KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Growing up in Poplarville, Mississippi, sisters Danica and Devynn Hart and their cousin Trea Swindle were raised on country music.
"Dolly, Darius, Garth, Shania, you just name it," Danica Hart said.
The trio now creates its own country music as Chapel Hart.
In 2022, the group took off after they received the Golden Buzzeron "America's Got Talent."
"As soon as you walk out on the stage and you hear the crowd roaring, the energy in that room is insane," Devynn Hart said. "But to get that reaction that we got was just unbelievable. I don’t think we ever could’ve imagined."
But their rise to fame wasn't always golden.
"I remember being a little girl watching CMT (Country Music Television) every morning before I would go to school and feeling like [I] really wanted to be a part of the country music community, but it was kind of harder," Danica Hart said. "It felt so far away because there was no one who looked like me."
The girls are now established in Nashville, Tennessee, but remember a time when they would walk in for open mic nights and be welcomed with stares.
"It was almost kind of like one of those cartoon country westerns — the music got a little lower and everyone kinda turned and went 'gasps,'" Swindle said.
Some even made comments stereotyping the music the three should sing.
"He was like, 'Uh, just so you know, we don’t do hip-hop and R&B.' And we were like, 'We don’t either,'" Devynn Hart said of one particular interaction. "It’s going to sound almost unbelievable in this day and age, but it was kind of unbelievable to us."
Despite Chapel Hart's experience with modern skepticism, history proves the influence Black voices have had in country music.
"Etta James observed that country and soul music were first cousins. There’s always been this kind of musical dialogue across the racial divide between country music and soul," said Chuck Haddix, curator of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Miller Nichols Library.
Haddix, who also hosts "Fish Fry" on Sirius XM, says the two genres run almost parallel with similar themes of love, rejection, hard times and redemption — both play off each other with greatly different sounds.
"Howlin’ Wolf, the great bluesman, talked about how he was influenced by yodeling of Jimmy Rodgers and said, 'I couldn’t do no yodelin’, so I turned it into a howl and it done me well,'" Haddix said.
Addressing the current lack of diversity in country music, Haddix says the audience has "preconceptions about what county music is all about." But he believes change is on the horizon.
"I think that younger people are more open to racial tolerance, and I think a lot of your fans, most of your fans today of country music, are younger people," Haddix said.
Chapel Hart agrees but says it takes patience — the world doesn't change in one day.
"We’ve learned not to take those kind of experiences to heart," Devynn Hart said. "We’ve learned that sometimes it’s just that people just don’t know."
The trio sees the beauty and unity that country music creates and is proud to be part of a genre that continues to evolve.
"It’s not about what you think country music is or it’s not about what type of people this music might apply to, it’s about coming together and listening to good music," Swindle said.
The group kicks off its next tour Feb. 10 in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Uptown Theater.
