Country music

• 1. Introduction

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  Country music got its name in an unlikely way. For decades, the genre was called hillbilly music, and only in the 1940s did the term "country music" catch on. By 2023-45 percent of Americans reported listening to it, a share that had climbed sharply since the early 2020s. That number raises a question: how did a regional sound, born in the South and carried across mountain ranges and radio waves, become the soundtrack for nearly half a nation?

  The instruments alone tell a story of collision. Banjos, mandolins, fiddles, harmonicas, and every imaginable shape of guitar -- acoustic, electric, steel, resonator -- came from different continents and traditions. British folk music rode the earliest waves of immigration. African-American spirituals and blues modes added harmonic depth. Mexican, Irish, Gospel, and Polynesian Hawaiian sounds each left a mark. What emerged was not a single thread but a braid.

  Bristol, Tennessee holds the formal honor: the U.S. Congress has recognized it as the birthplace of country music, grounding that designation in the recording sessions held there in 1927. But the music had been forming long before any microphone was set up. The questions ahead are not just about where country music came from. They are about what it absorbed, what it resisted, who it let in, and what it sounded like each time it remade itself.

• 2. Roots and Crossroads

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  Migration into the southern Appalachian Mountains carried the folk music and instruments of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin for nearly 300 years. That accumulation developed into what historians call Appalachian music. As the country expanded westward, the Mississippi River and Louisiana became a crossroads, giving rise to Cajun music out of the blending that happened there.

  In the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains, the American frontier, and the Rio Grande served as a backdrop for Native American, Mexican, and cowboy ballads. New Mexico music and western music grew out of those surroundings, feeding directly into Red Dirt, Texas country, and Tejano styles. The steel guitar -- one of the genre's most distinctive sounds -- traces its origins not to Appalachia at all but to Hawaii. Country historian Bill C. Malone summarized the genre's geographic roots plainly: country music was "introduced to the world as a Southern phenomenon."

  The Mountain City Fiddlers Convention, held in 1925, helped inspire modern country music before the famous Bristol sessions ever took place. The Bristol recordings of 1927 drew the most attention from historians, but the Johnson City sessions of 1928 and 1929, and the Knoxville sessions of 1929 and 1930, also shaped what the genre would become. Before any of these formal gatherings, pioneer settlers in the Great Smoky Mountains had been developing a musical heritage for generations.

• 3. The First Recordings

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  On the 30th of June 1922, fiddlers Henry Gilliland and A.C. Eck Robertson recorded "Arkansas Traveler" and "Turkey in the Straw" for Victor Records; those tracks, released in April 1923, stand as the first commercial recordings of what was considered traditional country instrumental music. Then, on the 14th of June 1923, Fiddlin' John Carson recorded "Little Log Cabin in the Lane" for Okeh Records, a New York City label that had been issuing hillbilly records since 1923. That recording is widely considered the first country song featuring vocals and lyrics.

  Vernon Dalhart became the first country singer to have a nationwide hit, in May 1924, with "Wreck of the Old 97." The flip side, "Lonesome Road Blues," also found its audience. In April of that same year, "Aunt" Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis became the first female musicians to record and release country songs. Columbia Records entered the hillbilly market in 1924, and RCA Victor Records followed in 1927.

  Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family emerged from this early period as the figures historians most consistently single out. The Carters, from Scott County, Virginia, had learned to sight-read hymnals using solfege. Their first recordings were captured at the Bristol, Tennessee session on the 1st of August 1927, with Ralph Peer serving as both talent scout and sound recordist. Rodgers fused hillbilly country, gospel, jazz, blues, pop, cowboy, and folk into a single style; his song "Blue Yodel" sold over a million records. Beginning in 1927, the Carters recorded approximately 300 old-time ballads, traditional tunes, country songs, and gospel hymns over the following 17 years.

• 4. Barn Dances and Electric Guitars

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  Record sales fell during the Great Depression, but radio picked up the slack. "Barn dance" shows featuring country music spread from the Southern United States north to Chicago and west to California. The Grand Ole Opry, which WSM in Nashville had been airing since 1925, became the most important of these. Among its early stars were Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, and African American harmonica player DeFord Bailey.

  The electric guitar entered the country sound in 1938, when Bob Wills added one to his band. A decade later, in 1948, Arthur Smith recorded "Guitar Boogie," which crossed over to the U.S. pop charts. Nashville session players spent years favoring the warm tones of Gibson and Gretsch archtop electrics before a Fender style, built on guitars that became available in the early 1950s, eventually became the signature country guitar sound.

  Drums were a different matter. Early country musicians considered them too loud and impure. By 1935, Wills had added drums to his western swing band, the Texas Playboys, despite the Grand Ole Opry's opposition. Louisiana Hayride, a less conservative venue, kept a house drummer backstage as late as 1956. By the 1960s, it was rare for a country band to play without one.

  Cowboy songs, filmed in Hollywood and performed by singing cowboys like Gene Autry -- called the king of the "singing cowboys" -- the Sons of the Pioneers, and Roy Rogers brought western music to mainstream audiences. Country and western were frequently broadcast together on the same radio stations, blurring two distinct genres into one label. In 1949, Billboard officially replaced "hillbilly" and "folk songs and blues" with the term "country and western." Patsy Montana opened the door for female artists with "I Want To Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." Webb Pierce, a honky-tonk singer, became the top-charting country artist of the 1950s, with 13 singles spending a combined 113 weeks at number one.

• 5. Rockabilly, Nashville, and Outlaw

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  Rock and roll and country collided in Memphis at Sun Records, where producer Sam Phillips launched Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash into rockabilly. Nineteen fifty-six was rockabilly's peak, producing Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," Cash's "I Walk the Line," and Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" in the same year. Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, served as the base for Buddy Holly. The first all-country radio station was established in Lubbock, Texas, in 1953.

  The Nashville sound peaked in the early 1960s under producers like Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley, and Billy Sherrill. It turned country into a multimillion-dollar industry by borrowing pop stylings -- smooth vocals, strings, and what players called "licks." Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, and Eddy Arnold were central to this era. The pianist Floyd Cramer's "slip note" style was a defining texture. The sound collapsed in 1964 when rock's resurgence coincided with the plane crash deaths of both Reeves and Cline.

  Outlaw country grew from traditional Western music styles rooted in the bars and honky-tonks of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Johnny Cash's 1963 hit "Ring of Fire" was among its early landmarks. Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Merle Haggard, and Joe Ely shaped the movement. Nelson described the outlaw image as something that "got written in an article" before young people decided it was cool and started listening. The 1976 album Wanted! The Outlaws crystallized the era. Its influence carried into the 1980s through supergroups like The Highwaymen.

  In 1980, the film Urban Cowboy popularized a style described as neocountry disco. Record store sales reached $250 million in 1981. By 1984, 900 radio stations had adopted country or neocountry pop as their full-time format. Also by 1984, however, sales had dropped below their 1979 levels. In the mid-1980s, a group of artists the industry called the "Class of '81" -- Ricky Skaggs, George Strait, and Reba McEntire -- began revisiting a more traditional sound.

• 6. A Global Phenomenon

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  Garth Brooks turned country music into a worldwide phenomenon in the 1990s. He broke records for both sales and concert attendance throughout the decade, fusing neotraditionalist country with stadium rock. The Dixie Chicks' 1998 debut album Wide Open Spaces was certified 12 times platinum; their 1999 follow-up Fly went 10 times platinum. Canadian artist Shania Twain's 1997 album Come On Over became one of the world's best-selling albums for three consecutive years -- 1998, 1999, and 2000.

  George Hamilton IV was the first U.S. country musician to perform in the Soviet Union and was later designated the "International Ambassador of Country Music" for his role in spreading the genre beyond American borders. In Germany, according to the Country Music Association International, three distinct groups gravitate to country: people drawn to the American cowboy image, middle-aged listeners seeking an alternative to harder rock, and younger audiences attracted to the pop-influenced sound of recent releases.

  In Japan, country and western first found a following before World War II, though many Japanese listeners encountered it through the Far East Network after the war. One of the first Japanese western acts was Biji Kuroda and The Chuck Wagon Boys. The genre maintains a dedicated following there today, with venues like Little Texas in Tokyo and Armadillo in Nagoya hosting honky-tonk nights. In Mongolia, Enkh-Erdene performed a cover of George Strait's "Amarillo by Morning" on The World's Best in 2019, then released an original country album in the Mongolian language in 2023, and covered Garth Brooks' "Friends In Low Places" in 2024. In Australia, the Tamworth Country Music Festival has been held since 1973 and draws upward of 100,000 visitors each year. Slim Dusty sang "Waltzing Matilda" at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Kasey Chambers became the youngest artist ever inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2018.

• 7. Race, Politics, and the Modern Era

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  DeFord Bailey, one of the first artists to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, was African American, yet country music today is largely associated with white Americans. Out of more than 2,100 country artists and groups played on national country radio stations from 2000 to 2020, only 3 percent were Black, Hispanic, or Indigenous. Researchers and artists have attributed this to deliberate segregation efforts by record labels that began in the 1920s.

  Lil Nas X's song "Old Town Road" spent 19 weeks atop the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, becoming the longest-running number-one song since the chart debuted in 1958. Before that chart peak, the song was removed from the Billboard Hot Country Songs list, sparking a debate about whether the removal was racially motivated. Billboard denied this, stating the decision was based purely on musical composition. Mickey Guyton was nominated for the Grammy's Best Solo Country Performance award in 2021; she has spoken publicly about her music being embraced by streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music while remaining largely ignored by American broadcast country radio.

  In 2024, Beyonce released Cowboy Carter, her eighth studio album, framed as a journey through the overlooked contributions of Black artists to American musical history. The album included original songs like "Texas Hold 'Em" and a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

  Country music also became a vehicle for political messaging, particularly after the September 11 attacks. Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" returned to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 following the attacks. Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, Charlie Daniels, and Darryl Worley all released explicitly patriotic songs in that period. In contrast, when The Chicks' lead singer commented in 2003 that she was ashamed to be from the same state as President George W. Bush, the backlash across the country music community was severe. Their 2006 album Taking the Long Way found commercial success outside country audiences while being largely ignored within the genre.

  Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" became the best-selling country song of all time during the bro-country era of the early 2010s. Research from the mid-2010s suggested that about 45 percent of country's best-selling songs at the time could be categorized as bro-country. Morgan Wallen is currently the traditional country artist with the most Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers, with four, as the genre's reach into mainstream pop continues to grow.