Join Queer Kentucky for their latest print edition featuring original stories, gorgeous photography, and exclusive interviews with Zack Wickham of Bravo’s The Valley, award-winning singer S.G. Goodman, and Chappell Roan’s makeup artist Andrew Dahling.

Born in western Tennessee and raised across state lines in Hickman, Kentucky, S.G. Goodman’s journey as an artist is deeply rooted in the landscape and culture of her upbringing. Hickman, a small town nestled in Fulton County along the Mississippi River, shaped much of her perspective. “I come from a long line of farmers. Hickman is a very small town. We didn’t have fast food. We didn’t have a stoplight. I’m ever finding out how much of an impact being raised in a rural, small community has had on me,” she reflects.

Raised in the Southern Baptist church, Goodman credits her religious upbringing for some of her foundational skills as a musician. “I would consider myself a recovering Southern Baptist at this point in my life,” she says with a hint of humor, but her reverence for the musical traditions of her childhood is clear. “Being that I’ve never had any formal training in music, I consider my time going to church three times a week as my formal training. If you dig, you find you’re in a deep, rich history of singing style and a culture that is very specific to your area.”

photo by Carey Neal Gough

Goodman’s connection to Kentucky runs deeper than music. Her father’s work as a farmer instilled in her a sense of place, a tie to the landscape and its lushness. “After traveling the United States so many times in a year, the thickness around here is what I miss the most—the lushness of the vegetation and animals,” she explains. Her home, part of the Lower Mississippi Delta region, offers a unique blend of landscapes, from cypress trees to slough waters. These visuals are central to her identity, both as an artist and as a Queer person.

“When thinking about how the landscape and where I was raised affected my Queerness, I would say it’s always been really important to me,” Goodman says, while acknowledging this understanding has been an evolving process. “I wasn’t 12 and walking around saying I’m a Kentucky Queer.”

For Goodman, Queer identity and rural identity can be complicated to hold together, but she is committed to representation. “Now that I am this version of myself, and secure in my identity as a Queer person, I understand how important it is for rural representation in Queer spaces.”

photo by Carey Neal Gough

Her early experience at Murray State University underscores her sense of being an outsider. Coming from Hickman, her first encounters with the busier streets of Murray felt overwhelming. “I remember driving around the town, and you know, there’s stoplights and bigger intersections and things way different than my little tiny hometown of Hickman. I felt so alone and like I didn’t know if I was meant to be there or not.”

She humorously recounts struggling with traffic laws, having learned to drive on a farm by the age of seven. “I knew how to drive, but I didn’t know the laws.” These feelings of uncertainty extended into the early years of her music career. “I oftentimes say, ‘I’m thinking of my grandparents, sharecroppers who only finished 6th grade, and I say that I’m carving out all the places in the world that were meant for them.’ Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is really who I am and my truth.”

Goodman’s music often mirrors this personal and cultural complexity. Her first album, Old Time Feeling, carries a love for her homeland, while her second, Teeth Marks, offers an exploration of trauma and empathy. “As far as the music I’ve put out currently, if we focus on the theme of love throughout it, I would say that my record Old Time Feeling… really spoke of a love for a place. Teeth Marks was more of a look inward.”

photo by Carey Neal Gough

Her unique voice and evocative storytelling earned Goodman significant recognition, including the Emerging Artist of the Year award at the Americana Music Association Awards. Kentucky’s first openly gay poet laureate and music journalist Silas House says, “S.G. is particularly important as a representative because she is completely herself in every way and she refuses to ever put aside her ruralness. It is a huge part of who she is, and especially the way that has shaped her in relation to her Queerness. Her music and her existence itself complexifies the notion of what it means to be a rural Queer person. I have tremendous respect for her music but also for who she is as an activist and as a representative for so many of us who don’t see ourselves portrayed accurately in popular media enough.”

Even as she finds success, Goodman wrestles with the complexity of her rural and Queer identities. “The only way to change a place is to stay put. And to do the work. And to live your life,” she says, though she recognizes the nuance of that truth. She wants to believe it, but she understands that some people must leave for their safety or mental health. For Goodman, the tension between identity and geography is a story still unfolding, but it is one she tells with unflinching honesty and profound artistry.