Country music has sure changed from 1985 to now - Billboard country album charts from Nov. 1985, now

You should try looking up some of these bands...........Blackberry Smoke. Steeldrivers, Trampled by Turtles, Old Crow Medicine Show, Whiskey Myers Cross Canadian Ragweed or Turnpike Troubadours. All fine country/southern rock, bluegrass by some fine bands. Some of these might change your mind about where country is going and has gone. Are some of these newer artists under the guise of country more mainstream than before? Absolutely. The entire genre though has not gone to hell in a hand basket.

 

I will! Are they played on mainstream country radio, or are they Alt. Country bands? I am familiar with Wagon Wheel.

 

Those artists like Wayne Hancock that DO stick to traditional country don't get the attention from the industry that they deserve. The artists, and consequently the genre, exists mostly in the sidelines. Whichever way you slice it, the genre is not to be found in the mainstream to any meaningful degree. The stuff that you do find is the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, what you find in the mainstream is not the country music genre but merely the label.

 

What are the chances of hearing something like this on the radio today?

 

The tremendous amount of success that Garth had was what definitely brought on the end of the music as we knew it. As you and others have pointed out so well, other artists were expected to try to duplicate that success and the easiest way to do that was approximate the sound of Garth's records, the way he dressed, and the types of concerts he put on. So the sound of Country music became a warmed-over rock sound - it wasn't a natural evolution, as was pointed out in this discussion earlier.

I had my own problems with Garth; his music didn't appeal to me for one thing and he seemed to care more about making money than making music. That was the undeniable message I got from reading his interviews. The whole "Chris Gaines" debacle (remember that?) was where the chickens came home to roost for Garth. I got the impression that "Chris Gaines" was what Garth wanted to be from the beginning but he used Country music instead because it was an easier entry into the music business. An irrational observation? Perhaps- but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 

Eddie Stubbs (on WSM in Nashville) would play it, I would think. It's good to hear a young performer sounding like this!

 

Some of her more recent stuff is country influenced. BTW, Contemporary Christian has always been more a labeling than a distinctive genre although there are artists who sing more explicitly Christian than others.

 

I never even said I hated all country music. I even said I liked Dwight Yoakam's latest album, did I not? My bf sometimes makes me listen to his classic country radio station when he drives and there is stuff on there I do enjoy. I just can name the country released after 1990 that I like on one hand.

I never said I thought Taylor was homophobic to start with. I said the names of the people I considered anti-gay in an earlier post. Hank Jr, John Rich and Brad Paisley are the three that come to immediate mind. I never "backpeddled" because I never believed Taylor would be stupid enough to alienate potential part of her fanbase (female artists are always more quick to do the "I love the gays" thing than male artists). Why should I like Taylor just because she's supportive of gay rights? I never understood this mentality about gay men that we're supposed to worship and glorify people like Gaga just because she's pro-gay, I've been called an self-loathing traitor simply because I don't care for Gaga. I already witnessed Madonna the first time around, since Gaga's built a career so far of pretty much copying Madonna, Bowie and Grace Jones. Why should I suddenly love Taylor's brand of Katy Perry pop (and Katy supports gays too... still hate her music) just because she is pro-gay? I'd seriously rather listen to Michelle Shocked than Taylor, Gaga or Katy. I don't like the born again headcase Michelle has become, but I've not heard a single track from those three on par with the "Short Sharp Shocked" album IMO.

I mentioned an affinity for Dolly earlier did I not? I've ALWAYS loved her. 9 To 5 is one of my fave movies of all time. You're the one being more defensive, not me. But then you continue to ignore where I stated I really enjoyed Dwight's last album, which sounded rockish but different from the Kid Rock type of "country rock" crap that is all over radio.

Hank made the news some months ago when he went on this rant that Obama is a "F*g lover" and that he doesn't want queers and homos to listen to his music. Which is funny because I am in a relationship with a guy who owns Hank in his collection.

But Green Day released "American Idiot" during the whole wartime division and yet had one of their biggest hits. Country audiences couldn't handle Natalie Maines being left-wing but rock audiences flocked to Green Day's album and they had their biggest record since Dookie. If Green Day had been a country act, American Idiot would've been the final nail in the coffin for them. I don't recall R.E.M. cd demolition events and artists going on award shows comparing Michael Stipe to Bin Ladin... yet this happened to Dixie Chicks.

 

This point - that "they ran off the greats" - is a favorite of the "new country sucks" crowd, but it's not as simple as that. Despite the fairy-tale ending of the Hollywood Johnny Cash biopic, where Johnny married June in the late 60s, and she "saved" him, and he kicked amphetamines and started walking the straight and narrow, Cash relapsed into abuse of various pills and drugs in the late 70s and early 80s. There was a lengthy article in MOJO magazine several years back about this period of Cash's career, that goes into great detail about his self-destructive behaviour during this period, if you care to read it. Despite all that, Cash got second, third, and fourth chances from Columbia that lesser artists would not have received, and Cash was still putting out albums on Columbia in 1985, thirty years after his debut with the label, and, as late as 1990, at the dawn of the Garth Brooks era, Cash's supergroup The Highwaymen had a Top Ten country album on Columbia, and, of course, it was only a few years after that that Cash's renaissance with Rick Rubin began, so the notion that the industry "abandoned" Cash is really not so accurate. Same deal with George "No Show" Jones - all of those anecdotes about him commandeering a riding mower to drive to the liquor store after his wife took away the keys to the car are entertaining and reinforce his status as a hard-livin' country icon - but, as was the case with Cash, those anecdotes reflect the reality that Jones was the victim of as many self-inflicted wounds to his career in the late 70s and 80s as he was the victim of industry indifference. And again, as late as 1999, Jones still charted a Top 5, gold-record country album with Cold Hard Truth, so it's not exactly accurate to say that Garth Brooks wiped Jones off the country map.

"They record on several tracks"? Really? I think Owen Bradley was doing that in the 60s. I get the point that you're making, but pretty much all music, in all genres, is recorded digitally these days. If you choose to limit yourself to the White Stripes albums that Jack White recorded on analog tape, and to the few other artists that keep that flame alive, you're not going to be listening to much new music, in any genre. I disagree very much that all modern country is "whitewashed rock and roll with a token country instrument thrown in," but, even if you believe that that is the case, country is still far more organic and "real instrument" based that contemporary rock or pop. Here's one of my very favorite "new country" tracks that fits your description, Little Big Town's "Leaving In Your Eyes":



There's just a hint of pedal steel (and maybe a mandolin?) here, and the whole track sounds like a lost highlight from Fleetwood Mac's Rumours or Tusk, but the vocal harmonies just slay me, and, even if the instrumental backing isn't pure country, it still provides me with an acoustic/real instruments fix that I'm not getting from most contemporary rock or pop. And I love this song (and so much else that Little Big Town has done) so much that I don't care what label you want to put on it - if it's "whitewashed rock and roll with a token country instrument thrown in," then I plead guilty to liking whitewashed rock and roll with a token country instrument thrown in.

Yes, I hate "proud to be a redneck" lyrics such as the following:

Whoops, that's country icon Hank Sr. from 1952, not some "mud on the tires" hit from today. So much of what people profess to hate about "modern country" is really what they hate about country, period, because so-called "redneck lifestyle affirmation" songs have always been part of the genre, from Hank Sr.'s "Settin' the Woods on Fire" to Loretta's "You're Looking at Country" ('Cause country is all I am / I love runnin' bare-footed / Through the old corn fields / And I love that country ham") to George and Tammy's "We're Not the Jet Set," etc. etc.

Well, I'd guess that I like 35-40% of modern country, and maybe 5% of modern rock, at most. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up on either genre. I agree with whoever noted above that they strongly dislike Jason Aldean, but, just because I don't like Jason Aldean doesn't mean than all new country is bad, any more than my dislike of Nickelback means that all new rock is bad.

 

Basically, what you did is slam country as a genre for being anti-gay, and then, when you get called on the reality that this is not the case, turn around and not give an artist like Taylor any credit for being supportive of gay rights. If the country audience is as backwards and prejudiced as you claim it is, I would think that you would give artists such as Taylor and Carrie some small amount of credit for standing up to their homophobic audience, but you've always got a stereotype handy to confirm any prejudice that you yourself have ("Well, uh, women are always more pro-gay than men, um, or something like that, so no points to them for agreeing with me.") even though you're the one who injected the whole "country is anti-gay" issue into the conversation in the first place.

 

I am sorry, but you are doing here exactly what you've been telling others NOT to do. You are citing two extreme examples and attempting to paint a picture that the greats were not run off. But those two examples don't tell an accurate story. They are the exceptions. I don't remember hearing George Jones on mainstream radio in 1999.

Here it is in George Jones's own words:

That was taken from New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/a...ry-singer-dies-at-81.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


Even at the peak of the Highwaymen, I don't EVER recall hearing them on country radio. At the time I was in Daytona Beach, FL and Orlando. Their main country stations were K92 FM (92.3) and 98 FROG (98.1). They never played Highwaymen no matter how big that group was ever considered to be. Garth Brooks ruled the waves!

 

The reality is that Johnny Cash and George Jones were hard-living men who shot themselves in the foot as much as "the industry" did. Same with Merle Haggard, you can read it in his own words:

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200511/merle-haggard-profile-chris-heath

Like many 60s rock stars such as David Crosby, a lot of these guys self-destructed on their own in the 80s.

No genre of music is going to keep playing records from 60 and 70 year old artists: I don't see Paul McCartney, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or any of the other 60- and 70-year-old giants of rock music getting their new material played on rock or pop radio these days. When was the last Stevie Wonder had an R&B hit?

Whether or not country radio is playing new records from 70-year-old artists, the genre is still more respectful than most towards its elders and giants:

 

This thread reminds me of the CD "Columbia Country Classics - The Nashville Sound":
http://www.allmusic.com/album/columbia-country-classics-vol-4-the-nashville-sound-mw0000314466
when Billy Sherrill started at Columbia records. His detractors saw traditional country being drowned under unending layers of orchestras and voices.

 

And this happened to the Beatles:



Does that mean that the 60s rock audience was exclusively made up of religious fundamentalists? Taking the Long Way, the Chicks' post-controversy album, hit #1 on the U.S. Country charts and went double platinum: clearly some fans stuck with the Chicks, unless all 2,000,000+ people who bought the album were NPR-listening liberals who bought the record out of solidarity with Maines.

 

Driver 8, I read this whole article, and it does not remotely say Haggard's drug use cost him on mainstream country radio. The paragraph you cited was a binge from Haggard in 1983. Haggard was on the absolute top of his game in 1983, and would continue to fly high through the 80s. By then, he had settled down with Theresa. There is not a hint that he "self-destructed". The country legends were/are outspoken about how they got black-balled in the 90s. Waylon, Jones, Cash, Willie, etc. They all complain that they could get radio play, and then it was shut down. Johnny Cash was indeed doing well with the Highwaymen when they pulled the plug on it. It forced him to American, where he single-handedly bested what came out of mainstream country for the next several years save Yoakam and Earle (actually Earle stopped getting radio play in the 90s also).

The artists themselves claim the industry shut them out.

 

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. My understanding of the lives of Cash, Jones, and Hag is that they all had some pretty serious substance abuse problems in the 80s that contributed to their commercial downfall. George Jones didn't earn the nickname "No Show Jones" for no reason.

Of course, once again, the reality here is that, back in the "good old days," the industry similarly turned its back on the greatest country artist ever, Hank Sr., who stumbled through the last couple of years of his career in a similar fashion to George Jones during his "No Show Jones" period, i.e., missing shows, turning up drunk for shows, etc.. Hank Sr. had been fired from the Opry before his death. So much for "respecting the legends" back in the "good old days."

But if you think that country let down the giants, and that Cash, Jones, and Hag should have been having radio hits into their fourth decade in the biz, and the fact that they didn't invalidates the genre, then, once again, we'll have to agree to disagree on that point. I suspect that that would have been a recipe for turning country into a genre with same grip on life that my grandmother's favorite TV show, Lawrence Welk, and its big-band nostalgia, had in the 70s and early 80s.

 

On the recording of modern country. We had a poster here in the industry that detailed what I was talking about, but I could not find it. Nashville records on multiple tracks today. They then go in tweak every single instrument, until it is "perfect". This includes the drum track, singing notes, etc. It creates a very homogenized sound that is very sterile to me. I know pretty much all music does it today, but I despise most modern music.


As far as "Settin' The Woods On Fire", Hank did record it, but he did not write it. Fred Rose did.

It is lightweight lyrically to be sure, but it doesn't drop to the ridiculous level of "John Deere Green". Neither do the other two songs offered. You can pull out songs that are lightweight lyrically from country music's history, but it is a very small sample size. Would you acknowledge that there is an unusually high percentage of songs in mainstream country today that have lyrics like "Ticks" or "Red Solo Cup" or "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk"?

 

Fair enough. Like I said above, if modern recording techniques bother you that much, you're probably not going to like much, if any, modern music in any genre. There are some modern country records that are definitely rootsier than others - I'd recommend Pistol Annies as one example of that - but even that album is probably too polished for you.

I don't really care who wrote it - outside writers have been part of the country genre from the get-go - the fact remains that "proud to be redneck" country songs didn't begin with Garth Brooks.

I think that "Ticks" is clever and funny, and I enjoy that song. I don't like "Red Solo Cup," but I'm not going to reject the whole genre because it contains novelty songs I don't like. Again, if you have a problem with the genre because of novelty songs, you have a problem with the entire genre, not just with modern country: Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" is not exactly high art, either, at least not in my opinion. There have always been country songs with dumb/corny/novelty/hick lyrics, from "Settin' the Woods on Fire" to "A Boy Named Sue" to "Harper Valley P.T.A.," to Loretta's "Your Squaw Is On the Warpath" and "One's On the Way" and "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly."

I enjoy some of those older novelty songs, particularly Loretta's, and like I said above, I enjoy a lot of Brad Paisley's novelty/funny songs, such as "Ticks," "Working on a Tan," "Camouflage," "Online," etc. If I don't like something like "Red Solo Cup," I just don't listen to it. Pretty simple.

 

I am just trying to establish a historical fact. It goes way beyond not signing 50-60 year old country artists. In the 90s, country radio moved away from music that sounded like traditional country. Here is the entry from Wikipedia on why Classic Country radio stations came about.

"The format resulted largely from changes in the sound of country music in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, as it began moving to FM radio stations in and around major cities and absorbing some of the electric sound of rock music; similar pressures also were a factor in the development of the Americana format at around the same time. These new FM country stations excluded older "classic" country artists from their playlists, despite the fact that artists such as Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers andEmmylou Harris were still actively performing and releasing new recordings, some of which were significant hits. When mainstream country radio began this practice in the mid-1990s, a large segment of older country fans felt alienated and turned away from mainstream country.[1] Whereas modern country began moving to FM around this time, classic country remained (and still remains) one of the few formats that has proven ideal for AM radio, particularly in rural areas; prior to this transition, country was primarily an AM radio phenomenon and was most widely popular in rural areas.
In 1998, Robert Unmacht, editor of the M Street Journal, said that thirty stations around the United States had switched to the format because many longtime country fans did not like what country radio was doing.[2]
The same practice has seemed to follow to television, where Country Music Television and Great American Country rarely play any music videos produced before 1996."

It is not really disputed that country shifted to "country pop" in the early 90s, or post-Garth. It is simply not accurate to say it was the same as it was when "Ol' Hank recorded". Something VERY different happened in the early 90s.

 

I don't think any of these would be labeled alt-country at all. When I think of that I'm thinking of Son Volt, Whiskeytown, Uncle Tupelo or Wilco etc.....

 

I agree with you that Garth didn't sound exactly like traditional country. Neither did "He Stopped Loving Her Today," in my opinion. You can draw a line wherever you want - the early 60s Nashville Sound, the 70s countrypolitan movement, Roseanne Cash using a synthesizer on her hit records, Garth Brooks, or whomever, and decree that that was the line in the sand where country lost its way. I see a genre that still exists as a distinguishable, separate genre from pop music, despite the existence of Garth and whomever else you don't like. Post-Garth, the Dixie Chicks brought banjos, mandolins, and fiddles more prominently back into the mix, and Miranda Lambert and her Pistol Annies are cutting some records that are "real" enough to satisfy me. If they don't satisfy you, well, there's certainly an endless wealth of pre-Garth country music to enjoy.

 

To my ears, it has caused modern country to sound very sterile and very homogenous. But, there are indeed very few modern acts from any genre that I like.

The reason I shared that information, was to clarify that "Settin' The Woods On Fire" was not from Hank's pen. Still, I think there is a HUGE difference between these songs and what appears today.

Some examples do not belong here. "Your Squaw Is On The Warpath" was very real. Doo's nickname for Loretta was Squaw, and he was known for his occasional womanizing. There is not much novelty to it. Is there better social commentary than "Harper Valley P.T.A."? "One's on the Way" was a very real slice of life for millions of American women. Most believe A Boy Named Sue is intelligent and clever, perhaps Shel Silverstein's best work.

For songs that truly are novelty songs from country's past, do any drop to the following lyrical level? All I had to do is click the Billboard Hot Country Charts. And today, there are endless songs with lyrics like this. I don't believe it is fair to compare the songs above with lyrics like these (and there is far worse out there). This is the current #1 country song, Cruise by Florida Georgia Line. There is no wit or intelligence to these lyrics, and I doubt they even view songs like this as novelty songs.

Yeah, when I first saw that bikini top on her​

She’s poppin’ right out of the South Georgia water​

Thought, "Oh, good lord, she had them long tanned legs"​

Couldn’t help myself so I walked up and said​

...​

​

In this brand new Chevy with a lift kit​

Would look a hell of a lot better with you up in it​

So baby you a song​

You make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise​

---​

She was sippin’ on Southern and singin’ Marshall Tucker​

We were falling in love in the sweet heart of summer​

She hopped right up into the cab of my truck and said​

"Fire it up, let’s go get this thing stuck"​

---​

When that summer sun fell to its knees​

I looked at her and she looked at me​

And I turned on those KC lights and drove all night​

'Cause it felt so right, her and I, man we felt so right​

---​

 

To me, that's a modern day updating of "Setting The Woods On Fire" - times change, the basic "party hearty" message of both songs stays the same.

But, again, you can pick out individual songs you hate all day long, and that's not going to change my opinion of the modern country artists whom I do like. I'm not really into Florida Georgia Line, but, as we're discussing in another thread about modern rock music at the moment, I don't really like Fall Out Boy, either, but not liking Fall Out Boy doesn't mean that I reject rock as a genre, or that I'm not going to listen to modern rock artists such as Fleet Foxes whom I do enjoy.

 

I have enjoyed some of the quality songs you have shared here, and I appreciate you opening that world up to me a little. I like some Swift and Lambert you have shared. I love the Dixie Chicks. They were able to bring traditional sounds to mainstream country radio, as has Jamie Johnson. But they seem to be few and far between.

Back in the day, even when the Nashville sound took over, country radio gladly played Cash, Haggard, Buck and Loretta. Today, those sounds are hard to find on mainstream country radio. Talented artists have to toil in relative obscurity as Americana artists.

 

You said above that if I had a problem with modern country "novelty" songs (which yet again I doubt that Cruise is even considered a novelty song), that I would have to have a problem with the entire genre. I tried to show they are not parallel. For traditionalists like myself, the gap between modern country and classic country is vast.

I am yet again glad there are a FEW songs that hint at classic country today. I will stick with those.