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The Country Boom Is Happening Outside Nashville
Artists are ignoring gatekeepers, writing better music, and laying the groundwork for the genre’s future.
The singer-songwriter’s voice has a yodel-like warble, and a banjo or steel guitar could fit right into her folkier hits like “You Were Meant for Me.” But selling tens of millions of records couldn’t help her achieve one of her longtime goals: getting played on country radio. Country continued to move into pop in 2019, when Lil Nas X turned a banjo loop into a massive pop-rap hit in “Old Town Road.” It hardly mattered that everyone inNashville (besides Billie Ray Cyrus) shunned the song, because a bigger audience had already claimed it. Big Thief accompanied hoedowns like “Spud Infinity” and “Red Moon” with glitchy electronic trackslike “Blurred View.” Olsen and Plains, the duo of Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, chased sounds that had long been out of fashion, like crisp ‘70s countrypolitan and plucky turn-of-the-century Americana.
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