Country music is one of Australia’s oldest popular music forms, stretching from the 1920s (when it was known as hillbilly) to today. It also shows a remarkable continuity of tradition. Despite country music’s reputation as being politically conservative and white, in Australia country has often pursued a progressive agenda and has featured many Aboriginal and women artists. Songwriters have used country music’s robust musical forms to tell richly detailed and diverse stories about life in Australia, from rural labour, to urbanization, to sexual and racial double standards, to economic woes, to familial bonds, to the ravages of the climate. Despite this rich history, and the genre’s rootedness in place, there remain many anxieties surrounding country music to do with its perceived ‘Americanness’, itself symptomatic of larger anxieties around national identity. While hillbilly music originated in America, musically, lyrically and culturally it has developed in new and fascinating ways in Australia.

The Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against the US president in 2003, infuriating conservative country music fans and broadcasters; within months, the Chicks’ music had virtually disappeared from country radio. While this made political sense, it made no economic sense because of the Chicks’ vast economic success. Why, then, target them? I argue the reaction was part of a broader regendering of the country music industry, catalyzed by legal challenges, technological changes, and the emergence of a new political conservatism. These changes ended women’s spotlighted place on country music stages where Shania Twain, The Chicks, and others had dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. This article thus begins a year earlier with the lawsuit the Dixie Chicks filed against Sony in April 2002. It is through this lawsuit – which challenged the company’s legal and economic authority over the Chicks – that this article examines the broader cultural, economic, and political shifts that characterized the substantial changes in country music performances and players.

In 2017, Rhiannon Giddens reflected on a recent performance as part of the first African American string band to play the Grand Ole Opry. As she recalled, “people started calling it a Healing Moment. But I have to ask: a healing moment for whom? One or two Black groups, or one or two Black country stars is not a substitution for recognizing the true multi-cultural history of this music. We have a lot of work to do.” These words are a touchstone for assessing Giddens’s first two solo albums, as works that reclaim and re-member the racially mixed roots of country music alongside other distinctively American genres. The analysis pushes against paradigms in which musical sounds align neatly with racial categories, specifically the presumed whiteness of country music. Giddens’s work makes clear that, though convenient, racialized conceptions obscure more than they reveal about US music and the people making it.

Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance at the 2016 Country Music Awards Show sparked unprecedented backlash on digital media spaces. For some viewers, the performance challenged the perceived boundaries of country music as fundamentally wrapped up in white identity. Consequently, white fans’ digital dialogue surrounding the performance attempted to maintain country music’s whiteness through surveillant rhetorical tactics. In this chapter, Hutten develops a theory of genre surveillance to describe how the boundaries of country music are policed not only by significant country music institutions but by a faction of country music fans. Hutten situates Beyoncé’s and The Chicks’ performance, and the digital reactions to it, within the history and politics of country music’s sonic color line. Additionally, Hutten mobilizes Browne’s (2015) theory of dark sousveillance to demonstrate how the performance functions as an act of musical resistance.

Long-associated with “insurgent” or alt.country and what is now “Americana,” Chicago’s Bloodshot Records’ first release (For a Life of Sin: A Compilation of Insurgent Chicago Country, 1994) was a compilation album featuring local punk and indie bands performing various styles of country music. The label’s ongoing use of compilation and tribute albums was not only commercial but also strategic in maintaining a connection to the label’s roots in the Chicago punk and underground rock scene, reinforcing its adherence to a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic and highlighting small-scale production and consumption practices. This chapter argues that Bloodshot’s tribute albums are significant for the layers of meaning they contributed to a label’s branding and identity by historicizing and legitimating the record label’s early country offerings while offering an argument for the importance of the independent record label and non-mainstream musical practices in the twenty-first century.

In the past decade, interest in the work of the tailor Nudie Cohn has intensified and the style he created, which was the defining dress practice of country music performance throughout the 1950s, has been reinterpreted by emerging western wear designers. This style juxtaposes the materials and construction values of bespoke tailoring with jewel colors, pictorial embroidery, sparkling rhinestones, and the style of the American West. Its revival began among musicians identified with the alt.country or Americana movements and has since broadened to mainstream country (Midland), to artists outside the genre (Lily Allen), and on its contested margins (Lil Nas X). This chapter explores the current revival as a development of and extension beyond the Nudie style’s established role as a signifier of authenticity, discussing its ability to reflect and to forge gender and race identities in country music, both historically and in the present.

For the past two decades, the cowboy who inhabits country music narratives has appeared with increasing frequency in a seaside setting or beach environment that appears to contradict the well-established conventions of place and space in the genre. Where rural farms and ranches, for instance, evoked codes of white, male working-class sustenance, physical labor, and pride in forging a symbiotic relationship with the land, the new beach imagery offered a different catalog of associative meaning: leisure, escape, travel away from one’s home and roots, and a sense of unbounded freedom. This chapter traces the rise of beach imagery as a setting and reference point in country music, both in song narratives and music videos, since the 1990s. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that, in spite of their ubiquity, these beach settings are only comprehensible to their audience because the underlying cultural meaning of country music has fundamentally changed.

Drawing on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork singing and playing with three Diné country-western bands, I explore how one Native band lives and responds to border town racism and settler nativism in towns bordering the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States. I illustrate how country music, a genre that has been embraced by Diné people since the late 1930s, serves as a flashpoint for racialized forms of difference and belonging within the liminal space of the Navajo reservation “border town.” I argue that country music performance serves as a condensed site for the enactment and negotiation of border town tensions, microaggressions, and more blatant forms of racism, providing key insights into the ways in which Indigenous country music unsettles Colorado’s own settler-colonial and settler nativist histories in the border town Southwest.