Country

In 1922 two Texas fiddlers walked into Victor's New York office in cowboy clothes and asked to make a record. In 1923 an Atlanta fiddler named John Carson cut two sides for Okeh that a producer called awful and that sold out in days. In 1924 a light-opera tenor called Vernon Dalhart recorded "The Prisoner's Song" and it became the first country record to sell a million. The companies had not planned any of this. They now knew there was a market for rural white Southern music and no name for it. They settled on "hillbilly."

Radio found the same audience the same year. On November 28, 1925, a 77-year-old fiddler played an hour on WSM in Nashville, and George D. Hay's barn dance never stopped. By December 1927 it was called the Grand Ole Opry.

The decade's big bang came in a hat warehouse in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia line, in the summer of 1927. Ralph Peer set up Victor's new microphones, advertised in the paper, and in two weeks recorded 76 sides by 19 acts. Two of them were the Carter Family, who sang the old songs in three-part harmony over Maybelle Carter's thumb-and-finger guitar, and Jimmie Rodgers, a railroad brakeman who sang the blues and yodeled at the end of every verse. The Carters are the root of the harmony tradition and bluegrass. Rodgers is the root of the country singing star. "Blue Yodel," recorded that November, borrowed its opening line from Black Memphis blues singers, and Howlin' Wolf later said his howl was a yodel he could not manage. Country and blues were never separate rivers.

The 1927 Bristol sessions had given the music its first two stars, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Rodgers died of tuberculosis in a New York hotel in May 1933, two days after finishing his last session, and the decade that followed was a fight over what came after him. The answer turned out to be several things at once.

One was the singing cowboy. Gene Autry started as a Rodgers imitator on Tulsa radio, had his first hit with a parlor ballad in 1931, and by 1935 was starring in Republic Pictures westerns that carried country music to city theaters where no fiddle band had ever played. The Sons of the Pioneers gave the cowboy song three-part harmony and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds." Patsy Montana's 1935 "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" made her the first woman in the field with a runaway hit.

Another was western swing, the Texas dance music that treated a string band like a jazz orchestra. Milton Brown's Musical Brownies recorded the first electric steel guitar in country music in January 1935 with Bob Dunn. Bob Wills took his Texas Playboys to KVOO in Tulsa in February 1934, added horns and drums, and by "Steel Guitar Rag" in 1936 had a band that could play a fiddle breakdown and a Gershwin tune in the same set.

The third was Nashville. The Grand Ole Opry on WSM added the Delmore Brothers in 1933, Roy Acuff in February 1938, and a Kentucky mandolin player named Bill Monroe in October 1939, whose Blue Grass Boys would give a whole style its name. That same month NBC picked up a half hour of the Opry for a regional network, and country music had a Saturday night address. Border radio did the rest: from the fall of 1938 the Carter Family sang twice a day on XERA in Mexico, a station ten times stronger than any American one, and the whole continent could hear Maybelle's guitar.

Country music in 1940 was still called hillbilly music on the charts, and its big sound was Western swing: Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, a Texas dance band with fiddles, steel guitar, horns and a jazz drummer, at the peak of their powers with "New San Antonio Rose". Wills was the first country bandleader to put drums on the Grand Ole Opry stage and had to fight to do it. His music is jazz with a fiddle, and it fed straight into rockabilly.

Honky-tonk was the war's country music. It came from the Texas beer joints where oil workers and soldiers drank, and it needed to be loud enough to hear over them. Ernest Tubb's "Walking the Floor Over You", recorded in Dallas in April 1941 with an electric lead guitar played by a Fort Worth sideman named Fay "Smitty" Smith, is the record that named the style; when Tubb joined the Opry in 1943 he brought the electric guitar with him. The songs were about drinking, cheating and walking the floor at night, and they were written for adults who did those things.

Then two things happened almost at once. In December 1945 a North Carolina banjo player named Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, alongside singer and guitarist Lester Flatt, fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts. Scruggs picked with three fingers, fast, rolling and syncopated, and the Opry crowd came apart. Monroe's Columbia session of September 1946, which produced "Blue Moon of Kentucky", is the first bluegrass record; the style took its name from the band. In 1954 a Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley would cut "Blue Moon of Kentucky" as the flip side of his first single, sped up into 4/4 time.

And in 1949 a thin Alabama singer with a bad back and a drinking problem, Hank Williams, took a 1922 Tin Pan Alley song called "Lovesick Blues", put a yodel and a Cincinnati studio band behind it, and held number one on the country chart for sixteen weeks. His Opry debut that June got six encores. In three years he wrote the songbook country music still lives in, and in four he was dead. Kitty Wells cut her first, unnoticed sides for RCA in 1949; her answer to honky-tonk's men would arrive in 1952.

Country entered the decade as honky-tonk: fiddle, steel guitar, a shuffle beat and songs about drinking and cheating written for jukeboxes in bars. Hank Williams was its poet, and he wrote faster than he could live. He was fired from the Grand Ole Opry in August 1952 and died in the back seat of his Cadillac on the way to a New Year’s Day show in 1953, at twenty-nine. His songs had already crossed to the pop charts through Tony Bennett’s "Cold, Cold Heart." His ghost hangs over everything after.

Kitty Wells answered Hank Thompson’s "The Wild Side of Life" with "It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" in 1952 and became the first woman to top the country chart, proving that women could sell records to an industry that had decided they could not. Patsy Cline sang "Walkin’ After Midnight" on Arthur Godfrey’s television show in January 1957 and a career began. The Louvin Brothers brought close-harmony gospel fire; Marty Robbins wrote cowboy ballads; Ray Price invented a shuffle that still carries his name.

Then rock and roll ate country’s young audience, and Nashville answered in two ways. Some of its own sons, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, simply became rockabillies at Sun. And on 16th Avenue South, producer Owen Bradley built a studio in a Quonset hut in 1955 while Chet Atkins took over RCA’s Nashville operation. They pulled out the fiddles and steel, added vocal choruses and strings, and built the Nashville Sound: country records that could sit on a pop station. Music Row was born there. So was the argument about authenticity that country has had ever since.

The Nashville Sound was at its peak: strings, background choirs, no fiddle, records built by Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley to sell to people who did not think they liked country. Patsy Cline was its greatest voice. "Crazy", written by a young Willie Nelson, came out in 1961; she died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee, on March 5, 1963, at thirty. Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold and Glen Campbell, whose "Gentle on My Mind" and "Wichita Lineman" made him a television star, carried the polished version to the end of the decade.

Bakersfield, California, was the answer to all that. Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, with Don Rich on a Telecaster, played country like a rock band: sharp, loud, danceable, "Act Naturally" in 1963. Merle Haggard, born near Bakersfield to Dust Bowl Okies and paroled from San Quentin in 1960, wrote about himself when nobody else did. "Mama Tried" in 1968 put his own prison record in a three-minute song and only softened the sentence. "Okie from Muskogee" the next year started a fight that has not ended.

The women told the truth first. Loretta Lynn, a coal miner's daughter married at fifteen, wrote "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" in 1966 and it went to number one. Tammy Wynette recorded "Stand by Your Man" with Billy Sherrill in 1968 and it has been argued about ever since. Dolly Parton put out "Hello, I'm Dolly" in 1967 and joined Porter Wagoner's television show the same year; she was already the best songwriter in the room.

Then the rock kids came to Nashville. The Byrds, pushed by Gram Parsons, made "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" in 1968. Dylan went to Nashville for "Blonde on Blonde" and stayed for "Nashville Skyline" in 1969, singing duets with Johnny Cash. And Cash, whose career had been sunk by pills, walked into Folsom Prison on January 13, 1968, with a small band and a tape machine and came out the biggest star in the genre. Country and rock have been trading songs across that line ever since.

Nashville in 1970 was a factory. Producers picked the songs, session players cut them in three hours and the artist showed up to sing. Two Texans broke the deal. Willie Nelson, who had written "Crazy" for Patsy Cline and been a Nashville songwriter for a decade, moved home to Austin in 1972, grew his hair and found that hippies and rednecks would both stand in the same hall, the Armadillo World Headquarters, if the songs were good. "Red Headed Stranger" (1975) was a concept album about a preacher who kills his wife, recorded so sparely that Columbia thought it was a demo. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" went to number one anyway.

Waylon Jennings won the fight in a contract: the right to use his own band and pick his own producer. "Honky Tonk Heroes" (1973), written almost entirely by Billy Joe Shaver, was the result, and in January 1976 RCA gathered Waylon, Willie, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser on a compilation called "Wanted! The Outlaws". In November it became the first country album certified platinum. Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar and army helicopter pilot, had already shown that a country song could be written like a poem: "Me and Bobby McGee", "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", "Help Me Make It Through the Night". Townes Van Zandt, in Texas, wrote better and sold less than any of them.

The women were writing too. Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter" (1970) was autobiography set to a shuffle, and "The Pill" (1975) got banned for saying what every woman in her audience already knew. Dolly Parton, still Porter Wagoner's duet partner, wrote "Coat of Many Colors" (1971) about being poor and proud and "Jolene" (1973) about a woman begging another not to take her man, then wrote "I Will Always Love You" to Porter as her resignation letter and left. Emmylou Harris learned country from Gram Parsons, who died in September 1973 at twenty-six; their duets on "Grievous Angel" (1974) are the hinge between country rock and what would later be called Americana. Harris's Hot Band, with James Burton and then Ricky Skaggs, kept that door open all decade. George Jones kept being the greatest pure singer country had, through a marriage to Tammy Wynette that supplied both of them with material.

Meanwhile the factory did fine. Billy Sherrill's countrypolitan sound, strings and choirs and a soft beat, made Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors" (1973) a crossover hit and Tammy Wynette a star. Kenny Rogers, out of a pop group, cut "The Gambler" (1978) and became the biggest country act in the world by talking a story over a shuffle. Both roads, the outlaws and the pop, ran straight into the 1980s.

The decade opened with a film. "Urban Cowboy" (1980) sent America to Gilley's honky-tonk in a Stetson and made country the pop-crossover sound of 1980 and 1981. Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" went to number one on both charts. Kenny Rogers and Dolly's "Islands in the Stream" (1983), written by the Bee Gees, and Willie Nelson's "Always on My Mind" (1982) were as smooth as anything on adult radio. Alabama, a self-contained band in a genre of solo singers, put a number one on the country chart every year of the decade.

The reaction came from Texas. George Strait, signed to MCA in 1981, had a hit with "Unwound" and did not change his hat, his band or his western swing for the next forty years. Ricky Skaggs brought bluegrass mandolin to the top of the charts. The Judds, a mother and daughter from Kentucky, made acoustic harmony records. Reba McEntire moved to MCA in 1984 and took control of her own songs. Nashville called it "new traditionalism". The fans called it country.

Randy Travis made it a movement. "Storms of Life" (1986), cut with Kyle Lehning for Warner Bros., was the first country debut to go platinum, and its baritone and steel guitar cleared the way for Dwight Yoakam ("Guitars, Cadillacs", 1986), Steve Earle ("Guitar Town", 1986), k.d. lang, Lyle Lovett and Rosanne Cash, who each pulled the form somewhere new. In 1985 Cash, Nelson, Jennings and Kristofferson formed the Highwaymen. In April 1989 Capitol released a debut by an Oklahoma singer named Garth Brooks, and Clint Black followed a month later. The 1990s explosion had its fuse.

Country had never sold like this. Garth Brooks, an Oklahoma kid who loved Kiss and James Taylor equally, took arena rock staging, a headset microphone and a fly rig into the country show. "No Fences" in 1990 sold more than sixteen million. "Ropin' the Wind" in September 1991 became the first country album ever to enter the Billboard 200 at number one, a fact SoundScan made visible and the industry could not ignore. He sold more records than anyone in the 1990s, in any genre. Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart" in 1992 taught America a line dance and sat at number one on the pop album chart for seventeen weeks. Brooks and Dunn's "Boot Scootin' Boogie" did the same job for the dance halls.

Under the boom, the neo-traditionalists held the line. Alan Jackson's "keep it country" was a philosophy and a business plan; George Strait kept doing what he had done since 1981, and it kept working; Vince Gill sang harmony so clean it became a standard. Trisha Yearwood and Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote and sang grown women's songs. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill married in 1996 and became the format's royal couple. LeAnn Rimes sang "Blue" at thirteen. Shania Twain and her husband Mutt Lange, who had produced Def Leppard, made "Come On Over" a pop record with a fiddle on it and sold forty million copies. Then the Dixie Chicks, three women with a banjo and a fiddle and real harmony, sold twelve million copies of "Wide Open Spaces" and proved the boom could be traditional and enormous at once.

And a road ran the other way. Uncle Tupelo, from Belleville, Illinois, named their 1990 debut after a Carter Family song, played punk-fast hillbilly and Hank Williams slow, and when they split in 1994 they became Wilco and Son Volt. A magazine named "No Depression" after that record became the name for the whole scene. Whiskeytown gave the world Ryan Adams. Lucinda Williams took six years and three producers to make "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and it is the record every Americana songwriter still measures against. Steve Earle came out of jail and rehab and made three great albums in a row. And Johnny Cash, dropped by his label and playing dinner theatres, sat down in Rick Rubin's living room with a guitar in 1994 and made "American Recordings". The last act of his life, and one of the best.

The decade opened with a soundtrack. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, produced by T Bone Burnett for the Coen brothers' film in December 2000, was old-time string band music, Ralph Stanley singing O Death unaccompanied and Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch harmonizing on hymns, and it won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2002 without a single country radio station playing it. It started a bluegrass revival that ran through Dolly Parton's bluegrass trilogy, Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel, Nickel Creek and, at the end of the decade, the Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons.

Then the war came. Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) was the plainspoken 9/11 song; Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue was the angry one, and it went to number one in July 2002. On 10 March 2003, nine days before the invasion of Iraq, Natalie Maines told a London crowd the Dixie Chicks were ashamed the president was from Texas, and country radio dropped the biggest-selling female group in American history overnight. Their answer, Taking the Long Way, swept the Grammys in February 2007. Johnny Cash covered Nine Inch Nails' Hurt in late 2002, and the video Mark Romanek shot in his cluttered Hendersonville house became his last testament; he died on 12 September 2003, four months after June Carter Cash. Loretta Lynn, at seventy-two, made Van Lear Rose with Jack White.

Mainstream Nashville got bigger and louder: Kenny Chesney's stadium tours, Tim McGraw's Live Like You Were Dying, Brad Paisley's guitar, Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts and Lady Antebellum. Gretchen Wilson's Redneck Woman and Big and Rich's Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) made 2004 the year of the MuzikMafia. Carrie Underwood came off American Idol and sold seven and a half million copies of Some Hearts. Miranda Lambert was the first of the new outlaw women. And Taylor Swift, sixteen years old at her debut in 2006, wrote her own songs about her own high school and made Fearless, the record that won Album of the Year and took her, and country, into pop. On the other side of town, Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera, Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and Gold, and Jason Isbell were building the Americana that the 2010s would run on.

Country radio in the early 2010s had one idea and played it constantly: a truck, a dirt road, a girl in the passenger seat, a hip-hop drum pattern underneath. Florida Georgia Line's Cruise in 2012 is the template, and Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean built stadium careers on it. Sam Hunt took it further on Montevallo in 2014, half-singing and half-talking over programmed beats, and Body Like a Back Road in 2017 sat on the country chart for months.

The pushback came from two directions. In 2015 a radio consultant told an industry newsletter that women were the tomatoes in the salad of country radio and should be played less often, which became known as tomato-gate and made explicit a bias everyone already knew was there. And a run of writers simply made better records: Kacey Musgraves, whose Same Trailer Different Park in 2013 won Best Country Album and whose Golden Hour won Album of the Year in 2019; Chris Stapleton, whose Traveller in 2015 was an obscure songwriter's debut until a duet with Justin Timberlake at the CMA Awards made it a phenomenon; Miranda Lambert, Eric Church, Ashley McBryde, Maren Morris.

Outside Nashville, Americana became its own economy. Jason Isbell wrote Southeastern in 2013 about getting sober and won two Grammys for The Nashville Sound. Sturgill Simpson made a psychedelic country record and then a letter to his newborn son. Tyler Childers, Colter Wall, Margo Price and Brandi Carlile all found large audiences without country radio, mostly through streaming and word of mouth. The Highwomen formed in 2019 to make the point about who gets played.

And the decade's biggest country-adjacent story was not country at all, officially. In March 2019 Billboard removed Lil Nas X's Old Town Road from its country chart, saying it did not embrace enough elements of today's country music. The song then spent nineteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100, the longest run in the chart's history. Ken Burns' eight-part documentary on country music aired that same autumn, a reminder that the genre's borders had always been policed and had always leaked.

Country had the strangest decade of any American genre: commercially enormous, culturally contested, and constantly arguing with itself about who counts. Morgan Wallen's "Dangerous" spent its first ten weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, the first album to do that since 1987, and it did most of it after a video of him using a racial slur got him pulled from every major radio group in the country. Fans bought more, not less. Nobody in Nashville had a plan for that.

The other half of the story is that country got looser. Zach Bryan recorded on a phone in a barracks and ended up with the biggest streaming week ever for a rock album. Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, Charley Crockett and Billy Strings pulled the sound back toward old-time and bluegrass and filled theatres doing it. Jelly Roll came out of rap and jail and sang about it. Lainey Wilson brought back the seventies. Chris Stapleton just kept being the best singer in the building.

Then 2024 blew the doors off. Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter" and "Texas Hold 'Em" made her the first Black woman ever to top Hot Country Songs, a chart that had existed since 1958. Country radio mostly ignored it and the argument that followed was about a hundred years of who gets called country. Shaboozey, a Nigerian-American from Virginia, then spent nineteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100 with a drinking song, tying the all-time record. Luke Combs took a Tracy Chapman song to number one on country radio and put its writer on the Grammy stage. Post Malone made a country album with everyone in Nashville on it.