Martina McBride is celebrating her 60th birthday on July 29 — and after more than three decades in country music, she shows no signs of slowing down.
McBride built her career on powerful vocals and songs that tackled real issues, picking up three ACM Top Female Vocalist awards and 14 Grammy nominations over the years.
McBride’s love of music started young. Growing up, she would spend hours after school singing along to records by Reba McEntire, Linda Ronstadt, Juice Newton, Patsy Cline and others.
She performed with various bands throughout her teens before eventually pursuing a solo career.
In 1992, she released her debut album, The Time Has Come, through RCA Records. The title track reached No. 23 on the country charts, though the album’s follow-up singles failed to reach the Top 40.
Her second album, The Way That I Am, was where things started to click. Its first two singles both cracked the country Top 10, with “My Baby Loves Me” peaking at No. 2 and “Life No. 9” reaching No. 6.
It was the album’s third single, “Independence Day,” that would go on to define her career. McBride first heard Gretchen Peters‘ demo of the song and immediately knew she wanted to record it.
However, the song faced resistance on the radio. Its portrayal of a mother burning down the family home to escape abuse made many programmers uneasy, and their reluctance to play it kept the song from breaking into the Top 10.
“We received initial pushback on the song, and I was so confused by that,” McBride told Rolling Stone in 2019. “I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t they play this song?’”
Despite that, “Independence Day” won Video of the Year and Song of the Year at the CMA Awards and went on to become McBride’s biggest track.
McBride has spoken about what the song meant to the people who heard it. While she couldn’t personally relate to its story, “Independence Day” gave women a way to share their own experiences with abuse.
“I started getting all these letters,” she told Rolling Stone, “handwritten letters back in the day, from women saying, ‘This is my song.’” McBride told the magazine, “I got a few letters that said, ‘I heard this song on the radio, I’ve been battered for 10 years, and I left.’”
The Washington Post once dubbed McBride the “queen of country-pop,” arguing that she “seems to have a sixth sense about finding good songs and socially responsible material.”
And the title certainly fits. She has racked up more than 20 Top 10 singles over the course of her career and won the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year award in 1999, 2002, 2003 and 2004.
However, that doesn’t mean everything has gone smoothly. More recently, McBride found herself at the center of controversy after withdrawing from the America 250 celebration.
“I will not be performing at the Great American State Fair on June 25th,” she wrote, explaining that she had been “presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event” that “turned out to be misleading.”
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The songstress said she had thought the event was “a bigger version” of the state fairs she had performed at for years, but that “things started changing.”
“I’ve spent my entire career singing songs about real people with real issues. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to be a voice for those who have felt like they didn’t have one,” she added.
Not everyone was supportive. Some fans took to social media to express their disappointment, with one writing, “I admired you. I thought better of you. You bowed down to pressure when pushback came. Sad. Yuck.”
Another added, “You got pushback from people who were NEVER your fans to begin with, and you caved. Shame on you.”
Despite the backlash, McBride is still hitting the road this fall for a tour running from August through October. “I’ve missed this. See you all on the road soon!” she announced on social media.
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