Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic, traveled to four cities, including Nashville and Cleveland, to track country's evolution.
Charleston, W.Va.
Country Outsiders At the Core
For a clear glimpse into the evolving soul of modern country music, you could have done far worse than to travel to Charleston, W.Va., this fall to catch a stop on Jelly Roll's headlining arena tour.
Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed former gangster rapper remade as a country-rock preacher, delivers bombastic, melodic songs about the desperation of addiction and the power of faith. His latest album, "Beautifully Broken," debuted atop the Billboard album chart in October.
His show is secular ministry -- "church for people that don't know they need church," he said earlier in the evening, picking at some hash browns with bacon in a green room backstage. The concert was also, in some stretches, a hip-hop show, nodding to the decade-long rap career that preceded his breakout, and the ways in which that fact is no longer the obstacle to mainstream country success than it once might have been.
In fact, the tour's whole lineup reflected that suddenly un-tense tension: The opening acts were Ernest, a writer of hit songs and an emerging star in his own right, who had an early career stretch as a rapper; and Shaboozey, perhaps the year's most striking country music breakout star, whose "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" -- a seamless and savvy hybrid of country and hip-hop, built around the structure of the 2004 hip-hop hit "Tipsy" by J-Kwon -- was rewarded with a record-tying 19 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
A common-man rock star, a classicist with an edgy past and an easeful genre hybridizer -- even a few years ago, one or more of these performers would have found country music's doors closed to them. In subtle but not insignificant ways, though, the genre is accepting the inevitability of evolution -- be it via performers who boldly engage with other genres, or via listeners whose consumption is more catholic than ever.
The curiosity is going both ways -- it has also been a year in which country culture has become palpably ubiquitous. For more than half the year, the top song in the Hot 100 was country, or notionally so. The superstars Beyoncé and Post Malone released albums celebrating their take on the genre. There were even cowboys on the runways of Louis Vuitton.
Last year at the Country Music Association Awards, Nashville's premiere honors, Jelly Roll won new artist of the year -- as close as that show comes to a left field choice. The victory actually left him with something to prove, he said, wondering if his tale of personal redemption, and the powerful and highly visible way he's passed that on to his fans, was what voters were rewarding. "I was worried if the new artist of the year was more story-driven than art-driven," he confessed. "As a creative person, that'll spiral you."
But this year, his rapid absorption into country was reaffirmed with a nomination for entertainer of the year, the CMAs' top prize -- an outrageous landing place for someone who arrived in the country music business through a side door.
"Three years ago I was looking at the country world and I thought by letting me in, it had become broader than it had ever been," Jelly Roll said. "And then I look at this year and I go, dude, it was still a PVC pipe back then. This is a full-blown tunnel now."
This year's outlier nominee for new artist of the year was Shaboozey -- one of the few Black performers ever to be so honored, and the only rapper. Though his success this year has been undeniable, he didn't win. He felt like he'd arrived at the right place, nevertheless -- where he was welcome, but boldly stood out.
"I love going to places where no one looks like you," he said, reflecting on the suddenness and size of his spotlight at a Mexican barbecue restaurant before that night's show. "I like being like a presence in a space."
"A Bar Song" was that and much more -- a year-defining song that bridged two worlds without significant concessions, the end result of more than five years of chipping away at his rap-infused country sound.
Country has been sniffing around hip-hop for inspiration for at least the past decade: "Cruise," the Florida Georgia Line single whose remix featuring Nelly became a megahit; Sam Hunt's genre-shifting "Montevallo" album; dalliances with rapping from genre stalwarts including Jason Aldean and Blake Shelton; and the relatively recent persistence of 808 drums in country songs, a simple gesture that's meant to almost unconsciously encode hip-hop tempo and texture.
It's an intriguing twist -- but perhaps not a coincidence? -- that the two songs with the longest runs atop the Hot 100 have both been country-rap hybrids released in the past five years. Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" teetered between faithfulness and parody (more often tilting to the latter), and was treated largely like a nuisance by Nashville while dominating the pop zeitgeist. Whether because of the faithfulness of his approach, or a more welcoming spirit in the country music industry, Shaboozey has found more favor in Nashville.
His reverence for country is genuine -- at one point in the conversation, he assesses the lyrics of Marty Robbins's "Big Iron" through a gangster rap lens. But he also recalled listening to guitar-driven Atlanta rap in the late 2010s and struggling to understand, "Why's this not country?"
Even though he's perceived more as a country artist who raps than a straight-ahead rapper, Shaboozey said he's still navigating exactly where he'd like to stand moving forward.
"My producer, every time he has a 808 in the song, I'm like, you need take that out. And he's like, no, we need this," he said. "I'm trying to get to stripped-down, singer-songwriter stuff. But sometimes I'm learning like, man, that might not be my music."
Nashville
Fathering a Rap-Infused Sound
The night before this year's CMAs, the producer Charlie Handsome was in his preferred room, The Cave at East Iris Studios in the Berry Hill section of Nashville. Perhaps more than anyone, he is responsible for the rapid evolution in country music's sonic attitude. In the 2010s, he cut his teeth making hip-hop songs with Young Thug, Kanye West, Kodak Black and others, and is now a primary architect of Morgan Wallen's sound.
Handsome's defining 2024 project was helping to craft "F-1 Trillion," the first country album by the cross-genre superstar Post Malone. It includes ample guest features from genre veterans (Brad Paisley, Chris Stapleton, Blake Shelton) but, more crucially, a sound that finds common cause between Malone's older work and the new world he's seeking entree to.
In essence, Handsome is a translator, taking gestures from hip-hop and finding useful spots for them in country. Wallen was a natural partner. "He knows all the classic country records," Handsome said. "But if you hang out with Morgan pre-gaming for his shows, it's all rap. If you ride around in a truck with him, it's all rap.
"I feel like we had that in common in Ernest as well," Handsome continued, "And that's why we were able to understand the plan together."
Those two first hit it off at a Los Angeles studio session years ago. Ernest then invited Handsome to Nashville to collaborate on songs -- within the first few days of Handsome's arrival in town, they'd written "If I Know Me," the title track of Wallen's 2018 debut album.
Since, Handsome and Ernest have been two of the key players in the creative brain trust that has remade the sound of Nashville hits. Part of the reason Handsome moved to Nashville full-time in 2021 was to be closer to Wallen. "Since the first night I met him, I was like, he could be the biggest artist in country. I always thought that. So I was like, it just makes more sense to come here and spend more time on that."
Handsome doesn't consider himself part of Nashville's inner industry circle -- he sat for an interview as he was skipping out on the BMI Country Awards, where he was honored for co-writing the song of the year (Wallen's "Last Night"). Later that evening, Handsome headed to the storied dive bar Losers, which teemed with songwriters and executives (and Kid Rock), to catch up with Malone, who wore a long-sleeve camouflage shirt as he held court in a cordoned-off section, a welcome and easily absorbed addition to the scene's center of gravity.
The following afternoon, Ernest was getting dressed for the CMAs -- playfully groaning about having to buy the same pricey black Lucchese alligator boots multiple times -- and recalling the days before he and his collaborators were regular nominees.
"We were all broke together," he said of the early days writing alongside Wallen, Handsome and others. "Obviously schedules are more busy now, but when we're sitting down and writing a song, it's just three or four broke dudes trying to write a cool song."
One of those songs became "I Had Some Help," a collaboration between Malone and Wallen that had the longest run at the top of the Hot 100 this year of any song besides Shaboozey's.
Malone wanted something different from Handsome -- no 808s, no trap music -- a sound distinct from the one Handsome had been cultivating with Wallen. "He said, 'I feel like you guys are doing the new pop, but I want to do old country,'" Handsome recalled. (Malone is "a country music nerd," Jelly Roll insisted.)
Ernest's own music skews more classic country as well -- "Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard -- I'm an old soul," he said. But as a professional songwriter, he's learned to be a creative assassin, writing in a variety of styles, a tool he said he honed freestyling when he focused more on rapping.
"The stuff that I used to write for fun when I was rapping, pulling up a Drake-style instrumental and write a song to that -- now I can do that and it ain't gotta be a joke," he said. "I can literally go write a Bon Jovi song by day and then BigXthaPlug at night."
During the pandemic, Ernest gained attention with an inside-country podcast on YouTube. On one episode he interviewed the storied songwriter Craig Wiseman about where he thought country music was headed. "Craig's answer was, wherever we send it," Ernest recalled. "At that time I was like, wow, to have that power. And I genuinely humbly feel like we have that power right now."
Looking around, all he sees are copycats. "I feel like a proud dad," he said, grinning. "I know a few of us guys who are expecting some Father's Day cards."
Charlotte, N.C.
From the Stadium to the Club
Wallen's One Night at a Time world tour -- the highest-grossing country tour ever -- concluded with a pair of sold-out shows at the Bank of America Stadium, home of the N.F.L.'s Carolina Panthers.
Wearing a pair of Travis Scott Air Jordan 1s, he performed two rollicking hours of country informed by hip-hop, pop and soul music. It was, in total, a coherent statement about the directions in which country music could be heading.
After the show, a few blocks away at the nightclub Trio, the country music DJ duo Vavo was getting prepared for its unofficial after-party.
It was Wallen who, indirectly, secured Vavo its big breakthrough: an edit of "Last Night," which quickly became a TikTok staple.
Vavo -- Jesse Fischer and Alden Martin -- has arrived at an optimal moment when edits, remixes and decontextualized trims are the coin of the realm on TikTok. A decade ago, you'd ask why there would ever be a club-friendly remix of a country song. Now it'd almost be preposterous if there wasn't one.
"There's only two artists I've ever cried when they passed -- one was Avicii and one was Toby Keith," said Fischer.
The duo signed a recording contract with Sony Music Nashville, and performed a brief preshow set at the Academy of Country Music Awards in May. They're releasing their own singles, but perhaps more crucially, they've been able to commercially release some of their remixes in partnership with the original performers, like Nate Smith and Thomas Rhett.
That owes to the group's effectiveness on social media, but also to a softening of the walls between genres in listening audiences. "You go back 10, 15 years and it was like, you either liked country or you didn't. There was no I'm-on-the-fence about it," Fischer said, noting that as a DJ, it was extremely limiting creatively. "Vegas was full of hip-hop, all these clubs were playing hip-hop. But if you were a country fan, you were almost outcast."
Once their post-Wallen set started, the through lines between country and dance began to reveal themselves plainly. Some songs, like Bailey Zimmerman's ecstatic "Religiously" were a natural fit in the format. Vavo delivered a melancholically thumping version of an Eric Church song that recalled the Chainsmokers. In places, they nodded to the hip-hop-friendly crossover country of the early 2010s: Big & Rich's "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)," multiple songs by Florida Georgia Line. There was even an edit of Luke Combs's somber version of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," a song practically allergic to rhythm.
The set underscored the fact that country music has always been dance music, be it Western swing, or '80s power country, or even the earthen stomp-clap sound that suffused the indie rock-adjacent universe in the early 2010s courtesy of Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers and others.
A decade ago, Avicii -- then one of the most important dance music producers in the world -- imported that sound into his repertoire, collaborating with the singer Aloe Blacc and the multi-instrumentalist Dan Tyminski. He debuted the sound at the Ultra Music Festival in 2013, and was roundly booed.
Eventually, those songs became hits, and helped set the table for the flexibility that underpins country's current sound. This year, that same texture was part of what propelled "A Bar Song" to the top of the charts. The sound also recurs in another of the year's unlikely hits, "Stargazing," by the British singer Myles Smith, which refracts the style through a pop-EDM prism. It is notable, perhaps, that both Smith and Shaboozey are Black and got their start outside the country mainstream. Deploying the stomp-clap is a clever hack, a neat shorthand for tactile authenticity.
Cleveland
Beyond 'Cowboy Carter'
But what about Beyoncé?
That question lingered over country's breakthrough year, though it was asked largely by those on the outside looking in, reflecting anxiety about a huge cultural force operating just out of reach, or perhaps comprehension.
Despite its size, Nashville remains relatively cloistered -- it can often feel like a company town that only answers to itself. This could be felt even in the year of country's true cross-pollination into the cultural mainstream, when the high walls surrounding the music, and also the culture that comes with it, were buckling.
And yet the conversations around Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" indicated that the walls hadn't fully collapsed. "Cowboy Carter" was by no means the most commercially successful country album of the year, but it was almost certainly the most discoursed-about country album of the year. Though even if the light it cast on the country music business was a skeptical one, the power of having one of the most famous artists in the world engage with country music sound and ideology couldn't be undervalued.
"Beyoncé's album helped -- it was all for the betterment of country music, whether it was intended that way or not," Ernest said, adding that it, along with Malone's album, was likely to give a permanent boost to the genre's profile. "The needle has been moved so far this way that it'll never swing back as far as it was."
Beyoncé pointedly said before the album's release that it should be heard as a Beyoncé album, not a country album. Whatever the nomenclature, it is a parallel universe album of American roots music that asks what would happen if those modes, largely co-opted by white performers, were reinhabited by Black performers. A nothing-to-lose pop superstar serves as the anchor, surrounded and amplified by several rising talents in a range of approaches, from historical to edgy.
This intersection is one that Tanner Adell -- one of the featured Black country performers on "Cowboy Carter" -- has been boldly heading toward for the past few years.
She's best known for "Buckle Bunny," a salacious song about roping a hot cowboy -- "Lookin' like Beyoncé with a lasso," she quips. That was one of several singles she released over 2022 and 2023 that showed her to be a nimble combiner of sounds, a country star with pop gleam, hip-hop swagger and R&B sensuality.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found a following on TikTok before signing to a Nashville label. (They've since parted ways and she's now signed to LVRN, a Black-owned imprint, which she chose for its flexibility.) She's still committed to making country music -- in Nashville, she often works in a studio just next to Handsome's.
"I've never waited for an opportunity -- I go out and get what I want," she said backstage at the House of Blues in Cleveland, a few hours before a sold-out show. "What I was doing did not have a fan base. I had to work to acquire every single customer."
Her sophisticated but uncommon sound draws a more expansive audience than the usual country crowd: "It's diverse, it's all ages. It's all colors," she said. "It's young women who felt like they were like closeted Taylor Swift fans, and I'm that for them. I'm like a Black Taylor Swift to a lot of people. And they get to feel safe and enjoy it, and dress up and wear the cowboy hat."
In concert, Adell carried herself as if she were on an arena stage -- perfectly poised, decked out in an ornate denim outfit with multiple belts, singing with verve and cheek. Her show was severely modern, dexterous, at times raunchy, full of eminently quotable lines. It was a country show with creative ambition, learned but not limited.
She closed with "Buckle Bunny," which in this room was a shout-along anthem. The main part of the song is sinuous and slinky, but toward the end, her drummer shifted to a double-time train beat, reminiscent of the country music of several decades ago. Adell held her cowboy hat tight, kicked her high-heeled boots up in the air, and didn't miss a step. That tradition was hers, too.