Country Music: The Wild Country Guide

Country music grew out of the ballads, fiddle tunes and gospel songs of the rural American South in the early 1900s, shaped by Appalachian folk traditions and African American blues and banjo music. Since the 1927 Bristol Sessions it has kept reinventing itself — honky-tonk, the Nashville sound, outlaw country, ’90s superstardom and today’s genre-blending hits — while holding on to the same core: songs about real life, told plainly.