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TwitThisReinventing Itself
Giant, inflatable girls bob to the beat of "Rock My World (Little Country Girl)," and 14,000 concertgoers in Virginia Beach sway along. They're on their feet for Brooks & Dunn, the celebrated duo known for "turbo-tonk," a souped-up, high-octane version of country music. What really gets the crowd going, though, are the searing guitar riffs that Brooks & Dunn shower like sparks, more reminiscent of The Rolling Stones than Merle Haggard.Forget the wagon wheels and the hay bales, and that wheezy old-style honky-tonk. Once again, country music is reinventing itself, getting stronger and more varied as it does. Without abandoning its roots -- God and country, hard work and hard times, good women and bad men, and vice versa -- country music has adapted to a younger audience, and is pulling in more diverse fans than ever.
Mostly, country has changed by getting broader, borrowing from rock and pop music, both once taboo in Nashville. Says Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn, "We've never been afraid to say we were influenced by ZZ Top or The Stones, the same way we were by Waylon [Jennings] and Willie [Nelson]."
The new influences are obvious, especially in terms of listeners. More radio stations -- 2,077 -- play country than any other genre. Last year's Country Music Association awards show, televised on CBS, attracted 38 million viewers, beating out "The Bachelor" and "The West Wing." This month's show, scheduled for November 5, is expected to give the competition the boot as well.
Not everyone loves the new sound though. Many fans treasure country's hallmarks -- "real stories sung by real artists who play real instruments," as CMA executive director Ed Benson puts it, referring to the fiddle-banjo-steel-guitar traditionalists. But even those who say the music is too commercial foresee a bright future. They expect yet another change over the next few years, one in which country gets back to its roots, with a sound that's more traditional, and, well, more country again. The late Conway Twitty once said: "When things stop changin', they die." If he's right, country music will live forever.
Who's Hot:
Faith Hill
From her debut in 1994, it was obvious that the stunningly beautiful Hill was not just a country artist. After all, her first album included a Janis Joplin song. But the Star, Miss., native -- who transformed herself from down-home sweetheart to a Hollywood glamour girl -- soon joined Canada's Shania Twain in leading Nashville women toward enormous pop-crossover sales.
Audrey Faith Perry, as she was known in Mississippi (the Hill comes from a brief first marriage), got her real start in life as the adopted week-old daughter of a factory worker and his wife. She grew up singing in church and staying out of trouble. (Her one bad-girl episode: rolling her English teacher's yard with toilet paper.) "I started singing as I started talking, basically," she says. "It really never was a choice for me. It was my way of expressing my feelings. There's this mystery inside of me that for some reason in music, I just explore."
In 1987, at age 19, she moved to Nashville, totally naive about how the music business worked. ("I thought you just walked into this magical little town and eventually you'd end up on the Grand Ole Opry.") She landed a job as a receptionist, keeping her aspirations a secret. A songwriter overheard her singing to the radio one day, and asked her to record a demo. When Hill's boss, singer Gary Morris, heard it, he ordered her to "start getting busy" on her career. She took off.
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