What Is Country Music?

Are there some terrific singles currently being played on country radio? Of course there are. Brad Paisley, Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Sugarland and a slew of other acts have dropped singles that have demonstrated a real facility with country conventions and with a mean pop hook. But there are just as many singles that have nothing to do with the traditional forms and conventions of the country genre and, perhaps more importantly, just as many singles that are poorly constructed, regressive pop. The idea that aping Def Leppard and Bad Company or, just as commonly, the drippiest of Bryan Adams and Gloria Estefan ballads constitutes progress for the country genre is just utterly wrong-headed, and I seriously doubt anyone would make the same claim if these same influences were felt so heavily in, say, contemporary hip-hop.
— JONATHAN KEEFE

One of the fascinating patterns of mainstream country in 2009 was that, as the sound moved further and further away from country music as we traditionally know it, the lyrics tried and harder and harder to pick up the slack. Seemingly every other song shipped to radio these days is about the singer's inherent "country-ness," either explicitly ("She's Country," "That's How Country Boys Roll," "I'm a Little More Country Than That") or implicitly ("Small Town U.S.A.," "Bonfire," "Backwoods," "Whistlin' Dixie"). There's a palpable self-consciousness to the trend, as though songwriters, labels and artists know they're stamping out a large part of the genre's core identity, but really, really hope you won't notice.
— DAN MILLIKEN

I see a danger in attempting to tightly define country music. The music may be a blend, of folk, traditional country, rock, blues or jazz -even Tejano or Cajun. Certainly none of those traditions or influences should disqualify music from being considered country. One need only look to the genius of an album such as Leon Russell's Hank Wilson's Back, or Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music to see that artists from other genres can make brilliant country music. Country music is a big tent, and we should avoid being quick to disqualify styles and artistic backgrounds in the name of a purity that never existed in the first place.
— PATSI BALE COX

My definition of country expands every year, to include more mainstream artists as well as more marginal acts. I'm never sure if this development is due more to my own increased immersion in a genre that I don't feel native to (as a misfit growing up in a small Southern town, I hated country as a defense mechanism) or to my own nomadism (I've changed cities three times in the last three years), but it creates an intense sense of discovery in the smallest moments, such as the realization that early Dolly Parton is just as sappy as current cancer ballads, or that George Strait's consistency is one of his most endearing qualities, or that Nick Lowe's country material is as good as his Stiff Records output, or that I can be genuinely moved by hearing Ashley Monroe perform "Has Anybody Ever Told You." As a result, country feels continually new to me even when I grow fatigued with and suspicious of styles I've spent years with.
— STEPHEN DEUSNER

Country music is now and always has been about experiences of those who respond to it, and while Taylor Swift's enormous commercial success in relating her youthful experiences has some marketers drooling over the opening to the Very Young Audience, it's been a rule of thumb that the more experienced in life the song-maker's been, the better the songs we get. So the most heartening developments of 2009 were the maturing, in public, of the songs of Brad Paisley and Miranda Lambert. They're now making nuanced, knowing and varied adult country music, both soulful and funny, and that's the best predictor that they'll both being doing so 10 and 20 years from now, too. Of course, Jamey Johnson more or less showed up already doing that.
— BARRY MAZOR

I decided to complete this list using only the "mainstream" country music that I hear on my radio, thus omitting strong albums from Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider, Ryan Bingham, Willie and the Wheel, Jason Isbell, Justin Townes Earle, Guy Clark, Kris Kristofferson and the great cover records from Rosanne Cash and Steve Earle. I allowed myself to cheat and include Holly Williams and Patty Loveless, though it's unclear why I was willing to make an exception for those ladies. (Perhaps my uterus couldn't help it.) In the end, you will notice I could not fill in all of the Best Album blanks, and the final two sit unattended. Maybe I'm overly critical and determined to be crabby, but then again, I'm as frustrated by this as anyone. I want people to start making albums again, not just peddling three singles and chaff.
— WHITNEY PASTOREK

>2009 sucked hard economically, but it was a great year for country, however you measure it. Any connection? Maybe, maybe not. The best songs weren't all, or even mostly, topical ones. But John Rich's "Shuttin' Detroit Down" and Patty Loveless's cover of Harlan Howard's "Busted" had moments that rang so true I shivered.
— WILL HERMES

To me, "country music" has always been about real people dealing with real life issues, from discovering love and purpose in one's life to coping with disappointment, disillusion and loss. In keeping with that spirit, I was totally mesmerized by Bob Dylan's Together Through Life. Conjuring up the ghosts of Hank Williams and Bob Wills, Dylan's weathered rasp atop the rollicking, loosey-goosey accompaniment of his crackerjack back-up band was by far the most emotive country recording I've heard in years.
— RICK PETREYCIK

The "what is country?" question bores me. I accept musicians as country by proclamation, affiliation, influence, association, marketing strategy or just if they sound country to me. The more time we spend discussing definition, usually in an attempt to maintain the purity of the genre (with country or any genre, really), the more we miss dissecting the actual music itself, figuring out what it is, how it works, what it does to us and why.
— DAVE HEATON

Genres are in the ear of the beholder. If I had to provide a limiting definition for country music, I'd say any song written by someone born in a Confederate state is country unless it's obviously aimed at another genre, though those written by Yankees or border staters can be, too (as Haggard and Jones and Shelby Lynne have proven -even Duke Ellington can sound country in the right hands.) But then, was Tony Bennett's "Cold, Cold Heart" country? I say, yes, it was.
— RALPH NOVAK

While I don't consider Kid Rock, Bob Dylan or Jon Bon Jovi country acts, I certainly think that that they have an appreciation for country music and I think they could have a country single or a country album. Unless they made a whole-hearted effort like Darius Rucker has done, they are still rock acts with some country overtones. I wouldn't say Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift or Rascal Flatts are hard-country acts. But because they broke into the country market, and country music has such a broad spectrum of musical sounds, they certainly fall within that genre as it is currently defined.
— VERNELL HACKETT

Much of what passes for country music today is really closer to western music, as in "country and western." The western part of that genre slowly replaced the so-called less sophisticated country music; while both types can be good, it's nice to understand the differences. One of the best ways to begin to understand the difference is to listen to Patty Loveless's Mountain Soul II, a welcome reminder of country's Appalachian roots. The themes are familiar on this follow-up to 2001's Mountain Soul: hard times, hard love, a bit of gospel and prison.
— TOM GEDDIE

The question of what's country seems to become more complicated with each passing year, especially given the wholesale usurping of the medium by such feeble pretenders as Kid Rock and Bon Jovi. Sadly, the fact that country audiences accept those acts in terms of crossover also helps undermine any effort to find Country's common ground. Country's mainstream marketers seems destined to pursue the dollars and devotion of the masses from whichever source they emerge, and nowadays it seems that whoever wears the proverbial cowboy hat and makes the most radio-ready melodies reaps the television time and packs them in the stadiums.
— LEE ZIMMERMAN

As a guy who most enjoys the music that straddles the fence of rock and country, filling out my ballot prompted questions and conflicts: Is there enough country in this rock? Is there any country in this rock? Is this a folk record, or is modern folk really contemporary country without the slick production? Is Ryan Bingham's Roadhouse Sun from 2009 any more or less a country album than Reckless Kelly's Bulletproof from 2008, when I basically left it off my ballot because I felt it was a straightforward rock album. Ultimately, I went with what felt right. No labels, no math, no science, just vibes.
— KELLY DEARMORE

In 2009, I wrote not so much about country as a genre, more about country performers who are great musicians. The cultural gap between Memphis and Nashville is unbelievable -last month, my cousin, a session drummer in Nashville, visited. He had never heard of Stax Records (though he did recognize Otis and Steve Cropper), and I was unfamiliar with the wide range of artists he backed. We live a few hundred miles apart, and our lives couldn't be more different. That said, I'm happy that Memphis is mine.
— ANDRIA LISLE

Like life and every form of music, the definition of country music morphs and shape-shifts with the culture, economy, news events and people of the time. While we may cherish Hank Williams, the Carter Family, et al, the experiences of the real people at that time are different from the real people of our time. The emotions and conflicts and characters may be the same or similar, which is why some music is truly timeless, but the circumstances that spawned them aren't. So we must keep our ears as well as our hearts open to youth, innovation and quality. The fact that Jamey Johnson and Taylor Swift co-exist in the same space with reissues of Hank Williams makes for pretty exciting times. I just wish radio could embrace a greater diversity of these voices, such as Magnolia Electric Company, Sarah Jarosz, Eileen Jewell, Phosphorescent and the Avett Brothers.
— ELLIS WIDNER

Battle Of The Blondes

Someone needs to publish some actual market research about all of the new fans that Swift is supposedly bringing into the country genre. Sales stats for similar teen-pop acts like Love and Theft, Gloriana and even Swift's supposed BFF Kellie Pickler suggest that Swift's appeal doesn't automatically transfer to her contemporaries. And that desperation to capitalize on Swift's market has resulted in some of the most lackluster crop of new "artists" to emerge in country music in a generation. Does someone in Nashville genuinely believe that a watered-down Christina Aguilera knockoff (Jessie James) and, more disturbingly, a watered-down BBMak knockoff (Love and Theft) are going to save the genre and, in turn, keep them employed?
— JONATHAN KEEFE

The Ashley Monroe story needs to be noted, because her outstanding album Satisfied, made three years ago and left on the shelf, was finally set free to be purchased digitally this year. Besides containing some of the most convincing and engaging new country you could hear in 2009, it's also a wake-up call, if one was needed, that what "albums" are, when they're "released" or become "generally available" is subject to 21st-century rules -which brings into question a lot of the old "this year's releases by record companies " premises of lists like these. This was one of the very best new country albums you could hear in 2009.
— BARRY MAZOR

I feel strongly that Taylor Swift is every bit as much "country" as, say, Miranda Lambert or Jamey Johnson, in the sense that she writes and sings songs cast as personal experiences with guitar-based, verse/chorus/hook construction, with aspirations to reach the widest audience possible without resorting to rock-rebel posturing or "outsider" status. All-inclusive, they used to call it, whether "it" was post-Sun Records Johnny Cash, or the Oak Ridge Boys. It seemed like a great year for country to my ears and (just as important these days) eyes, listening to and watching country performers on TV. (Thanks, Kanye. Thanks, David Letterman, for introducing Billy Currington's "People Are Crazy" by saying, "This is the real deal here -this is a perfect song." Not quite, Dave, but it'll do until you take a closer listen to Miranda.)
— KEN TUCKER

Miranda Lambert made what I thought was the country record of the year by coloring both inside and outside Nashville lines. I mean, the girl sang about putting a bullet in her radio, and still got airplay! Bless her. Her writing has really grown. And if she didn't pen the best songs -Fred Eaglesmith's "Time To Get A Gun" and John Prine's "That's The Way The World Goes 'Round" -she picked 'em and owned 'em.
— WILL HERMES??

Last year, too much loudness (that is, an excess of volume and dynamic-range compression in the mix and/or mastering) did unforgivable damage to what should have been my favorite rock album of the year, Metallica's Death Magnetic. This year it did the same for what should have been my favorite country album of the year, Miranda Lambert's Revolution. Here is an album filled with wonderful songs and terrific performances, neither of which I can stand to listen to because the sound has been so distorted by loudness and flattened by compression that it breaks my heart. The so-called "Loudness War" has been raging for more than a decade in the rock world, but Revolution will always stand for me as the first great country album to become a casualty. This vile practice is the mortal enemy of modern music, and it should be stopped immediately.
— CHRIS NEAL

Taylor Swift could do with a bit more self-awareness, but there is something tender about her songs that makes them seem so real. I know her problems with authenticity and pop, but there is something so lovely, so intensely broken about how she realizes she was told a lie. On the other hand, you do not want to get Miranda Lambert angry -you wouldn't like her when she's angry. Revolution is not the masterpiece of the last album, but enough of a new direction, with the same kind of pop instincts grafted onto a desire for Opry legitimacy. It makes me want to know what she's going to do next.
— ANTHONY EASTON

{ } Hearing Ashley Monroe emerge on the scene a few years ago was heartening -a young voice with more than a trace of Dolly's lilting mountain heartache who could write to boot. She's since gotten some country cuts and been a choice duet partner in indie-pop (with Trent Dabbs) and garage rock (with The Raconteurs), but -probably because she's not much for over-the-top belting -her own album has barely seen the light of day. And that's a real shame.
— JEWLY HIGHT

From the wailing and gnashing of teeth that began throughout the internet after this year's CMA broadcast, it would be easy to think that the Mayans and Woody Harrelson had miscalculated and the End of Days had arrived three years early. I'm hardly a fan of Taylor Swift's or any kind of a traditionalist, but the notion that her sweep of the CMAs signaled the death knell for country music as a whole seemed particularly hyperbolic and self-serving. Did Swift deserve the Female Vocalist of the Year trophy? It's hard to imagine anyone who heard her two live performances on that broadcast saying yes, especially when the literal interpretation of "vocalist" was the justification for denying the award to relatively thin-voiced stars such as Shania Twain, Terri Clark and Jo Dee Messina at their commercial peaks. But Swift's other wins were hardly the fulfillment of a prophecy Nashville simply continues to draw milk from the most distended udder it can find. And in 2009, Taylor Swift is the genre's leading cash cow.
— JONATHAN KEEFE

One of 2009's unexpected blessings was that Ashley Monroe's criminally shelved 2006 debut, Satisfied, finally saw the light of day —an unpromoted, digital-only light, mind you, but a light all the same. Not only does the album mark the proper arrival of an exemplary young singer and songwriter (she's also got cuts on Jason Aldean and Miranda Lambert's latest, including the killer Lambert track "Me and Your Cigarettes"); it's a big ol' twangy beacon for all who wonder how country music can evolve musically without losing track of itself.
— DAN MILLIKEN

Not that it wasn't mighty impressive to see a certain willowy blond convince all suburban girls who aren't yet old enough to drive -country fan or not -that she's read their diaries. It was. But Miranda Lambert made the bigger career-sustaining statement with her new album by growing into a role that's more emotionally demanding than "young hillbilly spitfire" alone.
— JEWLY HIGHT

Taylor is pretty much her own genre at this point, and she's the greatest singer within my earshot, using the wavers and quavers of her voice for whipsaw effect as much as for vulnerability. From the YouTube evidence it's something of a crap shoot whether she'll be on pitch live, and award shows cause her to stumble, so maybe Taylor doesn't happen without the modern recording studio. So hurrah for the modern recording studio.
— FRANK KOGAN

Men In Hats And Not

It was necessary for Paisley to acknowledge America's racial history somewhere on American Saturday Night, because he left it out on the opening title track. "It's like we're all livin' in a big ol' cup / Just fire up the blender [and] mix it all up," Paisley sings on this rousing and proud celebration of a country where most everyone can trace their stories back to some other land. The song's details explicitly point listeners back to Mexico, China, Canada and several European nations but not to Africa, which just won't work. I mean, an America without Chinese or Canadian immigrants would be a somewhat different country than it is. But a USA without African-Americans would be a place that's never existed -something that the similarly themed melting pot of "Southern Voice," by Tim McGraw, seems to understand. Of course, you can't play guitar like Paisley does without being steeped in the blues, so the defining cultural contributions of African-Americans are there, after all, in every twangy note even if, as has virtually always been the case in country music, actual black people remain segregated.
— DAVID CANTWELL

Willie Nelson's 2006 You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker hinted at the full-monty western swing of Willie and the Wheel, a Bob Wills tribute first envisioned by Atlantic's Jerry Wexler back in the '70s. And just as Walker got to hear You Don't Know Me just before she died (she told me in an interview how proud she was of it), Wexler finally got to hear his idea realized just before he passed. I'll bet he was pleased. Willie's outlasting everyone and still making great records. Maybe we should all be smoking more weed.
— WILL HERMES

Brad Paisley's ambitious American Saturday Night gets my vote for album of the year because not only is it State-of-the-Art Country, Mainstream Division, but also because it models a blend of rock and twang that could keep country alive and relevant (is there a difference?) moving ahead. "Welcome to the Future," indeed. ASN includes images and words never previously deployed on a country album-"heartbroken zombie," "big ol' wuss," "tarragon" and, most arresting of all, the burning cross that appears in "Welcome to the Future."
— DAVID CANTWELL

Song for song, I like Time Well Wasted and 5th Gear better. But Welcome to the Future is still a remarkable album, artful and ambitious, and the title track epitomized Paisley's greatness: matter-of-factly modern country music that, just as it threatens to veer into corn, sucker-punches with poignancy and squeezes in shit-hot guitar solos to boot. I guess there's plenty to be said about the political subtext of the song and video. But as a writer, Paisley chooses details over dogma, and lets his pictures tell the story. Every generation gets the country hero it deserves -Paisley is ours.
— WILL HERMES??

Alt-Country, Whatever That Is

Rude, raucous and brilliant, off-the-cuff musicians, Those Darlins are the aural equivalent of the babysitter you wish you had when you were 12 -willing to teach you how to smoke, cuss and kiss, before loading you up on ice cream and shots of your folks' whiskey.
— ANDRIA LISLE

I loved the father/son symmetry of the Steve Earle/Justin Townes Earle records, which both spoke to tradition, albeit in different ways. Pops bowed to his own creative father on Townes, with covers that played fast and loose stylistically (see Tom Morello's weirdly appropriate hip-hop noise guitar on "Lungs"); the kid played originals looking back to a still-earlier era while also covering The Replacements. These guys understand tradition is something to be both cherished and run up against.
— WILL HERMES?

The banjo is considered the most stereotypically "country" of instruments too country now for country, as Dale Watson once put it. Of course, with his jazz-fusion rhythm section and finger-busting virtuosity, Bela Fleck has long since transcended the instrument's supposed genre limitations. On Throw Down Your Heart, recorded in Africa with several of the continent's leading musicians and singers, he takes the banjo back to its ancestral origins, and in the process, shines a light on the dark and tangled roots of Appalachian country music.
— RICK MITCHELL

Buddy and Julie Miller's Written in Chalk is the sound of America today, from the nostalgia of "Ellis County" through "Every Time We Say Goodbye" and on to the harrowing story of "Memphis Jane," the addict. "Take me back when times were hard but we didn't know it / If we ate it, we had to grow it / Take me back when all we could afford was laughter and two mules instead of a tractor / Take me back again," Buddy sings on "Ellis County." But it's clear those times are gone, never to return -the song merely pays homage to what was.
— JIM MORRISON

So far, singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle's post-rehab albums don't have the range (or ranginess) of his father Steve's own prodigal peaks. No problem: The reflective alertness and hopeful smoothness of Midnight at the Movies strongly suggest that the younger Earle is his own kind of escape artist, thankful for the breathing room he's earned, and the floor plans he's committed to memory. He's learned not to get too crazy, and thus distract himself from the female spirit who always shows up to hold his hand, then "leaves before the credits roll." Earle is striding through honky-tonk neon shadows, thoughtfully singing to passing lovers and friends, while exercising his still-young lungs with that bracing night-life air.
— DON ALLRED

There is something so lovely, so exacting and so emotionally wrought about Lyle Lovett's Natural Forces. Filled with a swing that is only sometimes melancholy which sets the place with an exactitude that is effortless. It is also one of the most charmingly filthy albums of the year -including a cover of the Doughboys' epic food = fucking opus "Pantry," and perhaps the catchiest song about masturbation ever ("Choke My Chicken"). That he does this while covering Van Zandt's heartbreaking "Loretta" or "Bayou Song," the harshest text about Louisiana since Randy Newman, is even better.
— ANTHONY EASTON??

Ryan Bingham, Justin Townes Earle and the Deadstring Brothers have brought insurgence back to the insurgent-country genre and spread its message from Nashville and Bakersfield to Austin, Arizona, Boston and beyond. Some may decry the fact that roots-rock is as much about rock as it is about roots, but as long as the message is true and the original precepts remain -heartfelt passion and sentiment, skillfully played arrangements sans gloss and glitter, and songs that emit from the heart as opposed to the cash register -even latecomers like Elvis Costello can fit into the fold.
— LEE ZIMMERMAN

On A Friend of a Friend, [David] Rawlings finally stepped out from behind Gillian Welch to make...a great Gillian Welch record, just with him up front. In recasting "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)" -which he co-wrote with Ryan Adams for the latter's Heartbreaker LP -as a mountain-soul tune complete with rolling banjo and hot fiddle, he coined a modern classic. Then again, it was already halfway there: I heard my gentle, twenty-something, 21st-century hippie neighbors singing it on their front porch with acoustic guitars one night last summer, and knew then it had entered the canon.
— WILL HERMES??

"With a backpack full of yesterdays / On a freeway full of smoke and haze / Where the power lines and fault lines double cross." From country cliché and California evening news to righteous wordplay that eventually slips deeper, the dustbowl-soul of the Flatlanders' Hills and Valleys rolls on, through all zones. Alternative country icons Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, mostly writing together, are philosophical scavengers, poised and antsy. Years and miles definitely (sometimes densely) add up, but meanwhile, "If time is money / Space is credit / They're talkin' 'bout it all over town!"
— DON ALLRED

Of all the albums I listened to this year, Rosanne Cash's sequel to Black Cadillac was one of the strangest, not for its sound but for the way it never settled in my mind as one thing or another. I expected tasteful, elegiac versions of songs, which is what I got. But it sounded less like a memorial to her father than to a style of music that flourished in the last century and now becomes a marketing tool for artists who also flourished in the last century. She sings them beautifully, of course, but each song has to argue for its existence, and not all of them are persuasive.
— STEPHEN DEUSNER

The best country-related development of the year, in my mind, is the Recording Academy's establishment of a formal Americana category. Apparently, Bob Dylan and Steve Earle are still gonna be the acts to beat, but at least now everyone won't have to fight it out in the contemporary folk category. I'm shocked, however, that Townes could win a nomination over albums like Todd Snider's The Excitement Plan, or even Midnight at the Movies, by Steve's kid and Van Zandt namesake, Justin Townes Earle. Or Ryan Bingham's Roadhouse Sun. Those albums are among the year's colossal standouts -they outrank Electric Dirt, too, but the Grammy voters are nothing if not consistent when it comes to nominating the sentimental faves.
— LYNNE MARGOLIS

Buddy & Julie Miller's Written in Chalk is perhaps the ultimate sleeper. In a year where the best music was a source of catharsis for a nation struggling with big issues and a tough economy, these 12 tracks offer a gorgeous and enveloping escape. It's Buddy and Julie Miller doing what they do year in, year out, but with an extra warmth and focus that makes it a career highlight. Julie Miller's and Patty Griffin's performances on "Don't Say Goodbye" are some of the most beautiful things I've heard in ages. There's humility and strength in every note on this album.
— JEFF LEVEN