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Someone committed murder. 

At least, according to George Strait and Alan Jackson when they sang “Murder on Music Row” in 1999. 

“The almighty dollar and the lust for worldwide fame/Slowly killed tradition, and for that someone should hang.”

Classic country artists like Strait and Jackson consistently portray deeply American values like faith, family, and freedom overcoming human vices like drinking, gambling, and cheating. But as these artists age out, a cheap replica of “country” is rising in their place.

While Strait is still performing, the 72-year-old cowboy launched his first “final tour” in 2013. And Jackson, 66, announced in 2021 he has a form of neuropathy making it difficult to perform. Even 62-year-old contemporary country artist Toby Keith, known for patriotic anthems like “Courtesy of The Red, White and Blue,” died earlier this year.

In place of the classic country, which conveys deeply binding human values, a cheap corporatized image of “country” has emerged. Beyoncé donned a cowboy hat this year to sing “Texas Hold ‘Em” — which has nothing to do with Texas, but everything to do with deeming herself relevant. 

“Putting a cowboy hat on Beyoncé doesn’t make her country, and no country fan thinks she is country,” classic country artist Monte Warden told The Federalist. “She may sell a bunch of records in the country market, no country fan is buying that.”

Warden, 57, is a two-time member of the Texas Music Hall of Fame. He leads The Wagoneers, and the Austin band performs monthly at the legendary Texas honky tonk The Broken Spoke. He co-wrote Strait’s hit song “Desperately,” and has landed cuts with several other popular artists including George Jones, Carrie Underwood, Josh Turner, Patty Loveless, and Travis Tritt. 

Warden said the values of classic country resemble Americans’ rugged character and perseverance.

“It’s faith and family, and life’s hardships and the redeeming value of going through something tough, and celebrating things like dancing and everything that makes America great,” he said. “There is a — I would say — palpable, and noted, and obvious dearth of that right now in country music … Some of it is by design, some of it is by circumstance.”

The Beginning Of The End?

The demise of traditional country began with the advent of streaming services in the early 2000s, according to Warden, who said he has been in music studios since 1981.

“If you wanted to own music, you had to go buy the record, and then, all of a sudden, you could have it on your computer,” he said. “Suddenly, record companies were making 80 percent less.”

Record companies began making “360 deals” close to 2002 or 2003, according to Warden, in which they would get a cut of the artist’s income from merchandise, touring sales, and publishing.

“If you don’t write your own songs, you have zero publishing income. The record company felt it would make good business sense to then turn every artist into a songwriter,” Warden said. 

He said under this format, Americans would never have heard of legendary artists like Elvis Presley, George Strait, George Jones, and Emmylou Harris. “Because they didn’t write their own songs, they would not be signed today,” he said.

According to Warden, this format brought an influx of poor songwriters. He called this “the beginning of the creaking of the door open” to reducing music quality.

“If you have three great songwriters and a sh–ty songwriter on the appointment, the song is pulled down to the quality of the least-talented writer in the room. It is never pulled up to the most talented writer,” he said. 

Nashville classic country artist Timbo told The Federalist that modern country often embraces a sound completely foreign to the traditional genre.

“Not much of it these days is music-based, it’s an image business,” he said. “It came with the advent of technology. I think that people were more interested in music at one point in time.”

He also said genres like rap have deeply changed country music from its roots. “Every country music song on the radio now sounds like a rap song,” Timbo said. “That’s just the best we got.”

Changing Tune

“We are not being subjected to as many classic songs as a country music fan has grown to be subjected to,” Warden said, adding that this cannot be blamed on “one or two things,” but is rather the result of “a perfect storm.”

New technology like Antares Auto-Tune, which allowed for pitch correction in digital recordings, also entered the music scene in the late ’90s. Warden noted auto-tune was initially designed to save great takes in which a singer missed one or two notes, but soon it was being employed to help lesser artists sound like better singers than they were.

“Immediately what happened was the devil took over, and the record companies realized, ‘Hey, we don’t even have to have good singers anymore. We could just have somebody that’s good-looking,’” Warden said. “We were no longer presented with these incredible singers that maybe … weren’t a lot to look at.”

But more destructive was the influx of coastal elites into record labels producing country music, according to Warden. 

He said labels in Nashville had tight budgets in the early 2000s, encouraging them to recruit executives from New York and Los Angeles rather than promoting from within.

“For the first time, the majority of the executives, they actually looked down on the traditions of country music — on the importance of family and faith and fidelity, and what cheating does to a relationship, and what drinking does to a relationship, and all those things,” Warden said. “They had no cultural touchstone.”

He said these executives, “without any curiosity of understanding the culture,” tried to promote a product that would simply sell the most records. Warden went so far as to say he saw “actual disdain for the traditions of country music” in some cases “behind the scenes.”

“They just put a cowboy hat on it, and put boots on it, and went, ‘Look, it’s country,’” Warden said. “And that is not at all the case.”

Sterling Drake, another classic country artist, told The Federalist he was shocked by the type of people working in many of the genre’s labels.

“People becoming employed in these publishing houses on Music Row were fresh out of college, wearing Adidas and skateboarding shoes, from L.A. and from the coastal regions that really had no connection to what country music was,” he said. “But they were the purveyors of this genre’s future.”

Drake was born in South Florida, where he said he learned to love country music on his grandfather’s cattle ranch. He moved to Utah and then Montana to work on ranches as a young adult, keeping his love of classic country alive.

“Nashville seems so far away and disconnected,” Drake said. He said members of a publishing company once thought his cowboy hat and traditional garb — which he wears all the time — was a costume.

“They always kept calling my music ‘Americana,’ because it had pedal steel guitar and some of these more traditional elements,” he said. “But I felt like it was a kind of a wastebasket for whatever wasn’t popular for commercial country music, which seemed to go in a very electronic direction.”

Timbo said record companies often treat artists as a simple way of making money, making it difficult for good country artists to get deals if they lack things like strong publicity or popularity on social media.

“They want to figure out a way to do that, make money off of what you’re doing,” he said. “You have to give up a lot of your creative control.”

Warden said labels have left true country fans behind, pointing to Strait’s recent concert at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, which broke the record for largest ticketed concert in America with 110,905 fans.

“There were people from eight to 80 at that show, and those fans didn’t go away or die off or start listening to other stuff,” he said. “They’ve not been given the opportunity to continue to have new music in the music that they love.” 

Passing The Torch

While the modern, cardboard-cutout version of country has become increasingly popular, classic artists are passing the torch to some younger artists who promise to keep the tradition alive.

Randy Travis is a classic artist like Strait and Jackson. He is well-known for songs with deep meaning like “Three Wooden Crosses” — a story of redemption after an eighteen-wheeler struck a bus with a farmer, a teacher, and a preacher who gave his Bible to the lone survivor, a hooker, in his dying breath.

But following a stroke in 2013, the 65-year-old Travis now struggles to speak, let alone sing and perform. This marked the loss of an important voice for deeper meaning in the genre.

Travis appeared at Billy Bob’s, “the world’s largest honky tonk,” in Ft. Worth in October with 27-year-old Zach Top who released his first album just this year. Top sang Travis’ song “1982,” which appeared to bring a tear to the older artist’s eye. 

Top is helping bring back classic country. His song “Sounds Like the Radio” — an instant success — features steel guitar and the ’90s style of Strait and Jackson. His song “Dirt Turns to Gold” conveys the value of hometowns and hard work in forming one’s lifestyle and character.

Warden said young artists like Top, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, and Parker McCollum are keeping classic country alive in various ways, from their style to their method of composing music. “Those great songs are being written every day in Nashville,” he said

Timbo said his father played fiddle for legendary bluegrass artist Bill Monroe, so he was steeped in country music from a young age. He said young artists are reaching for real music, as they remember a time before today’s cheap imitation.

“I think a lot of us have reached for the roots, reached for things that have that feeling,” Timbo said. “Stuff that sounds real, as opposed to the ‘auto-tune, sexy tractor.’” He said humans can sense the natural character of classic country, which helps bring young artists to pursue it — though he said he is skeptical about being able to take the genre back from corporate music.

“There’s a hearkening there to the earlier age, that we can hear the naturalness,” Timbo said. “It’s a communal kind of music, it’s also built around stories of love.”

Drake said he is planning to release his first full-length record in late April or early May next year.

Drake tries to preserve classic country’s appeal to average people who “have dealt with real-life problems, that have been a part of the American story,” he said. He “didn’t find much love from the industry in Nashville,” because he is a “straight white male” who also wouldn’t “play the trope of an ultra-conservative figure.”

But he said he sees hope for classic country, citing artists like Cody Johnson. “I think that artists of all stripes and all political backgrounds are getting a little bit more recognition now than they were,” Drake said. “While the industry is still there and it’s holding on, it’s losing influence every year.”

Warden said the corporate music industry should listen to the listeners.

“Give the consumer what they want,” Warden said. “Don’t tell the consumer they’re wrong, don’t tell the consumer they’re a bigot, don’t tell the consumer they’re backwards.”

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.