Photo credit: Marie Tomanova
Lavender Country:
It’s taken five decades of not compromising to find his audience, but Patrick Haggerty’s still not ever going to be Nashville’s plaything. By Tom Murray
Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country
A number of years back, singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country found himself performing at a small, working man’s bar in Milwaukee. “I walked in and the accommodations were not good,” recalls the 77-year-old Haggerty from his home in Seattle, Washington. “The stage was not really a stage, and there wasn’t enough room for the band. There was a pretty good-sized crowd, though, and in it were these six or seven black men from the neighborhood. Middle aged, somewhere between 50 to 70, clearly heterosexual. I’m looking at 44
SPRING 2022
these men and you could tell they were thinking ‘what are you doing in our bar?’” Truth to tell, Haggerty was thinking that as well. As an unabashedly queer, Marxist artist with a love for classic country, this wasn’t exactly his expected target market. Thing is, after years of battling homophobia and capitalism, a handful of skeptical straight men wasn’t going to put him off. “I said to myself that my assignment tonight was to win these guys over. That’s what I’m gonna concentrate on, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
