No. 14: Trisha Yearwood – Country’s Most Powerful Women of All Time
Trisha Yearwood is a once-in-a-generation vocalist. Her superb voice, coupled with excellent song choices, scores her a spot on the list of country music's most powerful women.
Yearwood possesses an unusually resonant voice, and she employs it with excellent pitch control and tone on a long list of hits that leans toward somber ballads that allow her to interpret a broad range of deeper emotions. She and Garth Brooks were longtime friends before they ever married, and they teamed for several emotional hits including "Like We Never Had a Broken Heart" and "In Another's Eyes." Yearwood won a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1998 for "How Do I Live," the powerful theme song from Con Air.
The Georgia-born singer has also scored some of her biggest hits with lighter up-tempo fare, including her debut single, "She's in Love With the Boy," which gave her a No. 1 hit straight out of the gate in 1991. "XXX's & OOO's (An American Girl)" is another song that showcases Yearwood's more commercial side, but her real forte is in choosing and recording songs like "Walkaway Joe," "The Song Remembers When" and "I Would've Loved You Anyway," tracks that might have gone unrecorded if not for Yearwood's special touch.
Yearwood took home ACM Awards for Top New Female Vocalist in 1991 and Top Female Vocalist in 1997, CMAs for Female Vocalist of the Year in 1997 and 1998, and the CMA International Artist Achievement Award in 1998, and she's also won an American Music Award and even an Emmy for her cooking show. She's branched outside of country music for movie and television appearances and written several best-selling cookbooks.
The singer is a member of the Grand Ole Opry and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, and in recent years she's been on the road with Brooks for one of the biggest country music tours of all time. Her success and staying power made Yearwood an easy artist to agree on for the list of country music's most powerful women of all time.
Female Trailblazers Who Are Changing Modern Country Music
Watch: Country Women Well-Represented in 2017 Taste of Country RISERS