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Can Trisha Yearwood Become Country's Martha Stewart?

This article is more than 8 years old.

Trisha Yearwood is sitting in her house, looking at two dog beds—and finding inspiration.

The canine sleeping quarters are made by Martha Stewart’s company, part of a sprawling lifestyle empire that includes everything from picnic baskets to pizza ovens. Yearwood can’t stop gushing about how perfect the beds are for her two rescue dogs, and she’s similarly impressed by the lady on the label.

“They’re cool-looking, they’re real plain, but they go in the washing machine and the dryer,” says Yearwood. “I have active farm dogs so they get nasty. I’m just saying, [Martha’s] got it down.”

Yearwood isn’t doing too badly herself. Since her debut in 1991, she has sold more than 12 million albums and played hundreds upon hundreds of live shows. She has earned countless awards, including three Grammys; in 2000, she was even inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

Most recently, this past year, Yearwood joined husband Garth Brooks for his comeback-from-semi-retirement tour. Although she didn’t earn quite enough to make this year’s Country Cash Kings list, her income plus Brooks’ $90 million payday places the couple comfortably in nine-figure territory.

For Yearwood, there’s also plenty of potential for future earnings beyond the stage. She’s authored three best-selling cookbooks, and her success there has yielded a cooking show, a cookware line and, this year, a furniture brand that bears Yearwood’s name. She could be on her way to becoming the Martha Stewart of country—a notion that feels both strange and fitting to her.

“It’s not something that I sat down and said, ‘I’m going to hopefully have a successful music career and then I’m gonna also have a successful career in whatever you call this,’” she says. “I don’t even know. I would [call it] ‘cooking’ but now it’s expanding beyond that. Martha Stewart was the one who really did show everybody that you can do everything.”

The expansion of Yearwood’s brand mirrors the expansion of country itself. The genre is in the midst of one of its periodic mainstream upswings, the last of which was embodied by Brooks in the 1990s. Acts like Jason Aldean and Florida Georgia Line are at the forefront of this one, adding elements of arena rock and hip-hop—and making Yearwood’s husband look like something of a traditionalist by comparison.

The shift has coincided with the adoption of non-musical trappings of other genres as well. Among them: an increased focus on brand extensions, from Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar And Grill restaurant line to Kenny Chesney’s Blue Chair Bay rum. Whether that’s part of the changing landscape of country or a broader trend is up for debate.

“The fortunes of country singers are the same as in other genres,” says veteran entertainment attorney Bernie Resnick. “As the industry transitions from physical product to digital downloads and now to digital streams, it’s getting harder to make a decent living merely from sales of recorded music. So artists need to cultivate other avenues of endeavor to ensure their profitability.”

But the way the genre markets its stars—the "she’s one of us" attitude, as Resnick puts it—lends itself to the notion of monetizing country stars’ images. That certainly seems to be the case for Yearwood as well. Of course, her humble origins add to her everywoman appeal.

Yearwood got her start in Nashville in the 1980s, working as a receptionist for Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Records. Big Machine Records chief Scott Borchetta, who worked there at the time, remembers that Yearwood didn’t advertise her musical ambitions. He didn’t even know she sang until one day she asked him if he’d listen to her tape.

“That’s when The Judds were huge, and Trisha had this big Wynonna-esque voice,” Borchetta recalls. “And I said, ‘Wow, this is really great, what are you going to do?’ And she says, ‘I’m leaving the company to go be a demo singer.’ This was 1988. And so I said, ‘Good luck with that.’”

A few years later, Yearwood’s “She’s In Love With The Boy” launched her to major label superstar status (in 2013, she came full circle, signing with Borchetta’s Big Machine; she’s now with RCA Records Nashville). Yearwood married Brooks in 2005.

“We had made a decision that we both have been married before, and we didn't want to be together to be apart,” she says. “The first thing I did was cut my touring schedule way down … we lived in Oklahoma and went to lots of soccer games and soccer practices. But my creative side, it’s hard to not have something going.”

Indeed, she was quickly approached by a number of publishing houses interested in an autobiography, but Yearwood declined (“I probably would never tell all the good stories,” she explains). When editors asked if there was anything else she’d consider writing about, her first thought was cooking.

“I thought it would be cool to have all these recipes that I had to call home for all the time and that were sitting in a shoe box somewhere written down in one place,” she says. “And I didn’t think beyond that. I really didn’t. And so I was probably was the most surprised when I got the call that it was a New York Times bestseller.”

Her success yielded more books and a Food Network cooking show, Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, which just wrapped its sixth season. That turned into a cookware line when Yearwood found that her fans wanted to know what she was cooking with; subsequently, she approached the company GreenPan about a partnership.

So it wasn’t much of a stretch to launch the Trisha Yearwood Home Collection, announced earlier this year. The venture began with a call from a furniture company that was interested in working with her; soon its executives were at her house, sitting in her favorite chairs and couches, discussing what she liked and didn’t like.

Yearwood wouldn’t reveal precise financial details of her lifestyle ventures, though she did characterize her cookware and furniture lines as licensing deals, adding that she was a partner in creating the objects in each collection.

“If it's really successful, which the initial orders have been, then it’s just like a record deal,” she says. “You sign your life away basically when you sign a record deal, and if you have a platinum album, then you go back in and renegotiate.”

As for Martha Stewart, Yearwood continues to hold the lifestyle maven in high regard, especially for her ability to find a way to attach her name to just about anything and have it make some sort of sense. That said, there’s at least one area where it’s likely she and Stewart will never compete.

“I have not heard a Martha Stewart album yet,” says Yearwood. “But, you know, it could happen.”

For more about the business of entertainment, check out my Jay Z biography and my latest one, Michael Jackson, Inc. You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.