Mary Chapin Carpenter was a Ivy League-educated journalist's daughter from the DC suburbs who somehow became a country music star. She didn't look the part, didn't sound the part, and wrote songs that were more literary fiction than three-chord honky-tonk. Nashville didn't know what to do with her—so it just gave her five Grammys and hoped she'd figure it out herself. Carpenter proved that country music could be intelligent without being pretentious, personal without being confessional, and commercially successful without pandering. Her career opened a door for thoughtful songwriters who might otherwise have been locked out of the genre entirely. • How a Washington DC journalist's daughter became an unlikely country music star • The literary songwriting approach that broke Nashville's verse-chorus-verse formula • Why her five Grammy wins didn't tr ...