country music

country music, style of American popular music that originated in rural areas of the South and West in the early 20th century. The term country and western music (later shortened to country music) was adopted by the recording industry in 1949 to replace the derogatory label hillbilly music.

Ultimately, country music’s roots lie in the ballads, folk songs, and popular songs of the English, Scots, and Irish settlers of the Appalachians and other parts of the South. It also drew from minstrel and vaudeville traditions as well as African American blues, gospel music, and Tin Pan Alley (a genre of popular music that was centered on the song-publishing industry in New York City at the turn of the 20th century). In turn, country influenced (and was influenced by) many other types of music, from regional genres such as Cajun, zydeco, and Tejano to mainstream genres such as rock, rap, and trap.

Indeed, by the late 20th and early 21st centuries country was no longer a musical expression exclusive to the South or even to the United States. Contemporary country artists hailed from many other parts of the globe, from Canada to New Zealand and Australia. In the words of Willie Nelson, one of the genre’s biggest stars, “It comes from the soul of America, but it has gone around the world.”

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Beginnings in the 1920s

Country’s development was made possible partly by the invention of the phonograph and its ability to record music. In the early 1920s the traditional string-band music of the Southern mountain regions began to be commercially recorded, with Fiddlin’ John Carson garnering the genre’s first hit record, featuring the songs “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow,” in 1923. The vigor and realism of the rural songs, many lyrics of which were rather impersonal narratives of tragedies pointing to a stern Calvinist moral, stood in marked contrast to the often mawkish sentimentality of much of the popular music of the day.

More important than recordings for the growth of country music was broadcast radio. Small radio stations appeared in the larger Southern and Midwestern cities in the 1920s, and many devoted part of their airtime to live or recorded music suited to white rural audiences. Two regular programs of great influence were the National Barn Dance from Chicago, begun in 1924, and the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, begun in 1925. The immediate popularity of such programs encouraged more recordings and the appearance of talented musicians from the hills at radio and record studios. Among these were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, whose performances strongly influenced later musicians.

These early recordings were of ballads and country dance tunes and featured the fiddle and guitar as lead instruments over a rhythmic foundation of guitar or banjo. Other instruments occasionally used included the Appalachian dulcimer, harmonica, and mandolin; vocals were done either by a single voice or in high close harmony. Another common vocal feature was the yodel, introduced by Rodgers and employed by new generations of singers, such as LeAnn Rimes, into the 21st century.

Singing cowboys, Western swing, and honky-tonk

With the migration of many Southern rural white workers and families to industrial cities during the Great Depression (1929–c. 1939) and World War II (1939–45), country music was carried into new areas and exposed to new influences, such as blues and gospel music. The nostalgic bias of country music, with its lyrics about grinding poverty, orphaned children, bereft lovers, and lonely workers far from home, held special appeal during a time of wide-scale population shifts.

Despite this shift to the cities, early country music maintained an association with rural stereotypes of not only hill people and mountain folk but also cowboys, farmers, miners, and railroad workers. These mythical figures populated many songs of the genre, and some musicians tailored their image to align with audiences’ assumptions about rural life. Yet, authenticity underlay the image for many stars: Merle Travis, who wrote “Sixteen Tons” (1946), was a coal miner’s son, and Loretta Lynn was, famously, a coal miner’s daughter. During the 1930s a number of “singing cowboy” film stars, of whom Gene Autry was the best known, took country music and with suitably altered lyrics made it into synthetic and adventitious “western” music. This western theme remained popular for decades, as with Marty Robbins’s hit “El Paso” in 1959.

A second and more substantive variant of country music arose in the 1930s in the Texas-Oklahoma region, where the music of rural white fiddle bands was exposed to the swing jazz of Black orchestras and Mexican mariachis. In response, a Western swing style evolved in the hands of Bob Wills and others and came to feature steel and amplified guitars and a strong dance rhythm. An even more important variant was honky-tonk, a country style that emerged in the 1940s with such figures as Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams. Honky-tonk’s fiddle–steel-guitar combination and its bitter, maudlin lyrics about rural folk adrift in the big city were widely adopted by other country musicians.

Bluegrass, the Nashville Sound, and the influence of rock and roll

The same period saw a concerted effort to recover some of country music’s root values. Mandolin player Bill Monroe and his string band, the Blue Grass Boys, discarded more recently adopted rhythms and instruments and brought back the lead fiddle and high harmony singing. His banjoist, Earl Scruggs, developed a brilliant three-finger picking style that brought the instrument into a lead position. Their music, with its driving, syncopated rhythms and instrumental virtuosity, took the name “bluegrass” from Monroe’s band. The vocal style of bluegrass influenced the Louvin Brothers, a duo noted for their pure gospel-tinged sound and distinctive harmonies (also drawn from shape-note singing).

But commercialization proved a much stronger influence as country music became popular in all sections of the United States after World War II. In 1942 in Nashville Roy Acuff, one of the most important country singers, and songwriter Fred Rose organized the first publishing house for country music, the Acuff-Rose Publishing Company. A paramount signing was Hank Williams, whose catalog (including such hits as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the Cajun-inflected “Jambalaya,” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”) would have a tremendous influence on country music. Williams’s meteoric rise to fame in the late 1940s helped establish Nashville as the undisputed center of country music, with large recording studios and the Grand Ole Opry as its chief performing venue.

In the 1950s and ’60s country music became a huge commercial enterprise. Producer Chet Atkins developed the so-called Nashville Sound, a style in which many country music recordings employed lush orchestral backgrounds. At the same time, popular singers often recorded songs in a Nashville style.

There was considerable crossover between country and early rock and roll; the songs of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, and Carl Perkins (some of whom were labeled “rockabilly” performers) were played on country radio. Chuck Berry blended in country licks on his rock compositions, particularly on his 1955 single “Maybellene.” Later, in the 1960s, California-based bands such as the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers (led by Gram Parsons), and Buffalo Springfield ushered in country rock.

Modern country: From Patsy Cline to “Harper Valley P.T.A.”

In Patsy Cline and George Jones, country music found arguably its two greatest vocalists, both of whom were known for their unique phrasing and strong emotive abilities. Other leading performers of the era were Tex Ritter, Brenda Lee, Ray Price, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Glen Campbell, and Merle Haggard. Singing songs about social issues and giving voice to such marginalized figures as prisoners, Dust Bowl migrants, and Native Americans, Cash and Haggard (who had been incarcerated as a young man for various petty crimes) paved a way for the “outlaw country” movement of the 1970s.

Ballads were popular on the country chart in the 1950s and ’60s. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell were strong interpreters of songs centered on storytelling. Frizzell’s haunting murder ballad “The Long Black Veil” (1959) was one of the most influential examples of the form.

Other songwriters took the genre’s capacity for storytelling to new heights in the late 1960s. The 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry famously leaves listeners hanging at the song’s end regarding the identity of an unnamed object thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge. In 1968 Jeannie C. Riley’s chart-topping “Harper Valley P.T.A.” (written by Tom T. Hall) offered a miniature Peyton Place (a notorious 1956 novel about small-town hypocrisy) in lyrical form; the song relates the story of single mother who confronts the gossips at her teenage daughter’s Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) junior-high-school meeting.

Breaking new ground for women and African American performers

Taking a cue from Cline and Wells, several female country artists came to the forefront, creating songs that reflected women’s perspectives. Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton were among those who were highly influential songwriters as well as distinctive vocalists. Their public image, featuring glamorous hairstyles and sequined dresses, also established an indelible style for country divas for generations. A hallmark of country style for both men and women during this era were Nudie suits, one-of-a-kind “rhinestone cowboy” creations designed by Kyiv-born tailor Nudie Cohn.

Country music in the 1960s was also marked by the success of groundbreaking African American country artists. Although there were Black country artists since the origin of the genre, it was not until the career of honky-tonk vocalist Charley Pride that an African American singing star emerged. In 1967 he became the first Black solo singer to appear at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969 Linda Martell became the first Black female artist to perform there. Black performers in other genres also had significant success on the country chart; in 1962 soul and rhythm-and-blues (R&B) singer and pianist Ray Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, which sold more than a million copies, as did its single “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

The outlaw movement and mainstream country music

The 1970s saw the growth of the outlaw music of prominent Nashville expatriates Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Before the outlaw movement, Nelson had written hits for other artists, the best-known being Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” in 1961. As a singer he innovated a distinctive jazz-style phrasing, unusual to country music. Other seminal outlaw artists were singer-songwriters Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser, and Steve Earle. Additionally, some former folk musicians, in particular Gram Parsons’s former collaborator Emmylou Harris, successfully shifted their music to country in the 1970s.

Alongside the innovations, traditional bands and performers remained popular, including vocals-based groups such as Alabama, Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers, and the Oak Ridge Boys and contemporary singers such as Anne Murray and Kenny Rogers.

The gap between country and the mainstream of pop music continued to narrow in the 1970s and the next decade as electric guitars (and electric fiddles, in the case of the Charlie Daniels Band) replaced more traditional instruments and country music became more acceptable to a national urban audience. Country retained its vitality into the late 20th century with such diverse performers as George Strait, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, Travis Tritt, Faith Hill, the Judds, Vince Gill, Dwight Yoakam, and Lyle Lovett.

Garth Brooks was perhaps the most influential country star of this era, after the release his multimillion-selling album No Fences (1990). Brooks’s concerts were huge productions modeled on stadium rock shows, and he also recorded songs that addressed topics such as racism, interracial relationships, gay rights, and domestic abuse. Country’s popularity with mainstream audiences in the 1990s helped spawn a line-dancing craze, anchored by acts such as Brooks & Dunn and Billy Ray Cyrus.

However, some country purists objected to what they considered to be a focus on style over substance. There was a resurgence of bluegrass in the 1990s, led by fiddler and singer Alison Krauss and her band Union Station. Nashville remained the center of country music, but other cities such as Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles had thriving alternative country scenes, and prominent recording artists emerged from other parts of the country and around the globe, including the U.S. Northeast (Mary Chapin Carpenter), Canada (Anne Murray, k.d. lang, Shania Twain, and Cowboy Junkies), Ireland (Daniel O’Donnell), and Australia (Olivia Newton-John, Slim Dusty, and Keith Urban). In Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Tejano musicians increasingly incorporated country into their sound.

Country music politics

By the end of the 20th century country was regarded by many audiences as being a music genre solely produced by and for working-class white Americans who held conservative political views. Earlier country musicians and fans, however, had often aligned with populist or Democratic politics—for example, one of Fiddlin’ John Carson’s tunes was the protest song “The Farmer Is the Man That Feeds Them All.” In the 1960s some country alliances shifted to Republican candidates, and political statements began to show up in song lyrics. Among those who professed their views (whether liberal or conservative) were Cash, Haggard, Lynn, Lee Greenwood, and David Allan Coe.

At the turn of the 21st century some country stars were even more outspoken in their views. During the buildup to the Iraq War in 2003 the Dixie Chicks (later known as the Chicks) received blowback, including being banned from some country radio stations, after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized U.S. Pres. George W. Bush during a concert. A feud also ensued between the group and singer Toby Keith, who had released the patriotic “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Diversifying in the 21st century

Country’s popularity was not hindered by its controversies, however, and its success continued unabated into the 21st century, exemplified by such performers as Kenny Chesney, Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, Blake Shelton, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, the Zac Brown Band, Sturgill Simpson, Brandi Carlile, Luke Combs, and Chris Stapleton, among others.

Country also continued to diversify. Several African American artists, such as banjoist Rhiannon Giddens and former Hootie & the Blowfish front man Darius Rucker, redefined the traditional forms of bluegrass, Americana, and honky-tonk.

An invigorating new development was country-rap (and country-trap), a mash-up of country, Southern rock, and hip-hop music that resulted in an influx of crossover recording stars such as Nelly, Jelly Roll, Post Malone, Shaboozey, and Morgan Wallen. In 2019 the country-trap song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus broke the record for the most consecutive weeks (19) a single had topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In 2024 R&B singer Beyoncé released the Grammy Award-winning album Cowboy Carter, for which she collaborated with Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, among others, and became the first Black woman to top the country chart, with her single “Texas Hold ’Em.”

By 2025, when the venerable Grand Ole Opry celebrated its 100th anniversary, country music was being hailed as the fastest-growing music genre, especially on streaming services. It was increasingly popular among younger audiences, whereas it was previously associated with older demographics. Its fan base had also gone truly global, with high streaming numbers in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia and niche audiences in Japan, the Philippines, and China. Despite its embrace by fans around the world, country music retained an unmistakable character as one of the few truly indigenous American musical styles.