright, a Tecovas-wearing Dallas native whose latest album, Bygones, was released on August 30. “People say it’s about beer and trucks, and, you know, they’re right sometimes. Part of the challenge is to go, ‘All right, this song is about a truck, so what’s interesting in this situation?,’ and figure out how we can make the listener feel something.”
Cartwright is also the host of Ten Year Town, a podcast that explores the craft of writing country songs, where he regularly chats with Billboard-topping songwriters such as Luke Laird and Jessi Alexander. “In my own songwriting, I tend to be overly precise,” says Cartwright. “The more you can be specific with the story, it actually makes the song more universal somehow.”
Brand names offer a supercharged degree of specificity. If talking about cowboy boots in country songs feels cliché, then invoking a name like Lucchese or Tecovas can re-electrify the image. In some instances, it’s a way of getting so close to the cowboy boot that it becomes surprising again, an artistic technique known as defamiliarization. A brand name, with its different combinations of sounds and syllables, also offers songwriters linguistic flexibility and saves them from having to think of a twentieth rhyme for “boot.” Thomas Rhett can write the more alliterative lyric, “She’s twirling in her Tecovas, her Wranglers better hold on tight,” and Beyoncé can insert Lucchese’s rollicking three-syllable name right alongside Chevy’s on the Cowboy Carter track “Sweet Honey Buckiin’.” “It leaves something a little bit more in the memory when you hear it—just a more powerful visual,” says Austin Ripmaster, creative director and vice president of brand for Lucchese.
By invoking these brand names, country artists contribute to the products’ mythologies and demonstrate their own country bona fides in the process. Country music is deeply preoccupied with authenticity—perhaps now more than ever, as the genre welcomes new artists crossing over from pop and hip-hop. It’s not enough to wear boots; they should have a little mud on them.
On the 2023 track “Tecovas,” Karissa Ella sings, “Every time you slip them on / You walk just like a George Strait song.” It was an endorsement of Country Music Hall of Fame proportions, and the brand had no idea it was coming. “The song was a welcome surprise,” says Robyn Wedgeworth, senior director of PR and partnerships at Tecovas. “It’s hugely flattering to be associated as a brand that musicians not only want to wear but also want to integrate into their art.” No money exchanged hands, but Tecovas returned the favor a little later, when it closed its Nashville location so Ella could shoot a music video for the song there.
Both Tecovas and Lucchese have robust partnership programs, but the lyrical appearances are usually organic and independent of the brands’ outreach efforts. “When an artist is sitting down and writing their lyrics, they’re not calling us to tell us. For us to be in their mind, and in their art and their process, we are super honored by that,” says Ripmaster.
Older boot companies have ridden their established vibes into the country song canon. But for a new boot brand, such as San Antonio–based Fraulein Boot Company, founded in 2021, country music placements are also a way to define a developing identity. This summer, a pair of Fraulein boots—red with white inlaid thunderbirds—became explicitly aspirational objects when they appeared on the single art for Thomas Rhett’s “Beautiful as You,” an electronica-inflected love song about Rhett riding around in a truck with his wife. In the photo, her shoes hang out the window of a vintage pickup truck—she’s a manic pixie country dream girl with the boots to match.
The boots were selected for the single by stylist Catherine Hahn, who has dressed artists such as Jenny Lewis, Orville Peck, and Post Malone, including for his recent bedazzled shift into country. Hahn lives in California, but she has created much of the contemporary country aesthetic, which blends nostalgia, aspiration, and authentic lifestyle into a visual story. By selecting the Fraulein boots, she also enshrined them.
The sisters behind Fraulein, Margaret Walker and Sarah Caruth, have had to be scrappy in their approach to partnerships. Margo Price, the outlaw queen of contemporary country, helped put them on the music map. When Price started following the Fraulein Instagram page, Walker reached out by direct message and offered to gift a pair of boots to the alt-country star. “I remember specifically, she was so gracious and said, ‘I’d die for that turquoise one,’ ” says Walker. “[Price] wore the boots onstage at Bluebird Music Festival. We went to the concert and sat front row and cried and high-fived when she came out wearing them.”
For Walker and Caruth, whose vision for Fraulein is inspired by their mom’s independence and self-sufficiency, the partnership felt reflective of their budding brand’s spirit. Price has built a reputation on breaking into country’s cowboys’ club. “Women in music and entertainment have to fight hard to be seen as equals, and that’s what Fraulein represents,” explains Walker. “These boots are not demure. They really stand out; they’re bold.”
Their vision for the future of country music is shaped by the past. Musician-podcaster Cartwright, who has deep roots in West Texas, agrees: “I’m just trying to honor my family and my heritage. When I think of [the state], I think of my family and about driving out to West Texas. A lot of my favorite songs come from this almost parallel life that I imagine I live in West Texas.”
So often in Texas, that type of heritage includes a lifestyle populated by Lone Star beer and the state’s best-selling pickup truck, the Ford F-150. Texas-based brands—particularly a 141-year-old one like Lucchese—are bound to pop up in memorable moments.
“We’ve learned from artists that a lot of their writing is coming from memories from when they were kids, or something they learned from their grandfather or grandmother, or a recollection of a prom date,” says Lucchese’s Ripmaster. “So many of their fans have those similar memories. And what’s so interesting about great songs and great boots is that they’re sort of generationally agnostic, right? What worked then still works now. The human connection is the same.”
