Stacy Antonel, a.k.a. "Ginger Cowgirl," Plays Hot Concert at Balboa Park's Organ Pavilion July 15

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, July 15) I played hooky from my review responsibilities for Fanfare magazine and attended a “Twilight in the Park” organ concert in Balboa Park featuring Ginger Cowgirl, the stage name for the quite appealing Stacy Antonel. She grew up in San Diego but after she fell in love with country music, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 2017 to try to make it as a big star in country music’s citadel. Alas, she proved to be too small a fish in a big pond, though she has a great voice and a great bod, showcase last night in an all-black outfit featuring a black shirt and skin-tight black pants. Stacy Antonel says on her Web site she discovered country music through the $1 record rack at a local thrift store. On her “Twilight in the Park” set she played an appealing mix of originals and classic country covers, some of the latter from her new three-song EP Stacy Antonel and the Seahorses, Volume 1. It’s not altogether clear whether “Ginger Cowgirl” is a stage name for her or the title of her whole band, but they’re damned good. She boasts on her Web site that her bandmates have played with such major country artists as Miranda Lambert and the late, great Merle Haggard. Antonel opened last night’s set with a blistering sped-up cover of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” from her three-song EP. She gave the song a buzzing anger that reminded me of Rose Maddox, not the first important woman country singer but the first who portrayed feisty independence and sassiness. Maddox was my greatest discovery from Ken Burns’s massive 16-hour series on the history of country music, and her remodelings of Hank Williams songs like “Move It On Over” and “Honky Tonkin’” turned ordinary good-time songs into assertions of feminist independence. Antonel’s achievement with “Stand By Your Man” essentially turned it from the country lament Wynette recorded into the kind of song Rose Maddox would have made it into if she’d sung it. Then Antonel went into some of her originals, including “It’s Always Wrong” and what she called her “tequila song,” “All I Needed,” a lament about her attempts to get noticed in Nashville and all the drinking she (allegedly) did out of frustration over her failure.

After that she did another Tammy Wynette cover, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” the title track from Wynette’s first album in 1967 and also her first single. Then she sang what she’s called her “alien” song, “You Really Did a Number on Me,” an oddball fantasy about having an affair with a man from outer space. Antonel followed this up with another original, “Heartbroken Tomorrow,” which she claimed was a song with a moral: “Don’t sleep with your guitar player.” Then she did another one of her own songs, “Texas Is Forever,” and followed it up with another cover from her Stacy Antonel and the Seahorses EP, Merle Haggard’s “Swingin’ Doors.” She joked that this song was part of her autobiography even though someone else wrote it! (The third song on the EP is, of all things, Erroll Garner’s “Misty,” which after lyrics were added to it became a great record by Sarah Vaughan and a terrible record, but a great hit, for Johnny Mathis. Antonel’s version is surprisingly jazz-inflected even though it’s got country elements as well.) One of the things I liked best about her band was the presence of a violinist and a pedal-steel guitar player; these once-paradigmatic country instruments have virtually disappeared from today’s music scene even though, unless you’re Johnny Cash, if you don’t use them you’re not really playing country. You’re playing “Southern rock,” the sub-genre pioneered by groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers in the 1970’s before both groups were decimated by accidents. Antonel said her violin player (I suppose if I were really a country-music fan I’d have to call it a “fiddle”) was on loan from Dwight Yoakam’s touring band, and in honor of that fact she played a cover of Yoakam’s “Guitars, Cadillacs, and Hillbilly Music” in which the fiddle player got to sing along with the refrains. After two more originals, “A Long-Lost Soul for a Long, Long Time” and “Hurtin’ on the Bottle” (just what would country music be if its protagonists didn’t drink to excess?), she came back for a wild encore medley that started with a song called “If You Love Another, I Don’t Mind,” then segued into something called “Shake, Senora,” and closed with a hot cover of Elvis Presley’s hit “Viva Las Vegas.” Luckily Antonel told only one of the stupid and lousy jokes she’s become famous for, and the show was a great one I was glad to have attended.