“Oh, we got both kinds…”
I’d say early 2000s. As a woman in my thirties, I grew up liking rock/pop music but not liking country. Then pop music turned hip hop, and rock music turned too hard for my liking, and for a while I just turned to eighties music and didn’t listen to much of anything modern. It was around 2010 that I realized I liked country music. But I liked modern country music, not the country music of my childhood, because the modern country music seemed closer to the rock/pop of my childhood than modern rock/pop did.
I think the shift happened much earlier than a lot of posters are suggesting, when country drifted away from its folk/ballad roots. Or maybe it would be better to talk about two different shifts that led country music to where it is today.
Certainly, it was at least in the air and sharkward-bound as the Nashville sound took hold in the 1960s. By the 70s, though there were still songs and artists that called back to country’s roots, they were adrift in a sea of whining voices and whining strings; the era of cryin’-in-your-beer country was so established that it was satirized by John Goodman and David Allan Coe in 1975 (with “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”).
I think that era painted country music into an emotional corner. I grew up rural in the 70s and 80s, and the country music I heard back then (and I heard a lot of it) generally had no joy, or hope, or even excitement in it. There was nothing to leaven the grating pathos, and the genre was losing a generation of listeners, even in one of its strongholds. In the late 80s and early 90s, we saw another shift as it tried to find a way out of the dead end. Some artists tried to return to the genre’s folk roots. Others started grafting themes from other genres onto country’s style–notably pop, but also punk and others. Pop themes took the strongest hold, probably in part because they were so precisely what country had lacked for so long–energetic and, if not exactly optimistic, at least not actively depressing.
I’m by no means a country music historian, but I do recall that as a kid in the 1970s and early 80s, there was a LOT of crossover between the country stations and Top 40- to the point where I remember hearing a weird mix of acts on Top 40- stuff like Queen and Village People, as well as Crystal Gayle, Linda Ronstadt and Eddie Rabbitt. “Smokey and the Bandit” along with “Urban Cowboy” were popular movies of that era that popularized country as well. I mean, who didn’t hear “Devil Went Down to Georgia” on the radio in that era?
But country soon veered back into their own lane, with the rise of 80s pop, even if the music they were playing wasn’t exactly Willie, Hank Sr. or Ferlin Husky.
Fast forward about a decade, and country had a sort of resurgence in the late 80s/early 90s with Garth Brooks, Randy Travis and George Strait. Not so much Top 40 play though, just more general popularity.
Then fast forward another decade, more or less, and you got the same thing with the female artists like Shania Twain and Faith Hill, both of whom actually got a fair amount of Top 40 or Adult Contemporary airplay.
I kind of think we’re seeing another one with that execrable Bebe Rexha/Florida Georgia Line song and other stuff like the Maren Morris/ Zedd song (although that one’s more of a pop song with a singer who typically sings country).
At some point though, the more “traditional” artists branched off into Americana and outlaw country - the Steve Earle, Ray Wylie Hubbard type stuff. Even though it’s not classified as “country”, to my ear, it’s closer to old school country than a lot of the poppy new stuff with the country label.
Not only is it not new, the blurred line between country and whatever was popular at the time has always existed. Before rock country borrowed from blues, swing, folk, traditional westerns, hillbilly, etc. There has never been such a thing as “pure” country music.
Depends on your definition of “real.” Steel guitar, fiddle, no dance beat? I like Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, and Gram Parsons. But there is new music that I also like in the Outlaw Country and Americana genres like Jamey Johnson, Turnpike Troubadours, and Whitey Morgan.
There is plenty more though. John Prine has recent albums, Willie Nelson released one last year. Things aren’t so bad once you get away from nationalized pop country radio.
I like metal too.
Steve Goodman actually. And I think John Prine was also a co-writer.
Yeah the “wall of strings” in country music has always irritated me, and I think was one of the jump the shark markers. Even though Rhinestone Cowboy is a decent song.
I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s hard to pinpoint when country changed. At the same time, there were massive names like Willie and Waylon, Dolly and Tammy, doing what they’d always done, and there were up-n-comers putting out new stuff that wasn’t always very traditional, like Michael Martin Murphey in the 70s and Alabama in the 80s. (And, perpetually, there was Hank Jr. name-dropping like a 90s rapper.)
I tend to agree that country has always been in a state of flux. While hard rock had the fairly definable hair-metal and nu-metal and about a hundred other xxxx-metal subgenres, I’m not aware of many hard-and-fast subgenres of country.
(courtesy description: Bo Burnham Pandering)
I would say about 10 years prior to the first person feeling the need to include lyrics specifying that “this is a Country song”.
Yes, sorry about the brain fart. (I think I unintentionally munged their names together.)
I thought the only distinguishing feature of country music was the lyrics. Country music was whatever kind of music happened to be played at the time that people were singing country-ish lyrics to. So the music can be from any genre at all, as long as the lyrics are about being a country boy or whatever. You could theoretically have a country death metal band, but they probably wouldn’t have a huge following.
At least, that’s my way of thinking about it.
Those Mongolian fellows we were talking about last week seemed to be fairly rural.
Everything after Ronnie Milsap was bullshit.
To me a good country song has clever lyrics or a hook. Like “He Stopped Loving Her Today” or the aforementioned “Ode to Billy Joe”, “Golden Ring” etc…
September 11, 2001.
The day bands stopped using pedal steel guitar is when country music went to hell.
Even the outlaw country artist Waylon Jennings used pedal steel guitar. He hired Ralph Mooney one of the best in the business. Mooney played with Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Waylon. These men knew what was important in a real country band.
It’s rare these days to hear pedal steel guitar anymore.
Some would say when Hank Sr died. Or when Patsy Kline died. Or when the Opry left the Ryman. Or when Hee Haw started. Or when they started using electric guitars. Or when they replaced fiddles with violins. Or when they allowed drums in the studios. Or when Dolly went solo. Flatt & Scruggs broke up because of Vietnam. Or when Kenny Rogers got that plastic surgery.
You should listen to the FIRST Will The Circle Be Unbroken album. All 6 sides. Respected Country veterans and some long haired hippies from San Francisco. The only hairspray used by any of the musicians there was by Mother Maybelle.
Ha! My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. We had to listen to some god-awful so-called “country” music.
When I think about country music, I think about songs like “Unanswered Prayers” or “Seminole Wind.” These were almost spiritually meaningful. Now we have these rock-country songs that glorify NASCAR and camouflage, and emphasize redneck culture.
Am I missing something, or just selectively remembering the best songs from my childhood?
To me most of it is pop music with a phony sounding twang and the worst lyrics in recorded music. I like rock music, pop music, metal, etc, but I can’t deal with modern pop-country. If I had to listen to country I’d go for the older stuff, at least.
I would say that country music sealed its fate and locked in to a silly formulaic brand of crap sometime around 1977-1980. When country music fans embraced, for example Kenny Rogers and rejected, for example Townes Van Zandt.
Here’s Townes:
