In 1994, Alan Jackson released the single “Gone Country,” which became one of the signature songs of a particular moment in history when country music broke out of its usual ghetto and achieved mainstream success that it had not reached in almost 15 years. The song celebrates three unlikely people, a Las Vegas lounge singer, a Greenwich village folk singer, and a Southern Californian serious-minded composer who seek to hitch their stars to the rise of a popular form of country music that was beginning once again to achieve considerable popular success in terms of hit songs and bestselling albums. The song both celebrates the growing popularity of country music at that time within the United States and offers gentle and mild criticism of the sort of opportunism that follows the increasing popularity of often-marginalized genres like country. When times are good for country music, outsiders try to rush in to cash in on the popularity of the genre, but when times are bad for country, the genre is a neglected backwater ignored by the masses and treasured only by its core audience. So it has been for decades.

Without wishing to recapitulate the whole history of the genre of country music, it is worth commenting at least somewhat on the context of country music. Beginning in the early 20th century, country music (then called hillbilly music), was targeted to a mostly southern and mostly rural audience that had little cultural power within the United States, with music that came from the area around Appalachia based out of Nashville, Tennessee, which is still an important center within the genre as a whole. While country music itself springs from longstanding folk musical traditions within the rural South of storytelling songs with a strong religious undercurrent from the area’s generally Protestant background, country music has always had a complex and troubled history with the largely urban and “progressive” folk traditions of areas like Greenwich Village in New York City. Within a few decades after country music was first recognized as a genre of music and music audience with the advent of radio, the tradition had expanded to include Western music based in Texas, the Rocky Mountain areas, and rural California–especially the Bakersfield region, which had related traditions of music related to cowboys and rodeos and rural and small town life under the big sky.

Cycles of expansion and regression of country music have followed in the ongoing decades. In the early 1960s, artists as diverse as Ray Charles explored sounds in country and Western to considerable popular success. Early on, country music spread from the United States to its northern neighbor, Canada, which has established its own rich tradition celebrating the complexity of romantic relationships as well as the role of family, alcohol, and small-town and rural life, the celebration of car culture, and so on, all elements common to American country music as well. At times, artists were able to crossover into the mainstream from country music’s world, with artists singing about strangers in their houses or driving their life away or being gamblers in card games who knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. At other times, country musicians released music that was played on radio stations and sold to audiences made up only of those within the core audience of country music with a lack of knowledge or interest from the wider public in what was going on in such unfashionable circles. Then, some artist would draw popular attention, like a Garth Brooks in the early 1990s or Morgan Wallen today, and the cycle would continue once again.

At the present time, country music enjoys a strong position within the music of the United States and Canada, and also has considerable popularity in the rest of the core of the Anglophone world, including the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, where country artists repeatedly debut and quite often have serious hit singles and albums. There are also local country music traditions in those countries which have their own successful artists which sometimes (though not often) cross over into other markets. How wide can this popularity extend? While the continuity of folkways between the world of British settler colonies is undeniable, is there a blue-collar, rural tradition that is present in other cultural hearths that could find kindred spirits within English-speaking country acts? Could the rural inhabitants of Siberia or the gauchos of South America or the shepherds of Catalonia or the reindeer herders of the Sami or the yak herders of the Himalayas find themselves as country artists of the future? It is hard to say for sure. There are many parts of the world where traditional religious values, folkways of music composition and performance, a feeling of alienation from dominant urban elites, and a celebration of the free and open sky and the struggle to maintain one’s dignity in the face of grinding poverty are relatable concerns. Whether or not such diverse and disparate groups are able to recognize and celebrate their common concerns, though, remains to be seen.