Garth Brooks: Trisha ‘Works A Thousand Times Harder Than Me’

Garth Brooks tells the BBC that there is an unfair advantage for men in country music and women "work harder."

Garth said of his wife Trisha Yearwood, "She works a thousand times harder than me to get a tenth as much as I do out of this business. She doesn't complain. She just rolls up her sleeves and goes to work."

Brooks also acknowledged that men get more radio airplay and something should be done about it. He said that women have a fresh perspective, "We need that because guys... we open doors with our heads. We're not the smartest things on the planet. Females bring a whole different approach to how we see things. A good marriage between the male voice and the female voice, and country music, would be a true representation of what the people who listen to country music really are."

The BBC numbers show that female country singers have seen a decline in airplay over the past two decades and that the genre's most popular male artist, Kenny Chesney, was played on radio more than 6 million times between 2000 and 2018. The study was conducted by musicologist Jada Watson at the University of Ottawa.

The data also showed that the top female, Carrie Underwood, was played only half as much, while Taylor Swift, who left the genre in 2013, came third in the study, with 1.8 million plays.

-Nancy Brooks