This episode’s String show notes are a modified transcript.
Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein virtually invented the genre we know as the musical with era-shaping shows including Carousel, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. But their first musical together, one that helped usher in the golden age of Broadway, was Oklahoma!, which premiered on March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theatre in New York City.
Oklahoma! set a record for running more than 2200 shows, spawned an Oscar winning 1955 motion picture, won a Pulitzer Prize, and has been in revivals ever since, winning awards as recently as 2023. Oklahoma is Americana if anything is.
For country songwriter Kaitlin Butts, an Oklahoma native, the musical and the movie are part of her soul. Growing up in Tulsa, she saw live productions regularly, and says that her first youthful crush was on the protagonist cowboy named Curly McLain. And when she was watching the film (again) during the pandemic - and giving her new husband Cleto Cordero his crash course in this precious piece of culture and this window into her identity - she realized she’d written some songs that evoked, spoke to, answered, or expanded on moments in the Oklahoma story.
That led her to an ambitious and risk-taking approach to a critical album - the second one to come out during her rise as one of America’s most engaging and exciting neo-country artists. The project, Roadrunner!, came out last June and wound up on many year-end, best-country-album lists. It showed not just the insightful and bracing songwriting and keening western vocals we knew about but a layer of imagination and ambitious conceptual thinking that felt new.
Growing up in Tulsa, it was a gymnastics class teacher who recognized that the precocious Kaitlin seemed much better matched for theater arts. Thus began a long tutelage in singing, dancing, acting and a life aimed at the stage. She idolized fellow Oklahoman Kristin Chenoweth, the Broadway star. Country music was simmering along in the background however, she says, until it came into focus at what she remembers as her first concert, The Wreckers, the mid aughts duo of Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, live at Tulsa’s legendary Cain’s Ballroom.
“I saw those girls up on that stage playing guitars and singing songs that they had written about the world as they saw it. And it was so incredible to see,” Kaitlin remembers. “And what I really loved about them was that it wasn't all like boppy. Some of their songs were pretty dark. And as a little teenage emo kid, I gravitated towards that and the real emotion behind it. And I wanted to be that.”

The way in was playing covers of Miranda Lambert, The Chicks, and Taylor Swift at every mall, restaurant, and community center she could find. Thanks to those inspirations and others, she found a voice of her own as a singer and songwriter. “I feel like I've always had that in me, and this is the best way for me to express that,” she says. “I feel like I just identified with that kind of fire and that kind of attitude already in my own personality. So like getting to write songs about it, that's such a good way for me to express it.”
She released her first album, Same Hell, Different Devil in 2015, and she talks here about how getting radio airplay in Fort Worth and beyond introduced her to the Texas music scene and the very realistic possibility of making a living without having to aim for Nashville country stardom. And after years of grinding and getting into the touring life, her 2022 album What Else Can She Do? put her on the map as an Americana artist of note - one with a deft touch when it comes to such complex subjects as addiction and oppression. Butts opened for stars like Dierks Bentley and hit the road hard, landing more than 150 shows in 2024. She was named Best Honky Tonk Female at last Feb’s Ameripolitan awards, the show conceived by Dale Watson. Then she was nominated as Americana’s Emerging Act of the Year even before her follow up album came out in the summer.
That project was a risk-taking surprise. It starts with a literal “Overture” that quotes one of Oklahoma!’s most famous songs, “Oh What A Beautiful Morning” and then launches into a series of songs that are, in the CD liner notes, matched with time stamps in the 1955 musical motion picture. She tells the story in detail about how this was inspired when she watched the movie (again) with her husband and saw themes and ideas that synched with the songs she’d already been writing for her next project. She and Cordero join up for “People Will Say We’re In Love,” the one Rodgers and Hammerstein song amid a collection of originals that range from the lighthearted to the heart rending.
Roadrunner! couldn’t have been better received, with extensive Americana airplay and much critical acclaim. Rolling Stone named it the fourth best country album of 2024, just behind Beyoncé, calling it “an epic redo of an American classic that works brilliantly as a front-to-back listen, but is just as enjoyable one song at a time.”
Now based out of Nashville, Kaitlin Butts seems to be just getting started.