This is the first time that country music's gatekeepers are losing the power to determine what exactly is country music. The audience now has more power over the music.
From Loretta Lynn to Chris Young, 10 hit songs in which country music brags about its identity crisis
Yet ask Burns or the show’s writer, Dayton Duncan, to define country music, and despite — or perhaps because of — the depth of their research, you’re likely to get an enthusiastic, richly informed dissertation rather than a pithy bromide. But not for lack of trying. Among the most prominent examples: Jason Aldean’s 2011 hit “Dirt Road Anthem,” Sam Hunt’s breakthrough 2017 single “Body Like a Back Road,” pop-R&B singer-songwriter Bebe Rexha and country duo Florida Georgia Line’s No. 1 2017 collaboration, “Meant to Be” and Kane Brown’s new duet with EDM producer and DJ Marshmello, “One Thing Right.”
Pioneering singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers hailed from Meridian, Miss., where he grew up hearing the work songs, field hollers, blues laments and gospel music of African Americans. In 1929 he teamed with the most influential African American musician of the early 20th century, New Orleans trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, and his wife, pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, who added jazz licks to Rodgers’ recording “Blue Yodel No. 9.
“Now we’ve cut out the fiddle and steel guitar and added choruses to country music,” Bradley once said. “But it can’t stop there. It always has to keep developing to keep fresh.” “They wouldn’t let you do anything. You had to dress a certain way: you had to do everything a certain way,” Jennings once told an interviewer. “They kept trying to destroy me. ... I just went about my business and did things my way.”
Progressive country lit up the charts during that short-lived era Earle likes to call “the great credibility scare of the mid-’80s,” just before the arrival of Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black and other so-called “hat acts” of the ’90s pushed those predecessors aside, into the newly emerging wing called “Americana.”
“Fans of country music are invested in the identity of the genre in a way that a lot of pop music genres aren’t,” Hughes said. “You hear similar arguments at various times in hip-hop: ‘Did hip-hop sell out?’ But there are few genres in which there’s such a deep investment in the question, and you hear that in the music itself.”
Yet country radio has long been resistant to innovation, both in terms of gender and race, whether it was singer Charley Pride, whose music was initially sent out by his record label in the ’60s with no photos to give away the fact that he is black, or stations that refused to play Lynn’s “The Pill.” .
Shania Twain performs during the Super Bowl halftime show at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium on Jan. 26, 2003. As much as radio programmers work to draw listeners to tune in, they are equally or more concerned with existing listeners tuning out, engendering a conservative approach to including new voices and new sounds into radio playlists so as not to threaten their all-important advertising revenues. The condensing of ownership of radio stations into fewer and fewer corporate hands has only exacerbated a risk-averse approach.
“A lot of pop and rock artists have tried to transition to country, but how many have had success?” Country AirCheck’s Aly said. “The one shining example in all of it is [Hootie & the Blowfish singer] Darius Rucker. He came into the format and proved to everyone how important and how real it was — that it was not a part-time job for him.
“But there’s no reason Kane Brown should have to prove himself being country,” Hughes said. “When people talk about what is and isn’t country, it always seems to come with an added requirement of authenticity for artists who aren’t white. People argue about Jason Aldean and whether he’s having a positive or negative influence on country, but nobody argues whether he is or isn’t country.”
Hank Williams sings to his young son, Hank Williams Jr., who grew up to become an important figure in country music.
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