What happened to country music?

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

Eric Sedletzky

Contributor
Messages
9,661
Reaction score
10,543
Location
Santa Rosa, California
# of dives
0 - 24
The crap I hear on the radio these days by stations calling themselves "country" isn't country IMO, it's Nashville Pop, or another word I can think to call it is garbage.
Why are they abandoning and allienating their core group of supporters that have been there from the start?
All I hear now is new crossover music by these young wanabees who call themselves country artist,.. phooey!
They wouldn't know real country if it bit them in the rear end!
What ever happened to the Bakersfield sound or the styles of artist like George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Junior Brown, and even Dwight Yoakam, and a whole list of others - too many to mention.
There are some current traditionalist country music singers out there doing their thing but the mainstream radio conglomerates won't play it. One example is Jamie Johnson.

Am I alone here or are there others that feel the same way?
 
They are trying to win the hearts and ears of the twerking generation.

Tammy, George, Gentleman Jim, Johnny, and the rest are rolling in their graves.
 
These two guys were captured by terrorists and the head terrorist came to them and said, "We're going to kill you, but I will let you have a last request. What would you like before you die?"

The first guy said, "Before I die I want to listen to 'Achy Breaky Heart' one hundred times in a row."

The second guy said, "If you're going to play 'Achy Breaky Heart' one hundred times in a row I want to die first."

DFB
 
I suspect fewer up & coming music fans have a first hand personal background to identify with some of the older country music. A line from one popular song some years back went 'sweet potato pie and shut my mouth.' My grandmother (now 88) identified with that from growing up poor in rural Texas. She used to pick cotton for hours for what we'd hardly call pocket change today, and buying a single bottle of Coke on the weekend would've been a treat.

Today, kids grow up more suburban and urban, with far more disposable income and much less farm labor on average, generations away from the shadow of the Great Depression.

Singing about poverty, life on the farm, a coal mining family or similar (ala Loretta Lyn's famous 'Coal Miner's Daughter'), or just life in the 'real' rural country is pretty alien to today's youth. Some classic country song themes, drinking alcohol and adultery, are still current, but not something to endorse. The jails & prisons are sufficiently loaded that songs along the lines of 'Folsom Prison Blues' might have an audience.

It's kind of like those people you see wearing cowboy hats and boots; wonder what percentage have ever even rode a horse, much less held a job where such would be needed?

Richard.
 
I know there's a Bakersfield sound jam at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto Thursday nights. It's not open to the public, but at least there are folks doing it.

There are very active bluegrass and old time communities in the area but, I know, that's not the same thing...
 
I know there's a Bakersfield sound jam at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto Thursday nights. It's not open to the public, but at least there are folks doing it.

There are very active bluegrass and old time communities in the area but, I know, that's not the same thing...
Bluegrass is great too, I'm a former banjo picker myself, Scruggs Style. I like it very much.
Bluegrass is pretty unique and pure to try and bastardize.
I'm hearing about pockets of honky tonk aficionados here and there but info is scarce and they would never in a million years play that stuff on regular radio. The only station that I know of is an independant in Sonoma County called the Krush - KRSH 95.9
They play all sorts of off beat and unusual music from Americana to blues to this new folk style music, but they also play a lot of old 60's hippie music (the Sonoma County demographic, especially in the west county) kind of like Santa Cruz.
 

Back
Top Bottom