Mary Chapin Carpenter

Mary Chapin Carpenter, a singer-songwriter from Princeton born in 1958, spent years working the clubs around Washington, D.C., before Columbia Records signed her in the late 1980s. Hometown Girl, her 1987 debut, came and went without a charting single, but State of the Heart in 1989 and Shooting Straight in the Dark in 1990 finally got her heard, the latter carrying the barn-burning "Down at the Twist and Shout".

Her music splits the difference between contemporary country and folk: a guitar-strumming songwriter's sensibility, a sharp eye, and often a feminist streak in the lyrics. She writes most of her material herself or with John Jennings, her longtime producer, and when she does borrow, she reaches everywhere from Gene Vincent to Lucinda Williams to Dire Straits.

Then the dam broke. Come On Come On, from 1992, spun off seven singles and shipped four million copies in the US, and Stones in the Road followed in 1994, won the Grammy for Best Country Album and shipped two million. She won Best Female Country Vocal Performance four years running from 1992 to 1995, five Grammys in all from 18 nominations, and the Country Music Association named her Female Vocalist of the Year in 1992 and 1993. After a lean stretch in the 2000s she left Columbia for Zoë Records, and since 2015 she has released her music on her own Lambent Light label.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.