The outlaws had proved that country could sell to rock fans. The next decade tested how far the music could stretch before it stopped being country at all — and then snapped back.
Urban Cowboy
In June 1980 Paramount released Urban Cowboy, a film starring John Travolta as a refinery worker who spends his nights at Gilley's, a vast honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, riding a mechanical bull. Its soundtrack was a mixture of country and soft rock, and it sold in the millions. Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love" came out of it.
Almost overnight, country was fashionable. Western-wear shops opened in New York and Chicago, discos put in mechanical bulls, and country radio added listeners it had never had. The records followed the audience: Kenny Rogers, whose "The Gambler" had been a smash in 1978, sang smooth pop ballads with a country accent; Eddie Rabbitt, Anne Murray and Crystal Gayle crossed over to the pop charts; Dolly Parton made "9 to 5". Alabama, a band from Fort Payne, Alabama, with a sound built for arenas, started a run of number ones that went unbroken for years.
The fad passed quickly, as fads do. By the mid-1980s record sales had fallen back, and the pop-country sound felt dated.
The neotraditionalists
The answer was to go back. In 1981 a Texan called George Strait released his first single, "Unwound", a straight honky-tonk shuffle with twin fiddles and steel guitar. Strait never changed direction: forty years and sixty-odd number ones later, he still sounds like a Texas dance hall on a Saturday night.
He was followed by a wave that critics called the new traditionalists. Ricky Skaggs, a bluegrass prodigy, brought mandolin and fiddle back to country radio. Randy Travis's Storms of Life, in 1986, with its deep, plain voice and old-fashioned songs, sold millions. Dwight Yoakam, from Kentucky by way of Los Angeles, revived the Bakersfield sound and Buck Owens along with it. Reba McEntire became the biggest woman in the music. The Judds, a mother and daughter, sang close harmony on songs that could have been written fifty years earlier.
Counting the audience
Then, in 1989, came a group of young singers that would change the scale of everything: Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt all released their first albums within months of each other.
Two changes in how records and airplay were counted made their success visible. In January 1990 Billboard began building its country singles chart from Broadcast Data Systems, which electronically detected every play of a song on monitored stations, instead of relying on the playlists stations reported. And in 1991 it began counting album sales with SoundScan, which read barcodes at the till, instead of phoning record shops to ask what was selling.
SoundScan revealed that country fans had been badly undercounted. That September, Garth Brooks's Ropin' the Wind became the first country album to enter the Billboard 200 at number one — ahead of every rock and pop act in America.
The boom
For most of the 1990s country was one of the best-selling kinds of music in the United States. Brooks played stadiums with a rock-concert stage show and became, by some counts, the best-selling solo artist in American history. Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart" started a line-dancing craze in 1992, and Brooks & Dunn's "Boot Scootin' Boogie" kept it going. Television carried the music too: The Nashville Network and CMT, both launched in 1983, put country videos in millions of homes.
The biggest seller of all came at the end of the decade. Shania Twain, a Canadian working with the rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, made Come On Over in 1997, a record that was country in its accent and pop in almost everything else. It sold tens of millions of copies around the world.
What happened to the radio
Country radio boomed with the music. Stations that had been playing easy listening switched to country, and a new generation of formats — "Hot Country", "Young Country" — aimed at younger listeners than country radio had ever pursued.
Then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed the national limits on how many stations one company could own. Within a few years a small number of companies owned hundreds of stations each, and playlists everywhere came to be shaped by the same research: callout surveys, audience testing, fewer songs played more often. It became harder for an unusual record, or a new artist without a major label, to get on the air — which is part of the reason the next chapter happened largely away from the radio.
It also split country in two. As the hit stations concentrated on the new, "classic country" stations appeared to play the music of the '60s, '70s and '80s that the hit stations had dropped — the format many of the stations in our directory still follow.
Hear it now
Our classic country stations play this era all day: Strait, Garth, Reba, Alan Jackson and Brooks & Dunn. Or turn the dial to the '80s and '90s part of the band.