Country Music History's Historical Timeline
I've always had a soft spot for country music compared to other musical genres. While I enjoy other genres in more limited quantities, my car radio dial seems to gravitate towards country music far more often than the others. With that said, it's dominance on my musical radar has diminished some in the last decade, partly a product of mindlessly repetitious commerical country radio, and partly because the genre seems to be creatively depleted. Most commercial music has been creatively depleted for quite some time now, but country has clearly caught up with top-40 in recent years in its arid cliches.
As I so often do, I figured a timeline would be helpful to judge contemporary country music with its' origins as a stand-alone musical genre. Many recordings dating back to the 19th century would undoubtedly be judged as country music, but for all intents and purposes let's look at the genre's birth as being in the 1940s.
1940s and 1950s--This is the era of country music I know the least about since I was not alive at the time and even most "country oldies" shows rarely dig this far back. Hank Williams has long been credited as being the father of mainstream country music and was perhaps the gold standard for country-pop recordings of his era. He wasn't necessarily my thing as can be said of most of the era's mainstays such as Ray Price and Patsy Montana, among many others. Country music didn't start getting interesting for me until the mid-1950s with the introduction of two of my all-time favorite country artists, Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton, burst onto the scene, along with a few other crossover artists such as early Patsy Cline and Tennessee Ernie Ford that managed to rise above the genre's early hillbilly factor. On a future long weekend, it would probably be worth my time to dig into a number of old country recordings to see if I can find some lost treasures that have thus far flew beneath my radar. I'm sure there is plenty, but at least for me, country music hadn't hit its stride yet in this era.
Grade: B-
1960s--By and large, I still wasn't completely taken with what came out of Nashville in the 1960s. There was plenty to like, with the decade being the heyday of Johnny Cash, along with lesser but still quality acts like Jimmy Dean, Hank Snow, and the Statler Brothers, and the later years of the decade gave rise to upstarts like Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, and Dolly Parton that would take country music to an entirely different level. With that said, two of the genre's most promising early pioneers, Johnny Horton and Patsy Cline, were taken far too early in accidental deaths and stalled some of the genre's momentum. Furthermore, several of the decade's mainstays are all acts that, overall, didn't represent the kind of country music that grabbed me. I like several recordings by Loretta Lynn, but her style has never fully won me over....and that can be said to an even greater extent about 60s country stalwarts like George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Eddy Arnold, and early Conway Twitty. There were likeable aspects about all of these artists, and all had quality voices, but their sound just seemed a little too interchangeable to me. The rudimentary nature of country music production in the 1960s greatly limited the genre's appeal, meaning that artists really had to stand out stylistically to capture my fancy....and as far as I'm concerned, not enough of them did.
Grade: B-
1970s--Now that's a little more like it. Almost right away in the 70s, country music started to morph into a more satisfying package with a greater diversity of musical styles with rising production standards on the recordings, a number of promising artists who were holdovers from the previous decade really hitting their stride (Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Merle Haggard), and a greater overall acceptance of rocking the boat a little bit. The early 70s was an extension of some of the momentum from the late 60s and, in addition to artists mentioned who hit their stride in the era, also saw the rise to some crossover "countrypolitan" artists like Anne Murray, John Denver, and Charlie Rich who graced country airwaves with a more polished sound than what the genre had been used to. By the mid-70s, the exciting "outlaw era" was rarin' to go with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, David Allan Coe, the less commercially successful but still relevant Kris Kristofferson, and on the female side the young Tanya Tucker, redefining country music in an entirely different way than had ever been conceived in the previous generation. Former rocker Kenny Rogers picked the right time to enter country music world and his early recordings were also some of the more memorable cuts from the outlaw era, while Johnny Cash pretty much just kept doing what he'd always been doing in the 70s and the genre caught up with his vision.
An equally exciting development in the mid-70s was country music's outlaw era coexisting with the influx of additional new artists coming out of left field creatively, the best of whom were Ronnie Milsap, Emmylou Harris, and Crystal Gayle who combined elements of R & B and jazz into country music and would greatly influence the genre's direction in the post-Outlaw era in the decade to come. Meanwhile, new traditionalists like Don Williams emerged that kept the genre fresh and exciting and rooted in its historical origins. By the late 1970s, country had moved in a very pop direction, particularly with the advent of acts like Barbara Mandrell and Eddie Rabbitt, which would see the genre at its most commercially successful period in history at that time, with literally dozens of mainstream country hits crossing over into the top-10 of the pop charts in the late 1970s and into the decade ahead. It was the genre's second most exciting and second most pivotal decade in history.
Grade: A
1980s--The transition that began in the late 70s with more country music artists moving towards a pop/disco/Southern rock sound hit its peak in the early 1980s, with a great deal of help from John Travolta's 1980 "Urban Cowboy" movie which produced a surge in country music's popularity unlike anything the genre had ever experienced. Country traditionalists still bristle at the "urban cowboy" era as the time when country music lost its soul. It's true to an extent that the rough-around-the-edges country music of the previous decades would never be the same, but the era nonetheless produced a lot of outstanding music. While some established artists began making less interesting music as they embraced a more pop sound (Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt), other artists latched onto the genre's changing sound and made the best music of their career, none more than Ronnie Milsap but also T.G. Sheppard, Earl Thomas Conley, and Charly McClain. An exciting array of new artists also emerged that grabbed hold of country music's changing winds with tremendous results. Rosanne Cash was at the top of that list, but other quality newcomers would include Dan Seals, Steve Wariner, and Sylvia, the latter of whom was the poster child of urban cowboy era's most detested excesses, although she put out a couple outstanding albums before she officially became a caricature of bubblegum.
And while many look back to the early-to-mid 80s as being entirely defined by "urban cowboy" country pop, they're overlooking the continued chart dominance of traditionalists like Don Williams, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride, and even some newcomers like guitar-picking Ricky Skaggs, duo The Judds, and two of the genre's longest-lasting hitmakers, Reba McEntire and George Strait, the latter of whom has never been one of my favorites but still has a litany of quality recordings, the best of which came from the 1980s. The outlaw era was waning and hits became fewer and further between for country legends like Johnny Cash and George Jones, but Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson continued to score a plethora of impressive hits, with Willie in particular releasing some of my favorite of his recordings in the 1980s. Meanwhile, two of the decades biggest acts were Alabama and Hank Williams, Jr., newcomers that incorporated a decidedly Southern rock edge to country music. It was actually intriguing to see how the envelope was pushed with each progressive year in the 1980s with a more rock-edged sound going mainstream. It all made for a second consecutive decade of a compelling variety of sounds coming out of mainstream country music, but my the middle of the decade things had gone decidedly stale and by 1984-1985, the "urban cowboy" era was past its peak and country music needed another new reinvention to stay interesting.
It would get just that in the late 1980s with the neotraditionalist movement that brought us interesting newcomers like Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, and Clint Black sporting a traditional sound that still seemed contemporary. At the same time, some of the more progressive artists continued to flourish, particularly newcomers Restless Heart, Sawyer Brown, the Desert Rose Band, and Foster and Lloyd. With a little help from hitmaking wife Rosanne Cash who was at the top of her game in the late 80s, Rodney Crowell finally scored a successful solo career of his own after a decade of languishing in alt-country obscurity. Even some oddball alt-country types like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett went mainstream with a handful of memorable hits in the era. The lull in the middle of the 80s definitely stalled some of the genre's momentum, but country music had another outstanding decade and was poised to bust out at the seams in the decade ahead.
Grade: A-
1990s--Far and away the most consequential decade in country music's history, the genre's metamorphisis began almost immediately in the decade and the blistering pace of change left the landscape at decade's end almost unrecognizable. The vast majority of country music's mainstays from decades past were swept away and never heard from again only a couple of years into the decade, with everybody from Ronnie Milsap to Don Williams to Hank Williams, Jr. to Dolly Parton scoring the final top-10hits of their careers and fading into oblivion, and late 80s wunderkinds Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam running out of gas by mid-decade. Only a handful of successful 80s acts survived the transition including George Strait, Reba McEntire, and Alabama, the latter two surviving by successfully adapting to the times and recording the best music of their careers. A few other unlikely survivors were Steve Wariner, Tanya Tucker, and comeback kid John Anderson who had a fine second chapter to his career which looked dead by the mid-80s. While it was certainly sad to see some of these artists go the way of the woolly mammoth, it really felt like the time was right for wholesale change in country music at the time and wholesale change is exactly what we got.
This change effectively came in four different waves of new artists in the first half of the decade. The first wave came right away in the decade when the genre was still embracing a more traditional sound and a handful of new artists that made traditional country sound fantastic including Alan Jackson, Mark Chesnutt, Joe Diffie, and Tracy Lawrence. In addition, the first wave of new artists produced some more risk-taking acts like Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt whose stylistic flourishes would more radically alter the genre's trajectory. In addition, struggling late 80s acts Mary Chapin Carpenter and Vince Gill finally found their groove at this time and would also define the decade's progressive thrust.
The second wave of new artists would really make me take notice and corresponded with the peak of the genre's "boom" times. Sadly, despite the eclectic mix of styles that this wave produced, only a few of the acts would have a shelf life beyond five years, which was truly unfortunate given the caliber of talent that emerged. Brooks and Dunn was the biggest act to come from this wave, with additional success stories including Trisha Yearwood, The Mavericks, Little Texas, Suzy Bogguss, Pam Tillis, Hal Ketchum, Lee Roy Parnell, and John Berry.
The third wave of new artists produced some really big names and very long careers, but in the long run would impress less creatively than the first and especially the second wave. Some of the names included Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Neal McCoy, Toby Keith, Clay Walker, John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Byrd, and one of my favorite country groups of all-time, BlackHawk. A very worthy list of names in the lexicon of modern country, but some of the drawbacks to this wave was that a number of the acts came out of the box with outstanding material but then managed to coast for many years to come with bland, middle of the road fare, while other acts have been defined by impressive musical highs and cringeworthy musical lows.
The fourth wave of new artists generally had the worst timing in that country music's population growth left them little room to maneuver and would ultimately shorten the careers of promising newcomers like Wade Hayes, George Ducas, David Lee Murphy, and Rhett Akins. Shania Twain was, for better or worse, a phenomenon all her own and at least has to be respected for shaking things up. The more successful crooners of this wave ended up being mush peddlers of varying levels of quality such as Ty Herndon, Mark Wills, Bryan White, and one of the genre's all-time biggest mush peddlers but nonetheless the biggest star to emerge from the wave, Kenny Chesney.
By the late 1990s, the transformation that was so exciting just a few years earlier had made country music fat and lazy with so many new artists competing for limited chart space all the while trending towards a more faceless and generic sound. Somewhere along the lines around 1996, things had gone wrong and Hot New Country's well-deserved momentum had stalled. Only a handful of new artists broke through in the later years of the 90s, albeit some impressive ones including Lee Ann Womack, LeAnn Rimes, Lonestar, the Dixie Chicks, and Jo Dee Messina. Thank goodness for these acts because by and large the survivors of the four waves of newcomers who seemed so fresh and original in the first half of the decade were growing stale by decade's end.
It's a little bit challenging to rate this decade in country music. With the first two-thirds of the decade being so impressive and putting out so much first-rate music in just a few short years, it's impossible not to rate the 90s and country music's best decade. But with that said, it crashed pretty hard by the late 90s, and by decade's end, Nashville was churning out its weakest batch of music in 30 years. And regrettably, the late 90s rut would continue in the decade ahead.
Grade: A
2000s--The biggest problem with the most recent decade of country music is that Nashville did not update and retool its sound the way that country music has historically done with the advent of each new decade. There was little to distinguish the Hot New Country sound of the 2000s from that of the 1990s, and as a result even the more impressive recordings of the decade ended up sounding just a little too familiar. Also, the artists themselves became more interchangeable and less positioned for staying power than top-tier acts from the past. Granted, the decade produced a handful of acts that carved out their own sound and style and have stayed fresh and exciting for the duration of the decade, including Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, and despite the chasmic highs and lows of their musical selection, the group Rascal Flatts.
Beyond that, however, few of more promising acts from early in the decade lived up to expectations, whether it be the early flameouts of Lee Ann Womack, the Dixie Chicks, and Trick Pony to the creative drought that plagued Phil Vassar and Sara Evans after impressive early releases. Blake Shelton stands out as an artist who began his career as a breath of fresh air with a flurry of daring, outside-the-box singles but has since settled into a boring, middle-of-the-road groove. As the decade proceeded, Nashville gave us a number of male artists such as Dierks Bentley, Joe Nichols, Luke Bryan, and Jason Aldean who can best be described as "serviceable", keeping the genre on life support and occasionally releasing something mildly impressive, but definitely not leaving a lasting fingerprint on the genre's lexicon. Meanwhile, the new female artists like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift have dominated the charts and almost all cut their teeth on an unapologetic country-pop sound, some of which works but hardly any of which sounds as good as the country-pop that came from the top female artists of decades past, where the vocalists and the songs were better.
Another trend from the 2000s that largely fizzled was an attempt to revive the country music outlaw era with a bunch of new acts (and rebranded old acts) that didn't have the cache to compare with Waylon, Willie, Hank, Jr., and the boys. The would-be new outlaws included Montgomery Gentry, Big and Rich, and the redneck woman herself Gretchen Wilson. The warmed-over older acts that "went outlaw" this decade were Toby Keith and Trace Adkins. All of these acts were able to pull off what they were selling a little bit, but all seemed like imitators rather than innovators at the end of the day. In addition to Keith and Adkins, a number of 90s acts effectively made the transition into the 2000s churning out many more hits. But few of them improved upon their early body of work with subsequent releases. One of the few who may have is Alan Jackson, but just about everybody else was at best uneven as Tim McGraw, Brooks and Dunn, and Kenny Chesney were, while others showed little reason why they would continue to even release music if this is the best they can do, as was the case with Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks.
Having sampled a significant amount of country music over the course of several decades, I have to conclude that this past decade was its weakest. While early country music didn't really jive with my style, it seemed original and interesting while this past decade's seems weary and cliched. And little that I have seen so far in the new decade gives me hope for a creative renaissance.
Grade: C
My conclusions from this timeline is that the country music that impressed me most came from 1975-1995, an era in which musical production standards rose and which traditional sounds coexisted with an adventurous and progressive new wave. Breaking it down to a smaller period of time, the most exciting time in country music's history was 1992-1995 when the genre was transforming at the speed of light and producing some of the most interesting music to ever come out of Nashville. But unfortunately this metamorphosis proved to be a bubble with the same trajectory as an economic bubble...unsustainable and followed by years of stagnancy after it pops. While country music is not nearly as intolerable as modern top-40 in the year 2011, it's been in a funk for quite some time now and needs a shot of adrenaline that doesn't seem to be on the horizon.
As I so often do, I figured a timeline would be helpful to judge contemporary country music with its' origins as a stand-alone musical genre. Many recordings dating back to the 19th century would undoubtedly be judged as country music, but for all intents and purposes let's look at the genre's birth as being in the 1940s.
1940s and 1950s--This is the era of country music I know the least about since I was not alive at the time and even most "country oldies" shows rarely dig this far back. Hank Williams has long been credited as being the father of mainstream country music and was perhaps the gold standard for country-pop recordings of his era. He wasn't necessarily my thing as can be said of most of the era's mainstays such as Ray Price and Patsy Montana, among many others. Country music didn't start getting interesting for me until the mid-1950s with the introduction of two of my all-time favorite country artists, Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton, burst onto the scene, along with a few other crossover artists such as early Patsy Cline and Tennessee Ernie Ford that managed to rise above the genre's early hillbilly factor. On a future long weekend, it would probably be worth my time to dig into a number of old country recordings to see if I can find some lost treasures that have thus far flew beneath my radar. I'm sure there is plenty, but at least for me, country music hadn't hit its stride yet in this era.
Grade: B-
1960s--By and large, I still wasn't completely taken with what came out of Nashville in the 1960s. There was plenty to like, with the decade being the heyday of Johnny Cash, along with lesser but still quality acts like Jimmy Dean, Hank Snow, and the Statler Brothers, and the later years of the decade gave rise to upstarts like Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, and Dolly Parton that would take country music to an entirely different level. With that said, two of the genre's most promising early pioneers, Johnny Horton and Patsy Cline, were taken far too early in accidental deaths and stalled some of the genre's momentum. Furthermore, several of the decade's mainstays are all acts that, overall, didn't represent the kind of country music that grabbed me. I like several recordings by Loretta Lynn, but her style has never fully won me over....and that can be said to an even greater extent about 60s country stalwarts like George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Eddy Arnold, and early Conway Twitty. There were likeable aspects about all of these artists, and all had quality voices, but their sound just seemed a little too interchangeable to me. The rudimentary nature of country music production in the 1960s greatly limited the genre's appeal, meaning that artists really had to stand out stylistically to capture my fancy....and as far as I'm concerned, not enough of them did.
Grade: B-
1970s--Now that's a little more like it. Almost right away in the 70s, country music started to morph into a more satisfying package with a greater diversity of musical styles with rising production standards on the recordings, a number of promising artists who were holdovers from the previous decade really hitting their stride (Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Merle Haggard), and a greater overall acceptance of rocking the boat a little bit. The early 70s was an extension of some of the momentum from the late 60s and, in addition to artists mentioned who hit their stride in the era, also saw the rise to some crossover "countrypolitan" artists like Anne Murray, John Denver, and Charlie Rich who graced country airwaves with a more polished sound than what the genre had been used to. By the mid-70s, the exciting "outlaw era" was rarin' to go with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, David Allan Coe, the less commercially successful but still relevant Kris Kristofferson, and on the female side the young Tanya Tucker, redefining country music in an entirely different way than had ever been conceived in the previous generation. Former rocker Kenny Rogers picked the right time to enter country music world and his early recordings were also some of the more memorable cuts from the outlaw era, while Johnny Cash pretty much just kept doing what he'd always been doing in the 70s and the genre caught up with his vision.
An equally exciting development in the mid-70s was country music's outlaw era coexisting with the influx of additional new artists coming out of left field creatively, the best of whom were Ronnie Milsap, Emmylou Harris, and Crystal Gayle who combined elements of R & B and jazz into country music and would greatly influence the genre's direction in the post-Outlaw era in the decade to come. Meanwhile, new traditionalists like Don Williams emerged that kept the genre fresh and exciting and rooted in its historical origins. By the late 1970s, country had moved in a very pop direction, particularly with the advent of acts like Barbara Mandrell and Eddie Rabbitt, which would see the genre at its most commercially successful period in history at that time, with literally dozens of mainstream country hits crossing over into the top-10 of the pop charts in the late 1970s and into the decade ahead. It was the genre's second most exciting and second most pivotal decade in history.
Grade: A
1980s--The transition that began in the late 70s with more country music artists moving towards a pop/disco/Southern rock sound hit its peak in the early 1980s, with a great deal of help from John Travolta's 1980 "Urban Cowboy" movie which produced a surge in country music's popularity unlike anything the genre had ever experienced. Country traditionalists still bristle at the "urban cowboy" era as the time when country music lost its soul. It's true to an extent that the rough-around-the-edges country music of the previous decades would never be the same, but the era nonetheless produced a lot of outstanding music. While some established artists began making less interesting music as they embraced a more pop sound (Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt), other artists latched onto the genre's changing sound and made the best music of their career, none more than Ronnie Milsap but also T.G. Sheppard, Earl Thomas Conley, and Charly McClain. An exciting array of new artists also emerged that grabbed hold of country music's changing winds with tremendous results. Rosanne Cash was at the top of that list, but other quality newcomers would include Dan Seals, Steve Wariner, and Sylvia, the latter of whom was the poster child of urban cowboy era's most detested excesses, although she put out a couple outstanding albums before she officially became a caricature of bubblegum.
And while many look back to the early-to-mid 80s as being entirely defined by "urban cowboy" country pop, they're overlooking the continued chart dominance of traditionalists like Don Williams, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride, and even some newcomers like guitar-picking Ricky Skaggs, duo The Judds, and two of the genre's longest-lasting hitmakers, Reba McEntire and George Strait, the latter of whom has never been one of my favorites but still has a litany of quality recordings, the best of which came from the 1980s. The outlaw era was waning and hits became fewer and further between for country legends like Johnny Cash and George Jones, but Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson continued to score a plethora of impressive hits, with Willie in particular releasing some of my favorite of his recordings in the 1980s. Meanwhile, two of the decades biggest acts were Alabama and Hank Williams, Jr., newcomers that incorporated a decidedly Southern rock edge to country music. It was actually intriguing to see how the envelope was pushed with each progressive year in the 1980s with a more rock-edged sound going mainstream. It all made for a second consecutive decade of a compelling variety of sounds coming out of mainstream country music, but my the middle of the decade things had gone decidedly stale and by 1984-1985, the "urban cowboy" era was past its peak and country music needed another new reinvention to stay interesting.
It would get just that in the late 1980s with the neotraditionalist movement that brought us interesting newcomers like Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, and Clint Black sporting a traditional sound that still seemed contemporary. At the same time, some of the more progressive artists continued to flourish, particularly newcomers Restless Heart, Sawyer Brown, the Desert Rose Band, and Foster and Lloyd. With a little help from hitmaking wife Rosanne Cash who was at the top of her game in the late 80s, Rodney Crowell finally scored a successful solo career of his own after a decade of languishing in alt-country obscurity. Even some oddball alt-country types like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett went mainstream with a handful of memorable hits in the era. The lull in the middle of the 80s definitely stalled some of the genre's momentum, but country music had another outstanding decade and was poised to bust out at the seams in the decade ahead.
Grade: A-
1990s--Far and away the most consequential decade in country music's history, the genre's metamorphisis began almost immediately in the decade and the blistering pace of change left the landscape at decade's end almost unrecognizable. The vast majority of country music's mainstays from decades past were swept away and never heard from again only a couple of years into the decade, with everybody from Ronnie Milsap to Don Williams to Hank Williams, Jr. to Dolly Parton scoring the final top-10hits of their careers and fading into oblivion, and late 80s wunderkinds Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam running out of gas by mid-decade. Only a handful of successful 80s acts survived the transition including George Strait, Reba McEntire, and Alabama, the latter two surviving by successfully adapting to the times and recording the best music of their careers. A few other unlikely survivors were Steve Wariner, Tanya Tucker, and comeback kid John Anderson who had a fine second chapter to his career which looked dead by the mid-80s. While it was certainly sad to see some of these artists go the way of the woolly mammoth, it really felt like the time was right for wholesale change in country music at the time and wholesale change is exactly what we got.
This change effectively came in four different waves of new artists in the first half of the decade. The first wave came right away in the decade when the genre was still embracing a more traditional sound and a handful of new artists that made traditional country sound fantastic including Alan Jackson, Mark Chesnutt, Joe Diffie, and Tracy Lawrence. In addition, the first wave of new artists produced some more risk-taking acts like Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt whose stylistic flourishes would more radically alter the genre's trajectory. In addition, struggling late 80s acts Mary Chapin Carpenter and Vince Gill finally found their groove at this time and would also define the decade's progressive thrust.
The second wave of new artists would really make me take notice and corresponded with the peak of the genre's "boom" times. Sadly, despite the eclectic mix of styles that this wave produced, only a few of the acts would have a shelf life beyond five years, which was truly unfortunate given the caliber of talent that emerged. Brooks and Dunn was the biggest act to come from this wave, with additional success stories including Trisha Yearwood, The Mavericks, Little Texas, Suzy Bogguss, Pam Tillis, Hal Ketchum, Lee Roy Parnell, and John Berry.
The third wave of new artists produced some really big names and very long careers, but in the long run would impress less creatively than the first and especially the second wave. Some of the names included Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Neal McCoy, Toby Keith, Clay Walker, John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Byrd, and one of my favorite country groups of all-time, BlackHawk. A very worthy list of names in the lexicon of modern country, but some of the drawbacks to this wave was that a number of the acts came out of the box with outstanding material but then managed to coast for many years to come with bland, middle of the road fare, while other acts have been defined by impressive musical highs and cringeworthy musical lows.
The fourth wave of new artists generally had the worst timing in that country music's population growth left them little room to maneuver and would ultimately shorten the careers of promising newcomers like Wade Hayes, George Ducas, David Lee Murphy, and Rhett Akins. Shania Twain was, for better or worse, a phenomenon all her own and at least has to be respected for shaking things up. The more successful crooners of this wave ended up being mush peddlers of varying levels of quality such as Ty Herndon, Mark Wills, Bryan White, and one of the genre's all-time biggest mush peddlers but nonetheless the biggest star to emerge from the wave, Kenny Chesney.
By the late 1990s, the transformation that was so exciting just a few years earlier had made country music fat and lazy with so many new artists competing for limited chart space all the while trending towards a more faceless and generic sound. Somewhere along the lines around 1996, things had gone wrong and Hot New Country's well-deserved momentum had stalled. Only a handful of new artists broke through in the later years of the 90s, albeit some impressive ones including Lee Ann Womack, LeAnn Rimes, Lonestar, the Dixie Chicks, and Jo Dee Messina. Thank goodness for these acts because by and large the survivors of the four waves of newcomers who seemed so fresh and original in the first half of the decade were growing stale by decade's end.
It's a little bit challenging to rate this decade in country music. With the first two-thirds of the decade being so impressive and putting out so much first-rate music in just a few short years, it's impossible not to rate the 90s and country music's best decade. But with that said, it crashed pretty hard by the late 90s, and by decade's end, Nashville was churning out its weakest batch of music in 30 years. And regrettably, the late 90s rut would continue in the decade ahead.
Grade: A
2000s--The biggest problem with the most recent decade of country music is that Nashville did not update and retool its sound the way that country music has historically done with the advent of each new decade. There was little to distinguish the Hot New Country sound of the 2000s from that of the 1990s, and as a result even the more impressive recordings of the decade ended up sounding just a little too familiar. Also, the artists themselves became more interchangeable and less positioned for staying power than top-tier acts from the past. Granted, the decade produced a handful of acts that carved out their own sound and style and have stayed fresh and exciting for the duration of the decade, including Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, and despite the chasmic highs and lows of their musical selection, the group Rascal Flatts.
Beyond that, however, few of more promising acts from early in the decade lived up to expectations, whether it be the early flameouts of Lee Ann Womack, the Dixie Chicks, and Trick Pony to the creative drought that plagued Phil Vassar and Sara Evans after impressive early releases. Blake Shelton stands out as an artist who began his career as a breath of fresh air with a flurry of daring, outside-the-box singles but has since settled into a boring, middle-of-the-road groove. As the decade proceeded, Nashville gave us a number of male artists such as Dierks Bentley, Joe Nichols, Luke Bryan, and Jason Aldean who can best be described as "serviceable", keeping the genre on life support and occasionally releasing something mildly impressive, but definitely not leaving a lasting fingerprint on the genre's lexicon. Meanwhile, the new female artists like Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift have dominated the charts and almost all cut their teeth on an unapologetic country-pop sound, some of which works but hardly any of which sounds as good as the country-pop that came from the top female artists of decades past, where the vocalists and the songs were better.
Another trend from the 2000s that largely fizzled was an attempt to revive the country music outlaw era with a bunch of new acts (and rebranded old acts) that didn't have the cache to compare with Waylon, Willie, Hank, Jr., and the boys. The would-be new outlaws included Montgomery Gentry, Big and Rich, and the redneck woman herself Gretchen Wilson. The warmed-over older acts that "went outlaw" this decade were Toby Keith and Trace Adkins. All of these acts were able to pull off what they were selling a little bit, but all seemed like imitators rather than innovators at the end of the day. In addition to Keith and Adkins, a number of 90s acts effectively made the transition into the 2000s churning out many more hits. But few of them improved upon their early body of work with subsequent releases. One of the few who may have is Alan Jackson, but just about everybody else was at best uneven as Tim McGraw, Brooks and Dunn, and Kenny Chesney were, while others showed little reason why they would continue to even release music if this is the best they can do, as was the case with Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks.
Having sampled a significant amount of country music over the course of several decades, I have to conclude that this past decade was its weakest. While early country music didn't really jive with my style, it seemed original and interesting while this past decade's seems weary and cliched. And little that I have seen so far in the new decade gives me hope for a creative renaissance.
Grade: C
My conclusions from this timeline is that the country music that impressed me most came from 1975-1995, an era in which musical production standards rose and which traditional sounds coexisted with an adventurous and progressive new wave. Breaking it down to a smaller period of time, the most exciting time in country music's history was 1992-1995 when the genre was transforming at the speed of light and producing some of the most interesting music to ever come out of Nashville. But unfortunately this metamorphosis proved to be a bubble with the same trajectory as an economic bubble...unsustainable and followed by years of stagnancy after it pops. While country music is not nearly as intolerable as modern top-40 in the year 2011, it's been in a funk for quite some time now and needs a shot of adrenaline that doesn't seem to be on the horizon.
posted by Mark at 8:54 PM
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