Overview
By the 1990s, country music had become the most popular and bestselling genre of music in the United States. In this lesson, we will consider how and why country music rose to commercial dominance in the late 1980s and 1990s. The so-called “new country” music of the 1980s was actually in many ways a revival of older, traditional styles of country music. By the 1980s, a number of the top country stars such as Dolly Parton had become increasingly pop-oriented in their sounds and musical styles. The 1980s saw a return to the earlier days of country music, including the fashion, instrumentation, and lyric themes.
Objectives
- Recall how and why George Strait and Reba McEntire were important figures in the “new” country of the 1980s
- Recall the significance of Garth Brooks’s musical style and lyric message and how he was similar to and different from other country artists
- Examine the careers of other popular country artists from the 1990s, including LeAnn Rimes and Shania Twain
New Country, Old Country
The so-called "new country" music of the 1980s was actually in many ways a revival of older, traditional styles of country music. By the 1980s, a number of the top country stars such as Dolly Parton had become increasingly pop-oriented in their sounds and musical styles. The 1980s saw a return to the earlier days of country music, including the fashion, instrumentation, and lyric themes. Two leaders of this return to the traditional sounds of country music were George Strait and Reba McEntire, and most artists who were popular during the 1990s cited Strait and McEntire as two major influences.
Singer Reba McEntire released several albums during the late 1970s and early 1980s for Mercury Records. Most of the music she recorded during this period had a strong pop inflection. For example, her cover of "Sweet Dreams ♫" (written by Don Gibson in 1956 and recorded by Patsy Cline in 1963) has lush orchestral strings and an electric keyboard, both of which are clear markers of the country pop style popular at the time. Frustrated by the Mercury's emphasis on a pop-oriented style of country music, McEntire left the label in 1984 and signed with MCA Nashville Records.
MCA gave McEntire a significant amount of creative freedom, and she recorded music that was much closer to the traditional country music sounds of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1984, McEntire released My Kind of Country for MCA, which established her as a strong voice of traditional country music styles. The single "How Blue ♫," penned by Josh Moffat, features acoustic guitar, pedal steel guitar, and fiddle, and it is typical of McEntire's music from this period. During the 1980s, McEntire recorded and released several albums and singles with MCA, including hits such as "Only in My Mind ♫" (1985), which she wrote and produced, and "The Last One to Know ♫" (1987), which was written by Matraca Berg and Jane Mariash. Throughout this period, McEntire wrote her own songs, sang songs written for her, and covered older country songs.
McEntire was from Oklahoma, and she sang with a strong rural accent. Her family raised and participated in rodeos, and McEntire had been married to and divorced from a rodeo champion, all of which lent her and her music a sense of country and western authenticity. Her experiences gave her the materials to build a story that seemed authentic "country." McEntire's music and her insistence on traditional country music styles made her a spokesperson for the "new" country music of the 1980s.
"I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life."
