"WOMEN," said my multi-talented friend the tennis champion, clarinettist, saxophonist, pianist and, curiously, full-trained master baker, "are not natural musicians. They can be trained to a reasonable standard, but in the end of the day, men will always be superior."

"Joni Mitchell," I replied.

He did not pause even more a second. "Joni Mitchell," he intoned, "is not a woman."

As a fully-paid-up member of the Joni Mitchell fantasy society since my teenage years (example: Joni Mitchell arrives in Scotland, and arrives at Prestwick Airport restaurant in which, at 17, I am a student pretending not to be a waiter. I play her one of my sub-Cohen songs over an avocado and lemonade, we fall in love, she produces my first hit album, I move to California and become her Celtic muse) this was a hugely offensive remark. Besides, it was patently ludicrous to suggest that women are essentially less musical than men. Wasn't it? The problem is that a quick scan of my record collection reveals a fairly minuscule selection of distaff discs: Emmylou Harris, another sexual icon since that unbelievably erotic picture on the back of her first solo album, Pieces of the Sky; Nona Hendryx, courtesy of her status as feminist icon to several early girlfriends. A sprinkling of Tamla and Kent soul combos, Aretha Franklin and latterly Mary Chapin Carpenter prior to her Nashvillisation. No Bonnie Raitt, because of loyalty to Elvis Costello. Ricky Lee Jones's first tectonic-plate-moving record and one or two later bits and pieces too.

But compared to the vast vinyl horde of testosterone-soaked rock, from the appalling (yes, there are still copies of Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans and Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery lurking, but only two of each) through the unlikely (a complete set of Incredible String Band LPs) to the frankly insane (a Happy Mondays interview CD) there is very little female creativity in evidence.

It was not, however, in an attempt to redress this imbalance that I found myself some 30 quid lighter of pocket on Saturday and staggering back to the car with three CDs, all by women, all classified as country.

True, it may be part of a mid-life crisis return to the adolescent haunting of record-shops perfected at Fairbairns in Troon (first single: Distant Drums by Jim Reeves; first album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd by The Monkees: how cool is that?), but there was no erotic longing involved in the lashing out of all that cash. Country, I thought, couldn't be sexy. Until I listened to the first track on Lucinda Williams's critically-slavered-over record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury), Right In Time: possibly the most hallucinatorily seductive song ever recorded.

Lucinda Williams has managed to produce the best example of tough 'n' tender, hard-nosed, sexy, hard-drinking broad's music since ... oh, Ricky Lee Jones's Ghosty Face. Its reception - universally rabid approval, almost all from male critics - may be due to her fulfilment of the rock writer's fantasy of feisty femaledom, reinforced by the actual presence of genuinely hard-living, hard strumming country rock legend Steve Earle, and in spirit Earle's own main man, the late Townes Van Zandt.

In comparison, Kate Campbell's Vision of Plenty (Demon) is almost your standard New Nashville twang, although her southern-liberal lyrics are funny, sharp and, on the autobiographical civil rights remembrance Crazy in Alabama, enormously moving. But compared to Lucinda, she sounds more like a girl straight out of creative writing class with a reasonable record collection and a future, not a woman with a past and a half.

Gillian Welch, by contrast, is downright strange. From an arty Californian background, her take on country is at first sight as camp as kd lang's early work, but when you listen to her tales of rape, death, religion gone berserk, whisky and morphine, it doesn't matter that she's an MTV kid with an education and an interest in anthropology.

John Fogerty had never visited the south when he wrote all those Creedance swamp-rock classics, and Welch is at least his equal in aural scariness. A badmoon rising, indeed. Even the title of her CD has a shivery resonance, despite appearing to mean very little: Hell Among the Yearlings (ALMO Sounds).

Three women, then, all American, all taking country ingredients and making very different dishes out of them. But then, that's where my old pal the baker and brass player probably thinks they should be: in the kitchen. Personally, I think they make their male competitors look wimpish, thick and unadventurous.

But what do I know? After all, as Tammy said, I'm just a man.