SPOTLIGHT: On ‘Roadrunner!,’ Kaitlin Butts Puts ‘Oklahoma!’ on a Modern Map

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaitlin Butts is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for June 2024. Look for more on Butts and her new album, Roadrunner! (out June 28 on Soundly Music), all month long.

The great state of Oklahoma has long been the starting point for generations of rootsy artists — Woody Guthrie, Wanda Jackson, Leon Russell, and John Fullbright among them.

Add to that list singer-songwriter Kaitlin Butts. Her new album, Roadrunner! (out June 28 on Soundly Music), reimagines the Broadway musical Oklahoma! through the lens of contemporary country music.

“I would have never known that I would grow up to be a country singer,” Butts admitted in a recent phone interview. “It wasn’t the only kind of music that I liked. I listened to all kinds of music but there’s always been this underlying country-cowgirl theme to everything that I’ve done.”

Butts grew up in Tulsa participating in local community theater. As a kid, she was in productions of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun. In a second-grade talent show, she chose to perform Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from the Disney film Toy Story — about a toy cowboy from an old-timey TV show.

Though Butts’ previous album — 2022’s What Else Can She Do  (ND review) — was replete with sad songs about love and loss and addiction, she felt there was room for her to go in a different direction this time.

During the early days of COVID-19 lockdown, she holed up with her mother and husband (singer-songwriter Cleto Cordero of Flatland Cavalry), and they developed a movie-watching habit together. When Cordero mentioned he never watched Broadway musicals growing up, Butts took it on herself to bring him up to speed. One night they turned on Oklahoma!, and the idea to reimagine its soundtrack suddenly came to her.

“I had just written a song called ‘Spur,’” she recalls. “The hook is, ‘Why do you give her the spur when you know she needs the reins?’ And there’s a scene [in the musical] where Laurey throws Jud out of his own wagon. I was watching that, with [my new] song fresh on my brain, thinking that would be such a cool visual to pair with the song that I had just written.”

Once that proverbial door was open, she couldn’t not walk through. From there, everything else just flowed.

The View From ‘Oklahoma!’

Granted, Butts, now based in Nashville, isn’t the first to come at Oklahoma! from a new angle. In 2018, the celebrated musical was given a Tony-nominated revival on Broadway. It was set at a chili cookoff with the cast in trucker hats and jeans, and the plot gained a bit of a dark twist. (As The New Yorker noted, “As the plot unfolds, unexpected hints of menace start to poke through the rollicking spectacle.”)

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original musical was set in 1906, the year before Oklahoma became a state. It premiered on Broadway in 1943 and ran for more than 2,000 performances.

Its folksy storyline followed a pair of young lovers through a love triangle that gets a man killed, but the lovers still manage to marry and live happily ever after. It is packed with corny optimism (“The Farmers and the Cowmen Should Be Friends”), silly Broadway numbers contrasting the world of the musical with the outside world (“Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City”), flirty missives (“People Will Say We’re in Love”), and a heaping helping of the toxic masculinity of the times.

With Roadrunner!, Butts takes a brush to all of it, reimagining the lead couple, Laurey and Curly, as lovers in metro Tulsa who probably met at a bar. By the end they’re driving off to Vegas, in a Cadillac, to elope.

Roadrunner!’s 17 tracks parallel the original Oklahoma! score, more or less, though Butts’ creation is not an exact re-write. Its “Overture” is pulled from the film soundtrack — specifically from a scene often referred to as the “dream sequence,” though it’s more of a hallucination, coming after Laurey takes a deep whiff of smelling salts.

Some tracks seem to be direct responses to songs from the musical, including a straight cover of “People Will Say We’re in Love,” on which Butts duets with Cordero. Butts felt the original was perfect as-is, and that she could imagine hearing John Prine sing it with one of his various duet partners.

Other songs on the album are inspired by Oklahoma!’s characters. “Wild Juanita’s Cactus Juice,” for example, is a song apparently inspired by the peddler character, Ali Hakim.

Instead of “Surry with the Fringe on Top,” Butts sings of a motor revving on a turbo engine as her Laurey hightails it down the highway in the title track. Instead of Ado Annie singing “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” Butts pops a line out from the original (“Other girls ain’t having any fun”) and turns it into a modern-day twang romp. Instead of “Poor Jud Is Dead,” Butts revives the Sonny and Cher classic “Bang Bang” with a stormy Okie vibe atop it.

The album’s other cover is perhaps more of a surprise — Ke$ha’s “Hunt You Down,” from the pop star’s decidedly country-leaning 2017 album Rainbow.

Ke$ha, says Butts, has “always just been such a fun artist to watch because she says exactly what she’s thinking and it’s so quirky and weird. This album that she put out, Rainbow, is so country. … It has Dolly Parton on it. There’s a song about boots — ‘I know you love me wearing nothing but your boots.’”

Later, she adds, “I never want to cover anything that doesn’t feel like it came from me. There’s been a lot of people [who] have said, ‘I thought you wrote [“Hunt You Down”] because it’s very on-brand for you.’ I was like, that is the whole point. I wish I had written this song.”

Butts says she envisioned “Hunt You Down” as a stand-in for the Ado Annie/Will Parker duet “All or Nothing.”

In the original musical, Parker, a “wild and free” cowboy, is trying to convince Annie to put aside her various flirtations with other men and be faithful only to him. Hammerstein’s creative partner, Richard Rodgers, wrote the original, comically feminist lyrics, which depict Annie rebuffing Parker’s proposal. She effectively calls him out for asking her to change even as he has no intention of doing so himself.

He sings:

Take me like I am or leave me be
If you can’t give me all, give me nothin’ —
And nothin’s what you’ll get from me!

Later in the song, Annie rebuts:

Have your fun, go out on the town,
Stay up late and don’t come home till three,
And go right off to sleep if you’re sleepy —
There’s no use waitin’ up for me!

Butts’ vision of a 21st century Ado Annie and Will Parker, via Ke$ha’s song, places them in the position of leveling slightly harsher threats at one another. Nowadays, she explains, “So many people love their person so much that they’re a little bit crazy too, you know. They want [their lover] to know that if they mess around, they might wind up in a jail cell.”

Indeed Ke$ha’s lyrics bite a little harder than Ado Annie ever did. But if the character were written these days, it’s easy to believe she’d sing something like:

You say you’ve had your fun
And that you’re done and I’m the one
Just know that if you fuck around
Boy, I’ll hunt you down

All told, Roadrunner! is an ambitious endeavor whose catchy choruses and authentic heart-tuggers rise to the task. Listeners don’t need to be hardcore Broadway fans to appreciate the extent to which Butts nailed her objective. Each of the songs can stand on its own as evidence of one of the more creative songwriters making country music right now.