Last Saturday night, the Nashville Entertainment Association’s Extravaganza music festival had taken over an entire block of Lower Broadway. More than 20 bands were playing in clubs between Fourth and Fifth Avenues, on the very street where Hank Williams once walked.

At Robert’s Western Wear, Hazeldine, a three-woman, one-man band with a lead singer who wears skintight striped bell bottoms, was playing a sultry electric version of “I’m Lonesome Without You,” a classic Delmore Brothers ballad. Across the street, Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop featured the Cousin Lovers, a hillbilly band that wears ’70s polyester outfits. At Wolfy’s, an enthusiastic crowd greeted the Nevers, a Knoxville group that plays twangy power-pop songs with a tightness and ferocity that suggests the early Ramones.

Upstairs at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Jim Calvin, of the mountain-music duo The Calvins, was cackling. “This isn’t bluegrass,” he said as he hoisted a banjo across his lumberjack frame and adjusted the straps of his overalls. “This is ‘Americana alternative hillbilly.’ ” Moments later, his petite, redheaded wife, Royann, began playing the spoons in accompaniment to her husband’s banjo.

The song was a bit hard to place. The instrumentation was old-time country, and Royann’s spoons were making a silver blur. But the melody sounded oddly contemporary. No wonder. At Nashville’s most revered country-music nightclub, the hangout of Opry stars past and present, the hillbilly duo was playing the Ventures’ surf anthem “Wipeout.”

Last Saturday night in those clubs on Lower Broadway, Hazeldine, The Cousin Lovers, and the Calvins didn’t seem to have much in common—except that they didn’t exactly fit in anywhere else. None of them was playing the kind of country music that’s usually shown on CMT. And they, and their fans, like it that way.

Some observers, listeners, and record label executives are predicting that groups like these may be part of the next major musical trend—perhaps the first big trend of the new century. In the past year, the entire recording industry has been spooked by poor sales, and the national media have begun forecasting gloom. Alternative rock and country radio listenerships have been on a downswing. The industry is desperate for new sounds, new listeners, new revenue. If the record labels can somehow tap into this burgeoning phenomenon, imprecisely defined as “alternative country,” there are hopes that, once again, they will be able to clean up.

At last year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, electrified twang and roots revivalism stole the show. In the wake of the festival, major West Coast labels snapped up many of the rising alternative country stars. Geffen Records signed Robbie Fulks, a gifted Chicago singer-songwriter whose Country Love Songs was one of last year’s best country records; Geffen’s Outpost subsidiary reissued Faithless Street, the 1995 LP by the North Carolina band Whiskeytown. MCA in Los Angeles—not MCA Nashville—snapped up Richard Buckner, whose LP, Bloomed, made a splash when it debuted on the critically acclaimed Texas label Dejadisc.

Some label execs are tentatively suggesting that alternative country will serve as the means to bring disenfranchised rock ’n’ rollers and country fans back to the fold. But alt-country’s supporters are less than delighted at that prospect. For the most part, they’re convinced that it was media overkill and overhype that transformed independent post-punk music into the tuneless, faceless, inscrutably ironic bloat of alternative rock. On the other hand, alternative country still has to prove that it is anything more than a lot of idealistic rhetoric—a hype dream of another sort.

Four years ago on Music Row, anyone who touted “alternative country” as the wave of the future would have been greeted with horse laughs, like a tourist who claimed to have written Garth Brooks’ next No. 1 hit in crayon on a Fritos bag. These days nobody is laughing.

Within the past two years, Mercury has signed hardcore honky-tonker Neal Cody. RCA has signed the quirky, eclectic Jim Lauderdale. Arista has signed the slick-suited BR5-49. MCA, meanwhile, is weighing in with Big House, a group that suggests virtually every band that played on album-rock radio in 1973.

But this flurry of interest from the media and the record labels has come about without a single blockbuster success to define the alternative country movement. There hasn’t yet been one hit that defines alt-country in the way that Nirvana’s Nevermind defined alternative rock. The online news magazine Slate reports that, despite adoring reviews, Being There, the latest album by Wilco, the darlings of alternative country, has yet to sell 100,000 copies.

Alternative country exists in a sort of musical no-man’s-land. It isn’t even comfortable being pinned down to a single name. Sometimes it’s also described as “insurgent country,” a phrase that does capture the music’s cheeky humor, its vaguely rustic spirit, and its militantly grandiose rhetoric.

And yet, in the space of just a few years, alternative country has given rise to dozens of bands across the country. It has its own growing infrastructure of indie record labels with names like Watermelon, DejaDisc, Dead Reckoning, East Side Digital, and Diesel Only. It has spawned tours and celebrations from Alaska to North Carolina. It has its own magazine, its own nationwide network of fanzines, even its own cookbook.

Alternative country is musically omnivorous. It makes room for bluegrass bands that play punk songs, punk bands that play bluegrass songs, even bluegrass bands that play bluegrass. BR5-49, a traditional country band with a major-label deal, fits under the alt-country rubric. Southern Culture on the Skids, a rock ’n’ roll band with a major-label deal, belongs there too, right along with widely respected, hard-to-define songwriters such as Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Iris DeMent. The media, the record companies, even the bands themselves use the alt-country label without quite understanding it. In that way, alternative country is like pornography: When you see it, you know it.

Alt-country thrives on contradictions. It is a grass-roots movement that is tied to a vanishing rural tradition, and yet its growth is tied, in large part, to the Internet, which provides a sort of union hall for the exchange of information and news. Its artists include kids from the suburbs, feminists, wage laborers, well-to-do folkies, and former skate punks. Some alt-country artists wouldn’t sound out of place on 98 WSIX; any of them would fit into 91 Rock’s sprawling college-radio playlist. The movement’s ranks include strict hard-country purists as well as indie rockers who see redneck posturing as a last chance to express their rage.

Mainstream country is forever setting parameters, dictating boundaries as to what does and doesn’t belong, but alternative country seems to have a place for anybody who’s disenfranchised: the hardcore honky-tonk fan who wishes he could hear Webb Pierce and Merle Haggard on FM radio; the rock listener who tuned out in disgust after he heard one too many Stone Temple Pilots sound-alikes; the alienated thirtysomething who came late to George Jones, through albums like More Fun in the New World or Almost Blue.

According to Grant Alden, editor of No Depression, the magazine that serves as the movement’s conscience, its champion, and its reluctant Billboard, “There are good sociological reasons, I think, why [the number of alternative country fans] will grow. The underground rock scene of the ’80s taught many of us not to be dependent on obvious sources for our music; the alternative-rock boom of the ’90s will inevitably force the curious to seek out new sounds elsewhere.” And, as alternative country demonstrates, the past is always a great place to find new sounds.

For some groups, there are obvious advantages to being classified as part of a movement. It provides an invigorating sense of belonging and a shared sense of purpose—the sorts of feelings that are comforting as we’re faced with the yawning void of a new millennium. At the same time, other groups resist the alternative-country tag, fearing that it yokes them to an already overhyped trend, one that ridicules traditional country music and the people who love it.

And yet almost all the alternative-country groups approach their music with a similar attitude: an irreverent form of reverence. They seem to suggest the inspired amateurism of punk and mid-’80s indie rock—not the sleek, smoothly produced mass-market country packaged by Music Row.

Tastemakers and trendspotters insist that this shambling, iconoclastic, amorphous movement can unite jaded music fans of diverse backgrounds and temperaments. They figure alt-country’s target audience could resemble the sort of melting-pot audience that gathered for the Extravaganza performances on Lower Broadway last Saturday night: lawyers, drunks, collegiate punks, goateed hipsters, and middle-aged Alan Jackson fans, in the midst of whom sat legendary songwriter Hank Cochran, looking for all the world like King Lear surveying his blasted realm.

Alternative country’s most fervent admirers claim that their movement is a challenge to the mainstream swill that clogs country radio; they maintain that it infuses indie spirit and creativity into a music business that is now dominated by corporate interests. Alt-country’s finest moments—such as Freakwater’s striking 1995 album Old Paint, in which a timeless country sound provides the backdrop for plaintive contemporary meditations on work, lust, and moral courage—suggest that they’re absolutely right. At its best, alternative country shatters demographic constraints and scatters the hit-mill malaise. At their worst, however, alt-country bands merely substitute sloppiness for the sappiness of Music Row. What’s worse, they’re invariably condescending.

Outsiders are often confused by the fact that, to their ears, the best of alternative country seems virtually indistinguishable from first-rate mainstream country. The husband-and-wife Calvins, for example, sound like the very essence of country music. What’s more, their credentials are impeccable. Hillbilly omnivore Marty Stuart sings their praises to anyone who’ll listen, and they were Townes Van Zandt’s backup group of choice in the months before his death last month. Members of BR5-49 backed the duo on their recent self-released cassette Hillbilly Boogaroo.

Nevertheless, when Bloodshot Records released an album of “alternative” Nashville country artists last year, the Calvins were included. Meanwhile, they accept the irony that they’re being tagged as “alternative” for playing traditional country music. Like most other alt-country artists, however, they didn’t ask for the label. The label found them.

The same is true of “The Buck Starts Here,” a superb tune on Country Love Songs, a 1996 album by Chicago singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks. Dumped by his girlfriend, a miserable soul takes solace in the music of Hank Williams and Buck Owens. “When the good times are gone,” he puts a record on the turntable, and “the Buck starts here.” This perfectly traditional song could gain a large audience, if only it had a major-label promotion budget. A performer with Dwight Yoakam’s resources could sock it out of the park.

But that would mean sleeping with the enemy. And, above all else, the alt-country movement is determined to liberate country music from the Nashville major-label system. In the pages of No Depression, in overheated liner notes, and in self-righteous press releases, Music Row is demonized. It is the defiler of everything that alt-country holds sacred: the looseness of the music, its spontaneity, and (ooh, best of all) its darkness. “In today’s kinder, gentler Nashville,” Music Row publicist Holly Gleason wrote in No Depression, “today’s country artists seem about as dangerous as a bowl of day-old oatmeal.” Songwriter Robbie Fulks was even more direct. One of his songs about Nashville is called “Fuck This Town.”

The Chicago label Bloodshot Records has vowed “to exhume Hank, not to canonize him...[to] unbury him...from beneath the mounds of gutless swill which pass for his legacy, the suffocating spew of the Nashville hit factories.” The cover of Bloodshot’s Hell-Bent compilation depicts Hank as a human pincushion, à la St. Sebastian, his flesh pierced by arrows, shot perhaps by some music-industry weasel. On Hankenstein, an album by Angry Johnny & the Killbillies, the artwork depicts the desiccated Drifting Cowboy crudely whipsawed together and reanimated, the better to crank out a few more bucks for Mercury Records.

Most alarming—and amusing—is a track on Cowboy in Flames, a new LP by The Waco Brothers. Modestly titled “The Death of Country Music,” it swipes the tune of “Dem Bones” and turns it into a souped-up shuffle. Lead Waco Brother Jon Langford, one of alt-country’s most provocative and articulate voices, visits the performers who made Nashville great. They’re all interred, even the ones who are still alive.

“The bones of country music lay there in their casket,” snarls Langford, “beneath the towers of Nashville in a black pool of neglect.” He rips the corpses out of their sepulchre, burns them, and powders them into ashes. Then he summons their power in a ceremony that’s equal parts invocation and unholy rite.

“Spill some blood on the ashes,” he intones, “on the bones of the Jones and the Cashes.” As the shuffle assumes a vicious swagger, Langford transforms the evolution of country music into an anatomy lesson: “Oh, the Hank-bone connected to the George-bone, the George-bone connected to the Willie-bone, the Willie-bone connected to the Billy-bone....” The message is clear: Country music must be rescued from the clutches of the industry, revived, and given back its cold, cold heart—the black heart that is the proof of its humanity.

Many of the country heroes revered by the alt-country movement are the ones with the bleakest, most outrageous material. Indie-rock fans, most of whom thought gothic industrial rocker Trent Reznor cornered the market on unmotivated hostility, have been stunned to discover the Louvin Brothers’ “Knoxville Girl,” a song with such an unwavering acceptance of inexplicable evil that it elicits laughter from contemporary audiences. The resurgence of interest in Johnny Paycheck, a great singer who has often wandered into the heart’s darkest corners, has a lot to do with the chilling starkness of songs like “The Ballad of Frisco Bay” and “You’ll Recover in Time.”

Country death songs, odes to moonshine, madness, and incest—and even spangled Nudie suits—are alien to kids raised on rock radio. But those same kids find these songs cool and dangerous. They’re attracted to them in the same way they’re attracted to the funk, the slang, the Afros, and the casual violence of blaxploitation films. They’re a window on a world where the sheltered and politically correct dare not go.

At the same time, alt-country culture is plagued by a recurring streak of cartoonish posturing. It’s there in the record ads that feature pigs snuffling around outhouses; it’s there in the shows that feature slide presentations of trailer-park life. Sometimes the intention is to be innocently kitschy, right in line with a country tradition that includes distinctly un-PC material like Merle Travis’ “I Like My Chicken Frying Size When I Get My Skillet Hot.”

But watching alt-country groups, one often gets the sense that the performers are little more than poseurs. It’s fun to pretend to be a redneck badass, since it allows you to do rude things you’d never do otherwise. The singer in the Texas Rubies song “That Truck” longs to move South, where she “can change my name to Mavis and have me a big ol’ mouth.” If she had a big enough mouth, apparently, she could learn to say a certain word that rhymes with “truck.” Cussing in character comes easily to bands like Whiskeytown, whose lead singer proclaims himself “a fast-talking, hell-raising son of a bitch.” Making the proclamation, he exhibits all the dorky enthusiasm of a recent graduate of a motivational-training program.

Alt-country is bad enough when it looks fakey, but it can seem even worse when it’s trying to be sincere. “Hey there, little white trash boy,” the Starkweathers sing, “will you grow up to be a hateful man?/Will you be a racist just like your old dad/Will you break that evil spell you were born under/Lord, I wonder if you can.” John Waters, the filmmaker, was right on target when he told New York magazine last year that white trash is the last ethnic group that can be slurred with impunity.

In the early 1990s, a Missouri band called Uncle Tupelo put out three albums. They were modestly received, but they developed a cult following. The members of the group—songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy and veteran Nashville club drummer Ken Coomer—produced sounds that ranged from harsh guitar-driven rock to a quietly entrancing neo-folk idiom. Uncle Tupelo’s lyrics were often cryptic, but the acoustic sound, which was augmented by ghostly steel and the poignant plink of mandolins, helped anchor the songs to the earth—specifically, to the sort of lonesome rural landscape that’s visible from truck windows in the dead of winter.

Word about the band began to spread, largely because Uncle Tupelo had its own message folder on the Internet. The folder, like the trio’s first album, was called No Depression, a name that had been borrowed from a Carter Family song, “No Depression.” The name, like the band, brought together two divergent traditions: old-time country music and independent rock. The message folder attracted inquiries, arguments, and news about other bands, a surprisingly large number of them, which were performing similar hybrid forms of grass-roots music.

As the message folder bulged, two music journalists, Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden, took notice. They took the folder’s name and, in 1995, created No Depression magazine, which they intended as a printed forum for the unheard music.

Nobody is going to confuse a copy of No Depression with an issue of Country America. The Zapruder-quality artist photos in No Depression look like they might have been copied from a seventh-generation chain letter. As often as not, instead of headshots, the ads feature gritty fanzine-style graphics. There are a lot of house trailers and clip-art cows.

Opening an issue of No Depression is like entering a parallel universe—the Bizarro World of country. In a mainstream magazine, Mary Chapin Carpenter—who scored a No. 1 hit with alt-country goddess Lucinda Williams’ “Passionate Kisses” some years back—would get a cover story, while Williams would scarcely get a mention. In No Depression, however, it’s Williams whose every move is charted breathlessly, and it’s Carpenter who winds up in a space normally reserved for sea-monkey ads. Williams, The Waco Brothers, Jason & the Scorchers, Steve Forbert—they’re the stars of Bizarro Country.

No Depression has one undeniably major accomplishment to its credit: It has survived as a country magazine for people with only a passing knowledge of—and perhaps only a passing interest in—country music. Grant Alden still feels perfectly comfortable in chiding the author of an Ernest Tubb biography for assuming that the reader is familiar with Tubb’s music. Blackstock kicked off a Steve Earle profile by admitting that, for a long time, he didn’t even know “Wabash Cannonball” had lyrics, let alone that it was written by A.P. Carter. No Depression readers probably didn’t blink. They’re all pilgrims on the same lost highway, and no one seems to care if they make wrong turns along the way.

At the same time, though, the magazine isn’t hypocritical when it pays homage to giants of country music. Like the whole alt-country movement, No Depression is suffused with a joy of discovery. Along with the updates on alt-country artists like Nashville’s Jeff Finlin and Buffalo, N.Y.’s Pine Dogs, the magazine’s pages are filled with tributes to Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and other country greats. There’s no pretense at credibility; No Depression’s many writers simply want to share what they’ve recently heard. With all the zeal of the newly converted, they thump the tub for their favorite finds.

Weedy, offbeat strands of country music had been sprouting around the nation long before Uncle Tupelo fans created their No Depression folder. There just wasn’t an offbeat country movement. In the Midwest in the early ’90s, the Bottle Rockets were playing loud, sweaty rave-ups of blue-collar regret that owed equally to the Georgia Satellites and Johnny Paycheck. In the Northeast in the late 1980s, journalist/musician Jeremy Tepper founded Diesel Only Records, a label with a novel, gimmicky mission. Tepper produced nothing but vinyl singles for truckstop jukeboxes. His vision of “rig rock,” loping country without frills or pretense, was embodied in New York-based groups such as the World Famous Blue Jays, Courtney & Western, and the Blue Chieftains, whose “I Think Hank Woulda Done It This Way” became a rallying cry for country-rock bands.

In North Carolina, two bands, Jolene and Whiskeytown, were at the forefront of a community of college rockers who expanded upon the jangly sound of the Byrds’ 1968 LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo. In Seattle, the locus of grunge, the Picketts defiantly harkened back to the male-female harmonies of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, transforming “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” a teeth-gnashing anthem by the English punk band Clash, into a breezy two-step.

Before long the very name No Depression was being used to identify bands whose music paid homage to classic country, no matter how glancingly or parodistically. Still, the name emphasized the distance between these bands and their honky-tonk heroes.

The giants of country music, and their audiences, were connected to one another by the experience of the Great Depression. But the No Depression groups had no single unifying or leveling social phenomenon—except, of course, for television—that connected them to their listeners. Nevertheless, the number of bands multiplied—or divided, as was the case with Uncle Tupelo, whose two songwriters split to form their own groups, Wilco and Son Volt.

The No Depression bands represented a tradition that had nothing to do with the Grand Ole Opry. Instead, they came at country music from all directions. Country-rock, after all, was a mutt that returned every so often to nip and yap at Nashville’s heels. The shaggy sound achieved by Bob Dylan and the Band on the classic The Basement Tapes provided a virtual blueprint for the creation of alt-country: It was notable for its joyously imprecise backing, its ragged harmonies, its loose-limbed, spontaneous feel.

A cult following was attracted by the early-’70s recordings of Gram Parsons, who envisioned a “Cosmic American Music” that would span country, rock, and gospel. When Parsons and his duet partner, Emmylou Harris, entwined voices on “Love Hurts” and “In My Hour of Darkness,” their emotions seemed too pure and too intense for human hearts to bear.

Parsons influenced, and was influenced by, the Rolling Stones, whose 1972 Exile on Main St. LP presaged the roots-rock of the ’80s and today. The Stones saw country music as alternately sacred, lewd, profane, tough, and ridiculous. “Faraway Eyes,” their goofy cut on the Some Girls album, is the precursor of a zillion other fake-country novelties.

Growing up in the mid-’70s and listening to FM radio, teenagers got a daily earful of Poco, the Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, and numerous other SoCal rock or boogie bands. Those influences came home to roost in mainstream country in the early 1990s. At some point, it seems, we all return fondly to the stuff we enjoyed in high school.

While they were in high school, however, members of the emerging alt-country bands were listening to the college rock of the mid-1980s—the endearingly sloppy Replacements or the melodically precise Hüsker Dü. They also experienced the roots-rock fervor of the early 1980s, one of the most lasting, and least expected, fallouts from the punk movement.

On tours of America, British punk and new wave figures like Elvis Costello and the Clash’s Joe Strummer professed their admiration for country’s emotional directness and its working-class voice. (During a Nashville gig in 1984, Strummer puzzled his Vanderbilt audience by repeatedly introducing himself as “Hank Snow.”) In 1981, Costello released Almost Blue, an album of country covers recorded in Nashville with producer Billy Sherrill. The album drew scathing notices, but its impact on young rock fans continues to reverberate. When the Mavericks perform Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” in concert, Costello’s punched-up, piano-based arrangement is the obvious inspiration.

Back in the U.S., the great California punk band X covered George Jones’ “Drunk in My Past” on its 1983 LP More Fun in the New World. Performing as their alter-egos, the acoustic band the Knitters, the members of X made their debt to country even more explicit. Dwight Yoakam’s “I’ll Be Gone” originally appeared on a left-of-center country compilation on the punk label Enigma.

And there’s no overestimating the influence of Nashville’s Jason & the Scorchers. More powerfully than anyone before or since, the Scorchers wedded balls-out rock and stone country music at a time when the combination was truly dangerous. According to journalist Bill Friskics-Warren, writing in No Depression, “It may be commonplace now for roots-rockers to perform cover versions of classic honky-tonk songs, but back [then]...it just wasn’t done.” Bandleader Jason Ringenberg testifies that the Scorchers nearly got their asses whupped several times by good ol’ boys who thought they were making fun of country music.

In the pantheon of influences on alt-country, the Scorchers rank right up there alongside “Cosmic Cowboy” Gram Parsons, the Byrds, the Stones, and Uncle Tupelo. These are the performers who set the benchmark against which the rock ’n’ roll alt-country faction must be measured, and they have yet to be topped. While an awful group called Slobberbone was mangling indistinguishable country-metal songs at last week’s Extravaganza, New Country editor Brian Mansfield remarked wistfully, “You realize this all comes down to one question: Can anyone ever do this better than the Scorchers?” The embarrassing display onstage gave the answer: Hell, no.

Nashville’s alternative-country tradition did not end with the Scorchers, nor with the many cowpunk bands that have followed in their train. Only three years ago, at the same time alt-country bands were springing up, unbeknownst to one another and all around the country, the brilliant bandleader Greg Garing and a group of fellow hillbilly-music aficionados set up residence in the forgotten honky-tonks of Lower Broadway. Their coterie included rising indie star Paul Burch and members of the bands BR5-49 and Lambchop. Perhaps it was just remarkable timing; perhaps Garing and his compatriots had a vision that the reopening of the Ryman would signal the return of hard country music across the alley. At any rate, if it had not been for them, the Lower Broad club-crawl probably would not be taking place now.

In the few years since BR5-49 set up shop at Robert’s and sent a jolt through the city’s club scene, a multitude of Nashville acts have surfaced to feed the appetite for alt-country. Now that BR5-49’s touring schedule keeps them away from Lower Broad, the home base of the local movement has shifted to The Sutler on Eighth Avenue, where Billy Block’s Western Beat Roots Revival, a weekly hootenanny-cum-radio show, has provided a center for the notoriously unfocused alt-country scene.

The Western Beat Roots Revival attempts to do for alternative country what shows like the Boone County Jamboree did in Hank Williams’ day. It exposes its audience to a wide variety of new artists, but it also brings diverse acts together in the sort of continuum that can only be created by a weekly radio show. The show was started almost exactly a year ago by Billy Block, a California transplant who, for years, had sat in as a drummer for a similar show at L.A.’s Palomino Club.

The Roots Revival format is unvarying: Every Tuesday night, four guests play short sets with the house band; at the end of the evening the entire crew comes onstage for a hillbilly free-for-all. The show has attracted attention from TNN and The New York Times Magazine, and it has become a link in a nationwide circuit of alt-country venues.

Every Tuesday night, upwards of 200 people are wedged into the Sutler’s cramped space. The audience includes grizzled old-timers in cowboy hats, college kids with shaved heads and earrings, and a wide assortment of music-biz personalities—the country clothier Manuel rarely misses a show. The program is broadcast live over FM 100, and Block does the warm-up, making sure that his listeners are pumped, even before the first note hits the airwaves.

Still, the Roots Revival does little to clarify the question of what alt-country is or is not. Its local guests have included trailer-torch singer Kristi Rose and her Handsome Strangers; song poet R.B. Morris; full-tilt country bands like Hank Flamingo, Buck Fifty, and Block’s own Bum Steers; and gifted guitarist-songwriters like Duane Jarvis and Tim Carroll, writer of “I Think Hank Woulda Done It This Way.” Last week’s show featured Mandy Barnett along with J.T. Blanton, an energetic dilettante who could be the hero of every verse of Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country,” and some guy doing something called “In-Your-Face Country Soul,” a pallid number that sounded for all the world like a Bryan Adams knockoff.

Nevertheless, Block likes the broadness of the show’s appeal. “There’s two ways to look at it,” he says of alternative country’s loosely defined audience. “There are people who sleep [alt-country] and breathe it, and people who’ve never heard it.” He says that, when he looks at the audiences that are drawn to The Sutler, he’s reminded of his days in roadhouse bands in Texas, where local dance halls accommodated everyone from hippies to John Birchers. Only in the world of alternative country, he says, could an artist like sexagenarian Texas yodeler Don Walser find his deserved following.

Block believes that the lack of variety in country radio has driven potential listeners elsewhere, to Hootie & the Blowfish, even to Alanis Morrisette. “Country radio has a stranglehold on the format,” he says. “The horse they’ve been riding has lost its legs. It’s time for fresh horses.” The pun on the title of Garth Brooks’ blockbuster LP Fresh Horses is not happenstance.

Most of the early alt-country bands signed with labels based outside Nashville. If the movement really does take off commercially, that could spell trouble for Music Row.

Thus far, however, such talk remains fantasy. For starters, there’s no solid radio market to boost alt-country nationwide. In 1994 The Gavin Report, a music-industry trade magazine that tabulates airplay, created its “Americana” category to chart roots music. That may be the only chart success many alt-country bands ever find. A Gavin chart from last fall is typically broad: Lyle Lovett at No. 1; the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a screwy Dixieland-jazz ensemble, at No. 32. But artists and label reps confide that they haven’t seen much sales impact yet from Americana. Many of the stations that report to Gavin—77, as of last fall—are public-radio affiliates that may only broadcast roots-music programming once a week. That’s not the sort of rotation that builds careers. Although bands such as the Mavericks occasionally straddle both worlds, mainstream country radio won’t touch alt-country.

Then again, why should it try? Tell an Aaron Tippin fan that the Nevers or Jolene is a country band, and he’ll look at you as if you’d called a kiwi a watermelon. At the Exit/In during last year’s Extravaganza, an audience of rowdy, drunken Steve Earle fans wouldn’t shut up during Freakwater’s set.

Nashville is used to dictating the terms and limits of country music. It’s refreshing to see alt-country’s insurgents running roughshod over those carefully maintained boundaries. But alt-country is also a sprawling movement; it has a diverse audience, but one that just barely permits the movement’s various elements to coexist. If alt-country is to become commercially viable, a narrowing of its definition will be inevitable.

And yet there’s a romantic appeal to the wide-open spaciousness of alt-country’s vision. At the Sutler last Thursday, in a special Extravaganza edition of the Western Beat Roots Revival, one superb artist after another took the stage, summoning up visions of honky-tonk heaven. Phil Lee, the truck-driving roadhouse rocker, sang of working men’s elusive dreams and comically disastrous romances. Kevin Gordon’s odes to big American cars and small American towns rang with exuberance. Mandy Barnett’s huge, haunting voice stilled the air in the room, and John Sieger’s carefully constructed, rootsy pop tunes set feet to tapping and heads to bobbing. Above all, there was Lucinda Williams, who performed her indelibly detailed songs with elating self-confidence.

Williams, resplendent in a red velour blouse, was in an unusually playful mood. “Record labels, right here! Radio stations, right here!” she shouted from center stage. “You don’t need Music Row! The best music in town is right here! Just open your ears, and here it is.”

In The Sutler there was scattered applause.