Gretchen Wilson has waved goodbye to the trailer park and faced down the cynics in Nashville who already had a brunette on the books and found her hard-faced lyrics 'scary'. Now her debut album is cutting a swathe through country music. She talks to Brian Boyd

You can almost hear the banjos duelling as you skim through Gretchen Wilson's biography. She was brought up in a series of trailer parks by her twice-divorced teenage mother and left school at 14 to work in a bar.

When she wasn't pulling drinks, she was up on the stage belting out Loretta Lynn songs using the Dukes-of-Hazzard-sounding name "Country Cutie". Like many a country starlet before her, she took a bus to Nashville to make her name, but years and years of record company knockbacks left her bruised.

One day she was watching Country Music Television. "They had about three female singers on in a row and they all looked so polished and so perfect," she says. "I thought to myself 'I'm never going to make it in this town, because I'm just a redneck woman' and I wrote a song about that." She also wrote a song called You Glad We're Not All Californian Girls - about how normal women feel when put beside silicone-enhanced "doll girls"; a song called Homewrecker - about a "a skinny bitch in a mini-skirt" who's trying to steal her man and who she'll gladly meet outside in the carpark to resolve the situation. Elsewhere, she has songs about women, like her, who buy all their clothes in Wal-Mart and prefer beer to champagne.

Before her debut album was finished, her record company sent the single Redneck Women out to radio stations. It has become the most requested country music station and pop music station hit in many a year. It was a word-of-mouth hit, which meant her company had to rush out her Here For The Party album. It has already sold three million copies in the United States - across the usual genre divide.

Wilson's massive commercial success is seen as the public waving two fingers to Nashville's clinical country-pop where crossover success has become such a holy grail that they're currently manufacturing Britney Spears lookalikes who can play a bit of banjo. Gretchen Wilson, it appears, is very much "4 Real" - "Foreplay? I don't need any foreplay. When I'm ready, I'm ready," she offers.

"I sing these songs with passion because they're about my life, what I've actually been through," she says. "The Redneck Women song came about because rednecks are looked down on and people laugh at them. It's just about bringing a bit of pride back to a group of people. I'm actually proud of my redneck background, but the song can also be about being proud of who you are, whether redneck or not. I just don't want people to think that because they drive a Merc and live in a swish condo, that they're any better than me. I really liked it when this woman from New York came up to me and said: 'I'm a Manhattan redneck, and you have to be pretty committed to be one of those'. She got the point."

Wilson is blithely unconcerned about how people outside of country music circles react to her. "You turn up for these photoshoots in Los Angeles or wherever and there's this big bale of straw in the room and a confederate flag beside it and they're looking at you as if to say 'see, we really wanted to make you feel at home'. I couldn't care less, really. If that's how they want to view me, that's fine."

There's nothing vaguely "y'all" about her speaking voice. Wilson is actually from Illinois, but, as she points out, the place she is from, Pocahontas (population about 700), is actually further south than most parts of Kentucky. "We may be only 35 miles or so away from St Louis, but it might as well be a different world," she says. "Nothing but taverns and a gas station in a lot of the places where I'm from. And it's those sort of towns that tend to be the most rebel of them all."

Now aged 31, Wilson knows she's wasn't exactly what Nashville was looking for. "Even though I can sing rock'n'roll, I would have a bit of a twang in my voice when I did. Country was the only music for me, so I just had to go to Nashville. I know I'm viewed as an overnight success, but I still put in those five years there looking for a deal. It's amazing how women are viewed there. I would go along to see the heads of record companies and I'd be there with my acoustic guitar doing my songs and they'd say things like - and this is an actual quote from one of them - 'The songs are great, but, sorry, we already have a brunette on our books'. It's stuff like that that inspired the line in the song Here For The Party which goes 'I may not be a 10, but the boys say I clean up good'.

"I think what's happening now is that a lot of country music simply can't relate to the lyrics that are out there. I know a lot of record company people thought my lyrics were scary, but look at someone like Loretta Lynn. I just suppose this hasn't been done in a long time."

In a strange way, country music, like hip-hop, has dropped the ball a bit too often in the search for crossover success. A certain authenticity is lost whenever people chase the big sales figures. What Gretchen Wilson is doing is restoring the so-called backwoods roots to her style of music.

Or as she puts it herself: "I'm trying to bring back the audience that country has lost."

Here For The Party is out now