If you like country music and haven’t heard of Hannah Dasher, I’d bet some honey-buttered biscuits on that fixing to change. Seeing is believing, and I bore witness along with a taxidermied possum, owl, fox, and jackalope inside a packed Mercury Lounge last Wednesday.
A Nashville native, Dasher has made a name for herself with her sly-witted country rock, biblically booming hair, and “I am woman, hear me shred” guitar bravado. She burst onto the scene in a cloud of hairspray and rhinestones in 2021 with spotlights by Fender guitars and Rachael Ray. Yes, that Rachael Ray. Those honey-buttered biscuits I’m betting? They’ll be Dasher’s own recipe. She’s risen to prominence not just with her music but with her “Stand By Your Pan” TikTok cooking series. But last week in Tulsa, she left her pan in her tour bus and gave the 150-cap Mercury crowd just what we came for.
“Country” is clearly Dasher’s genre, but her “fit for a Trans Am hood” logo betrays her leanings towards red-meat Southern rock. Her lyrics find affinity with Loretta Lynn’s interests, but her backing band has the boudin and crackle of Molly Hatchet. During one part of the set, Dasher took a short catwalk into the spellbound crowd to shred slide guitar over a vamp lifted straight from ZZ Top’s “Tejas.”
Sexuality is a big part of Dasher’s brand, and it’s the “large and in charge” variety, along the lines of Dolly Parton’s. Her merch table is replete with pinup glossies of her (one of which she signed to my partner and me as “you hotties”) and during her set she proudly told the audience how she had just “got these new boobies.” (Dasher’s having fun bringing back that long lost word, and why not? In her Thanksgiving “Stand By Your Pan” segment, she reminds the viewer they’re making dressing, because “stuffing is what you put in your bra when you don’t have enough boobies.”) If you weren’t reminded of Dolly’s “it takes an awful lot of money to look this cheap” quote, then you haven’t seen enough Midwest truck stop magnets.
Earlier in the evening, a different kind of sex was for sale down Route 66, where Mötley Crüe was playing to a packed TU stadium. As “Girls, Girls, Girls” ricocheted across midtown lawns, shoulder-perched fans presented their breasts as offerings. Filth and sleaze are as rock-‘n’-roll as Dasher’s apple pie is American. But this is an age where Barbie has busted the box office: there’s a new kind of woman in town.
Dasher’s voice fluctuates between apple-crumble sweet and smoky-eye smolder. And her subject matter embodies that Southern-belle duplicity. Her newest single, “That Thing He Likes,” has her crooning (before trilling the lethal punchline): “He can’t hang on to a dollar / He can’t let go of his mama / Never was much of a lover / ‘Til I got him under the covers / Remember when he’s lovin’ on you tonight / That I’m the one that taught him that thing you like.”
Waiting in line to buy Hannah Dasher candles and the previously mentioned glossy, and to take a photo with Dasher in front of her step and repeat banner, I heard someone utter something very true: “This is the last time we’ll see her in a room this small.” The country-rock tables will turn, and women like Dasher are ahead of the game.
Next at Mercury Lounge: Studio House with special guests Michael Campa and Clay Welch, Avery Marshall, and Daniel Chang, Aug. 25.
