North Carolina singer/songwriter/rapper Katie Noel's countrified take on trap first caught on with a series of songs about drinking, cars, and Southern pride. Singles like "Diesel Gang" and "Blood Red" showcased her rap skills, but her mixtape releases were peppered with more traditional country songs and acoustic reworkings of her rap songs. Katie Noel was born Katie McGalliard in Asheville, North Carolina in 1999. In 2017 she began uploading videos of herself playing guitar and singing, starting with an acoustic cover of Rae Sremmurd's "Black Beetles." From there she regularly posted new musical content, which included both country and rap covers as well as her own original songs. A late 2017 remix of Lil Pump's "Gucci Gang," with Noel's own lyrics about trucks, was eventually reworked with a new instrumental for her 2018 single "Diesel Gang." The song became a country-rap hit, with the video streaming millions of times. This opened the doors for Noel's music career, and she released her genre-hopping Just Gonna Send It mixtape in 2018, quickly switching gears between eerie trap tunes, high-energy country-rock, and stripped-down acoustic numbers. 2019's Rap the South was more stylistically grounded in rap, but still focused primarily on backwoods partying and Southern life. She continued her country-rap style on 2019 singles "Jeep Gang" and "Blood Red." ~ Fred Thomas