In the 1990s, country music on the radio was a bigger business than it had ever been — and a narrower one. As playlists tightened, a great deal of music that sounded like country, and was made by people who loved country, could not get played on country stations. It found another way to its audience.
Gram Parsons and cosmic American music
The roots go back to the late 1960s, when a handful of rock musicians fell in love with country. In 1968 the Byrds, with a young Georgian called Gram Parsons in the line-up, made Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a country album recorded partly in Nashville; when they played the Grand Ole Opry, the audience did not know what to make of them. Parsons went on to form the Flying Burrito Brothers and to make two solo albums with a then-unknown singer, Emmylou Harris, before his death in 1973 at 26. He called what he was after "cosmic American music". Harris carried it on for the next fifty years.
No Depression
Twenty years later a trio from Belleville, Illinois, called Uncle Tupelo mixed punk rock with Carter Family songs. Their 1990 debut was named after a Carter Family song, No Depression. When the band broke up in 1994 it split into two more — Wilco and Son Volt — and "No Depression" became the name of an online discussion group, and then of a magazine, for the music people had started to call alt-country.
It was a loose label for a wide range of records. Steve Earle had already made Guitar Town in 1986, a country record with rock-and-roll grit, and after years of addiction and prison came back in the mid-1990s writing better than ever. Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, in 1998, was hailed as a masterpiece. Whiskeytown, the Old 97's, the Bottle Rockets and later the Drive-By Truckers all had country in their bones and loud guitars on their records. Very little of it was played on country radio.
A radio format of its own
What these records did get was airplay somewhere else: on college stations, on public radio, and on the "adult album alternative" stations that played singer-songwriters. In 1995 the radio trade magazine the Gavin Report launched a chart to track them, and called it Americana — a word broad enough to take in alt-country, roots rock, folk, bluegrass and blues.
The name stuck. The Americana Music Association was founded in 1999, held its first awards in 2002, and in 2010 the Grammys added a Best Americana Album category. Americana became, in effect, the name for country music's other audience — the people who loved the old records and the songwriting, and had stopped listening to the hit stations.
Texas and red dirt
A third road ran through Texas and Oklahoma, where the outlaw tradition had never gone away. A whole circuit of singers — Robert Earl Keen, Pat Green, Jack Ingram and, later, Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen — built careers playing dance halls, college bars and the big outdoor festivals, and selling records themselves, with little help from Nashville.
Just across the Red River, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a scene of songwriters that had grown up in the 1970s around a house called the Farm gave its name to red dirt music, after the colour of the soil. Cross Canadian Ragweed, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, Stoney LaRue and, later, the Turnpike Troubadours carried it to a wide audience. Texas stations kept their own charts for these artists, and many of them still do.
We tell that story in more detail in red dirt and Texas country.
When the radio turned
In March 2003, on stage in London, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks — then the best-selling group in country music — told the audience she was ashamed that the president was from Texas. Within days a boycott was under way; some station groups pulled their records, and their airplay collapsed. The band, now called The Chicks, never really returned to country radio. The episode showed how much power the stations still had, and how quickly they could use it.
The songwriters win anyway
In the 2010s the road around radio became a highway. Jason Isbell, who had played in the Drive-By Truckers, made Southeastern in 2013 and became one of the most celebrated songwriters in America. Sturgill Simpson's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, in 2014, reached a rock audience. And in 2015 Chris Stapleton, a Kentucky songwriter who had written hits for other people for years, released Traveller. That November he sang at the CMA Awards with Justin Timberlake, and the next week the album went to number one — having had very little country airplay.
By then the line between Americana and country had almost disappeared, at least for listeners. Streaming made it easy to find music the radio did not play, and the next chapter is about what that did to the charts.
Hear it now
Our Americana and alt-country stations cover this side of the music. SomaFM Boot Liquor has been playing it online for many years, and Radio Free Texas and Texas Rebel Radio play the Texas circuit.