_In March I paid my first visit to South by Southwest, Austins annual roots music conference in which six thousand industry bizzers stand around concrete-lined clubs drinking Mexican beer, stroking their black-dyed, receding hairlines, and worrying that they’re missing the chance to discover the next big thing.

On the opening day of the session, I sat on a panel called “Is Country Ready for a New Radio Format?” The title referred to Americana, a format founded a few years ago to provide a home for so-called alternative country artists like Joe Ely, Steve Earle, and Iris DeMent.

About an hour into the panel, a music critic from Houston stood up and offered this caustic assessment of our discussion: “You people are ignoring the most central question. Why does country radio suck?”

The audience erupted into applause.

_If there’s a common belief that unifies most commentary about Southern music today, it’s this: Nashville has lost its sense of place. Garth Brooks and his merry hunk-apostles have corrupted country music forever. Music Row is little more than a craven boulevard of desperate salesmen eager to fill shopping malls and radio airwaves with helping after helping of watered-down, pop-country drivel. As Nicholas Dawidoff wrote in his 1997 book, In the Country of Country:

To call today’s mainstream country music country at all is a misnomer. Hot Country is really pop rock music for a prospering, mostly conservative white middle class. It’s kempt, comfortable music—hypersincere, settled, and careful neither to offend or surprise.

While there may be a kernel of truth in this view (in fact, as I suggested in response to the question that day, the main reason country radio “sucks” today is that labels and stations rely too heavily on audience research), in the end, it only sounds good, and misses a fundamental point: the changes going on in country music represent larger changes in the South, changes that mostly make the South a better place.

To begin with, anyone who dismisses contemporary country music as being too commercial overlooks the truth that Nashville has always been built on the bottom line. Since Ralph Peer arrived to record Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in Bristol, Tennessee, in August 1927, country music has been a self-consciously mercenary enterprise. Though the lyrics or instrumentation may have shifted to reflect the times, the essence of what constitutes country music has changed surprisingly little—country is music that chronicles the country and music that the country will buy. If anything, the second half of that equation is more important than the first. More than artists, executives, or even critics, consumers have always decided what constitutes country music. This is the Faustian bargain that Music Row has agreed to. It doesn’t matter what music anyone in Nashville might like—if the country doesn’t like it, Nashville will change. As Chet Atkins said, “Somebody interviewing me once asked me, ‘What’s the Nashville Sound?’ I was stumbling around for an answer and he got out some coins and shook them and he was right.”

_The chief tension in country music has always been the battle between the old and the new. Though critics may complain that established acts are ignored, newer artists (with their appeal to younger consumers) have almost always prevailed. A study by the Country Music Foundation found that the average age of country artists who charted in 1955 was thirty-three. In 1995 the figure was also thirty-three. The average age of first-time artists in 1955 was twenty-five. In 1995 the figure was the same. Though older performers may linger in the public’s mind, each decade has given birth to a new musical form—bluegrass in the ’40s, honky-tonk in the ’50s, the Nashville Sound in the ’60s, the Outlaws in the ’70s, New Traditionalism in the ’80s—that brought with it a new crop of stars.

Nashville in the ’90s was ripe for change. The country music coming out of Music Row these days reflects the region from which it comes, and for a majority of Southerners, the transformations affecting that region have resulted in a higher quality of life. Most people still associate country music with certain areas Southern Appalachia, the Texas flatlands. Critics who dismiss contemporary country say it has lost touch with these places and the people who live there. This may be true, but only insofar as people themselves have lost touch with these places. Country music has never had as its mandate the preservation of American regional life. Its goal has always been to tell the stories of ordinary Americans. That country music today is less about place and more about values is the result of changes in America—specifically, a lessening of the importance of “place” in our lives.

How did this change come about? Regionalism was always based primarily on economics—people were rooted to the places where they lived in large measure because they were tied financially to those places. Fifty years ago, when the Grand Ole Opry was at its peak, a majority of Americans lived in rural areas, and half of them didn't have electricity. As a result, people were less mobile, less wealthy, more isolated (in 1945, for example, only 46 percent of Americans had telephones), and more inclined to define themselves by their communities. In 1970, when Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were just beginning to wake Nashville out of its Olivia Newton-John phase, jet airplanes, interstate highways, and network television (not to mention rural electrification) were beginning to free Americans from their regional shackles. With greater mobility and prosperity, people began defining themselves less by their immediate surroundings and more by broader social identifiers—race, gender, youth. The foundations for a national culture were being laid.

_Today, regional identity is less important than ever. In an era when computers, chain stores, and cable television dominate American life, the sense of isolation and disenfranchisement that was once central to the South has all but disappeared, replaced by a general sense of well-being and good fortune (“down here we’ve got jobs and nice weather”), so much so that more than twenty million Americans have moved to the South since 1970, twice the national growth rate. In addition, non-Southerners were suddenly prepared to identify themselves with the region, something unthinkable two generations ago when the dominant images of the South were of oppressed minorities, barefoot, pregnant women, and toothless, racist men. Even if country music had addressed national themes in 1960, a limited number of Americans would have been prepared to accept it due to the rank connotations still associated with the place from which it came. This change in perception of the South is still the most underdiscussed—and underappreciated—reason for country music’s growth in recent years, and perhaps the most convincing reason for Southerners to embrace the boom on Music Row.

While this helps to explain the foundation of Nashville’s success, it begs a central question: What about the music? Is it any good? Well, yes, actually. To be sure, much of what’s heard on country radio is the worst representation of Music Row—and the South. It’s bland, homogenized, and unadventurous. For half a century, record executives and radio stations were able to decide what was good music by listening, and by trusting their emotions. There must be some way to bring that process into the future without abdicating all creative decisions to market research, a process that involves calling one hundred people at random during dinnertime, playing them six seconds of forty songs, then asking them to rank what they’ve heard. No wonder so many songs on the radio sound like commercial jingles: they are being packaged in exactly the same way.

But that doesn’t mean all commercial country music is mindless. In fact, the real news is how sophisticated so many of today’s artists are, from Mary Chapin Carpenter to Shania Twain, from the Mavericks to Kim Richey. There’s similar news for people who claim to like old country music but not the new. Have they listened to Patty Loveless? Trisha Yearwood? Vince Gill? Alan Jackson? Garth Brooks has two early songs—“Unanswered Prayers” and “If Tomorrow Never Comes”—that I would submit for a list of all-time great country songs. Wynonna has a voice and a body of work—both with her mother and without—that is as strong as Patsy Cline’s.

To claim that country music today is merely endless radio ditties and faceless knock-off artists is to forget that all forms of popular music (not to mention film, television, and books) have only a few originators and swarms of mediocre imitators. Even traditional country music had talentless copycats; they are now mercifully forgotten, as will be most of today’s bad acts. The only difference is that today, because of Nashville’s popularity, there is more country music in the culture, so there is more bad country music. Music Row should not be blamed for making commercial music—it has always done so. And like every other aspect of the entertainment business, it will continue to do so. Twenty years from now, albums by most of the artists mentioned above will be on the shelves of music lovers of all generations, and critics will once again be complaining that their contemporary country music does not hold up to the “past”—that is, to Nashville in the ’90s.