Margo Price has had a heck of a year. Last March, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” her debut album for Jack White’s Third Man Records, landed in the top 10 without a charting single, an unprecedented feat, she sang with John Prine and Kris Kristofferson and appeared on TV shows ranging from “Charlie Rose” to “Saturday Night Live.”

It was a case of sudden fame after more than a decade of sometimes gut-wrenching struggle for the artist, who grew up a small-town farmer’s daughter in western Illinois. It was only when she decided to stop playing by everyone else’s rules in Nashville that her life and career turned around.

She found her bearings with a song called “This Town Gets Around,” which addressed a city with “so many promises, favors and lies” that she was starting to choke. In a sassy voice over a honky-tonk two-step, she doesn’t spare herself either: “Most of the town wears a good disguise/ And even I too have been known to wear one.”

Price says she knew the song wouldn’t endear her to the decision-makers who could make or break her career, but she’d had enough. “There were so many people concerned with being cool, and I hit a turning point with that song. I just had to face up to the fact that I’m a loser and I could write a song about it. Self-deprecating humor and brutal honesty is a really freeing thing. We’d come off tour and people would ask how it went, and nobody wanted to say, ‘We drove all the way to Birmingham, made 50 bucks and 20 people came out to see us.’ It was terrible, but you’d be afraid to bare your soul so you’d say everything went great.”

Price finally found acceptance and acclaim with “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” which brims with brutally honest autobiographical songs in the vein of “This Town Gets Around.”

“I’ll be in Nashville 14 years this spring, and it was just time,” the singer says. “I saw people here doing a lot of great things, good things. So to set yourself apart you have to be different, you have to stand out in a crowd, and I just hit a point where I wanted to write a song that was entertaining to myself and not worry if maybe no one else thought so. People would have a lot of success … they can sing, they can play the hell out of a guitar, but their songs sounded like they’d all been done before. I know we have a traditional sound and people refer to us as a throwback band, but if you put your guts into a song, that’s what matters.”

“Hands of Time,” the first song on “Midwest Farmer’ Daughter,” was the last one she wrote for the album. It’s a cathartic six-minute summation of some of her struggles, including the loss of her family’s farm when she was a child and the death of one of her twin sons soon after birth.

“My firstborn died and I cried out to God,” she sings. “Is there anybody out there looking down on me at all?”

In the aftermath of her baby’s death in 2010, she sank into a depression and sought solace in booze. She was jailed briefly for drunken driving, an incident echoed in her song “Weekender.”

The hard-bitten tales have little to do with some of the glib tunes currently dominating the country charts, but are throwbacks to an earlier time when country music documented the struggles of the working class. Price comes from blue-collar stock. She grew up in Aledo, Ill., in the ‘80s, where her father was a farmer and later a prison guard, her mother a teacher. While studying dance at Northern Illinois University, she visited Nashville during spring break and decided to drop out of school and go all in on following her music muse.

She worked odd jobs while finding her voice as a singer and songwriter on Nashville’s open-mic scene. Her great uncle, Bobby Fischer, was a veteran songwriter in town with gold records on his wall, and he gave her some tough-love advice on how she needed to keep working on her craft before she could come within sniffing distance of a record deal. Despite a series of personal and professional setbacks, she kept plugging away alongside her husband, bassist Jeremy Ivey. Eventually they sold their dearest possessions, including Price’s wedding ring, to pay for studio time at Sun Studios in Memphis.

“It was a complete fluke,” Price says of how she came to record in the same studio where artists such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash cut their first hits in the 1950s. “We were traveling home with my band at the time and we stopped in the gift shop. There was a sign in there: ‘Make your own recording.’ It sounded like a novelty kind of thing, but we thought it would be fun. We did two songs, and we hit it off with the engineer, Matt Ross-Spang.”

After raising enough cash to pay for an album session, Price returned to Sun to record the album over three nights with Ross-Spang coproducing. The recording was rejected by every label that Price contacted, but White was interested. At a meeting at Third Man Records, she was handed a guitar and played a song she had recently written about life on the road, “Desperate and Depressed.” White was listening in the next room. “He just wanted to make sure I could sing in tune,” she says with a laugh, and White agreed to put out the label’s first country record.

“I don’t know if I would have given up after that,” Price says, “but we definitely put all our chips on that record.”

The risk paid off, and now Price says she’s recorded the follow-up with Ross-Spang. She attributes her resilience over 14 mostly hard-luck years to just being almost irrationally stubborn.

“There’s a level of insanity, doing something over and over again and expecting a different outcome,” she says. “But opportunity does not come knocking on your door, you have to look for it. I’ve seen people more talented than me put it down. The swimming pool is so overcrowded — anyone can make a demo, have a Facebook page and hire a bunch of marketing people. There were plenty of times we started questioning our whole existence. But I wasn’t going to compromise the art. We waited a long time, but we finally found an audience.”

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