Country

Country leans on acoustic guitar, fiddle, banjo, pedal steel, upright bass and, more recently, drum kit and electric guitar. The rhythmic vocabulary stretches from waltz time through honky-tonk shuffles to today's mid-tempo 4/4 with a 2-and-4 backbeat. Singers favor a nasal Southern delivery and conversational phrasing, with lyrics that name towns, trucks, bars, families and God in concrete detail rather than abstract sentiment. Even on radio-polished productions the body resonance of an acoustic guitar is left audible — the music likes to sound like it was tracked in a room rather than a screen.

Country emerged in the 1920s in the Appalachian South, where British and Irish fiddle ballads met African-American banjo and blues traditions. The Bristol Sessions of 1927 — which produced the first recordings by the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers — are usually cited as the founding moment. Nashville's WSM 'Grand Ole Opry' radio show, on the air since 1925, consolidated the industry, and successive generations rewrote the sound: Hank Williams' honky-tonk in the late 1940s, Patsy Cline and Chet Atkins' Nashville Sound of the 1960s, the outlaw country of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the 1970s, and the pop crossovers of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain in the 1990s. Today the format runs from Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs on Music Row to Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson on the alt-country fringe.

Pay attention to the crying glissandos of pedal steel and fiddle, the rolling banjo triplets and the way singers slip between gravelly chest voice and a high lonesome falsetto. Watch how the lyrics tell stories in the third person, often zooming out to a wide landscape shot in the chorus. On shuffle grooves the snare often sits inside the hi-hat pattern rather than slamming on 2 and 4, giving the music its rocking, walking feel.

For a single track try Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' (1949): one of the loneliest three minutes ever recorded. For a contemporary album, Zach Bryan's 'American Heartbreak' (2022) shows where stripped-down country songwriting sits now.

Nashville's Music Row, a few blocks of converted houses along 16th and 17th Avenues South, still holds most of the major-label country offices and tracking rooms in the United States. The rhinestone-encrusted stage suits associated with country and early rock and roll were largely the work of Nudie Cohn, a Los Angeles tailor whose shop dressed everyone from Hank Williams to Elvis Presley.