Ginger Cowgirl Turns In Fine, Exciting, Fun Performance at Organ Pavilion's "Twilight in the Park" Concert July 30

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, July 30) I went to a “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring Ginger Cowgirl, whom I’d previously seen at a “Twilight in the Park” concert a few years ago. I’d enjoyed her act so much I wanted to make sure I went back to see it, and I was glad I did. “Ginger Cowgirl” is both a band name and a pseudonym for country singer Stacy Antonel, who won a TV singing contest called Three Minutes to Stardom in 2017 and quit her job (her Web site, https://www.stacyantonel.com, didn’t say what it was) to focus full time on music. A San Diego native, she eventually moved to country music’s unofficial capital, Nashville, Tennessee and she’s recorded an EP as “Ginger Cowgirl” and a full-length CD, Always the Outsider, under her real name. She and her second vocalist both wore antennas to look like space aliens, and she explained that was in honor of a song she was performing, “Planetary Heartache,” about a love affair she had with a man from outer space that, she laconically explained, did not end well. Ginger Cowgirl performed a pleasant 15-song set mixing covers of country classics – Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” (which she did a lot faster and angrier than the original, much the way Doris Day transformed Ruth Etting’s hit “Ten Cents a Dance” from a depressing lament into a feminist war cry in her Etting biopic, Love Me or Leave Me), Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five” (she emphasized Parton’s critique of capitalism), Emmylou Harris’s “Long Lost Lover in a Long Lost Town” and the old truckers’ lament “Six Days on the Road” – with originals close enough in style they fit right in.

She joked about how many of her originals are about bad relationships with men, mostly fellow musicians in her bands, and said that after one of her gigs an older woman came up to her after the show and said, “Why are so many of your songs about bad men? You should be in therapy!” She didn’t dare say it, but her thought, she recalled, was, “Look in the mirror.” Among her songs were “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” (certainly a common theme in country music!), “Mama’s Too Good to Blame,” “Close All the Honky-Tonks” (her perhaps overly strong reaction to her man of the moment haunting said establishments in search of extra-relational activities), “Turn It Loose,” “Texas Lasts Forever,” “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Classic Douche” (she said the man who done her wrong and inspired that song was her bass player, though she hastened to assure her current bass player it’s not about him!). One thing I noticed was she did not change the pronouns in songs originally written by and for men to sing, reverting to the inadvertent 1920’s genderfuck that had straight guys like Bing Crosby and Red McKenzie singing “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” respectively. Her encore was another drinking song, “I Put a Hurtin’ on the Bottle,” a nice end to a fun and remarkable program.