A recent Sunday afternoon rehearsal for Nashville In Harmony buzzed with the members’ enthusiasm for their upcoming concert. And that excitement came as a relief to Wesley King, the artistic director of this local LGBTQ+ chorus.

He’d worried about how they’d take the news that their next program would focus on country music. “There’s a reason why I didn’t tell them the theme until after the season had started,” he explained in a post-rehearsal interview, “because I knew if I’d said it’s country, there’d be people that would be like, ‘Oh, well, I’m not going to do it.’ ”

For one thing, choral groups like this are meant to sing without any sort of regional accent, one of the hallmarks of country music. So country material can be a stylistic stretch for those accustomed to more formal fare.

“I come from classical musical training,” says group member Charlotte Varnum. “I went to school for music and I think about it more technically than anything most of the time. … My fear with doing popular music in a choral setting is always that it’s kind of come across as hokey or glee club, show choir kind of feeling.”

Then there’s country music’s lingering associations with whiteness and heteronormativity. King found it troubling to witness the country music industry seemingly retreat to its status quo after a relatively brief period of prioritizing diversity.

“For a while there, we started to have more representation of black and brown artists, of LGBTQ artists,” he reflects. “They’re still there. They’re still trying to make their careers happen. But they’re not getting near the amount of attention that they were making some progress on a couple years ago.”

King understands why the chorus members might feel alienated from the country music mainstream. But instead of maintaining their distance, he wants them to “put themselves in the conversation.”

While they learned strikingly complex choral arrangements of popular country songs like the Little Big Town ballad “Girl Crush,” he invited them to talk about the meaning the music holds for them.

“When that song came out, I was not out yet, but I loved that song,” Varnum recalls. “That song is so purely a longing, pining song. And I feel like that is such a universal queer experience.”

That wasn’t the only interpretation of “Girl Crush” they discussed. Nashville in Harmony member Ali Veech recalls a trans woman in the group sharing that, to her, the song captured the desire to outwardly embody femininity. And others spoke of associating the Chicks’ song “Cowboy Take Me Away” with their first queer relationships.

“Putting it in this kind of lens,” says Veech, “is very much a reclaiming of, ‘This is still music that is ours.’”

A Kacey Musgraves song they’re performing is “Follow Your Arrow.” The way the lyrics made affirming queerness seem so routine signaled possibility to Veech back in 2013 when it was released.

“It’s so poignant, and it was not received by country radio,” she says. “And I think back to when I first moved here and I was understanding what country could look like. I remember hearing that song and being like, ‘Oh, OK!’”

More: How this Nashville LGBTQ choir celebrates 20 years of harmony

There are other songs by Musgraves and the Chicks on the bill too, along with Garth Brooks and Beyoncé numbers.

‘I think I’m safe’

King deliberately selected a pair of special guests who aren’t yet household names: Lauren-Michael Sellers and Brent Snyder. Both bring insight into what it’s like working at country careers as openly queer artists.

Country stardom has been Snyder’s lifelong dream. He set it aside for half a decade when he came out at the age of 25, but country music is such a part of him that he returned to performing and, after hearing that other “out” country singers and allies call Nashville home, made the move himself.

“I think there was a little of that signaling of, ‘I think I’m safe,’ ” Snyder remembers. “[But] it’s still really scary to rip the mask off and be authentically who you are in a place 500 miles away from home where you don’t know anybody — and I grew up in a no-stoplight-town in a single-wide trailer.”

Snyder’s life in Nashville isn’t much more glamorous. He still lives in a tiny structure behind another musician’s house. And that’s after years of networking, hustling for gigs, refining his songcraft and cutting independent recordings in his rippling tenor. His experience echoes King’s observations. Bookings have become harder to come by, and he’s had conversations with industry contacts that yield little more than the suggestion that he play Pride events.

“[That] hit me in a way that was like, ‘Oh, that’s all you think I can do.’ You don’t actually think there’s room at the table in the mainstream, which I don’t believe.”

The invitation to perform with Nashville In Harmony brings welcome recognition. It’s also Snyder’s first opportunity to give one of his songs the choral treatment, “something that I’ve always wanted,” he says. The group will sing on “Michigan,” a new ballad examining wounds caused by conditional love and acceptance. “The integrity [with] which they’ve treated my song has been really great. I got to go to rehearsal and talk to them about the story behind it and they asked questions. It’s been a really great experience to have not only a choir, but the type of choir, the fact that it is people that are like me, people that are marginalized.”

Snyder will also sing a hooky original called “Getting There,” which captures his evolving relationship to his ambitions.

“I’ve come out of a season in the last couple of months where, I’m going to be honest, I didn’t know how much longer I would be here, on Earth, period,” he says. “I thought, ‘My career’s over, things just aren’t happening, I can’t afford to stay here.’ Luckily, I started writing and getting myself out of it through that. But now that I’m here, I’m like, ‘Some of the worst rejections and failures are already past me. Let’s just uplift and move on and be resilient.’ ”

At Nashville In Harmony’s “That Ain’t Country” show this Sunday, Snyder, Sellers and the choir will share their stories. King, their director, also wrote short essays about the significance of the popular country songs they’re singing and the mainstream barriers they challenged. (Remember Garth Brooks’ refusal to sing the national anthem at the 1993 Super Bowl unless the television network would air the video for his socially inflected anthem “We Shall All Be Free”? Or the Chicks responding to their blacklisting by country radio over anti-war comments with the defiant “Not Ready to Make Nice”? Or the Chicks and Beyoncé both being treated like unwelcome interlopers at the CMA Awards?)

The audience will have plenty to take in.

“I hope they have a great time,” says King, “but I hope it leaves them wondering. Wondering about, ‘Why haven’t I noticed this before? Why didn’t I know these stories?’ “

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