this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Late 80s early 90s. When they started making 80s pop music with slide guitar and a twangy vocal and calling it country.
The final nail in the coffin was when country music radio refused to play Johnny Cash's Unchained album.
https://img.songfacts.com/calendar/15354.jpg
That sounds about right. I also think that at some point around that time the big Nashville labels decided that it made more financial sense to get behind a specific type of cultural and political messaging than it did to simply let the music be whatever it wanted to be.
Long gone were the days of Loretta "The Coal Miner's Daughter," and Johnny Paycheck "I Owe my Soul to the Company Store," and while we still had Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and their protogé young Steve Earle, for the most part mainstream country and western was turning into formulaic corporate crap.