Growing up in the Texas ‘burbs there are two genres you become familiar with – country and heavy metal. Metal currently offers many more sub-genres than country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heavy_metal_genres) yet metal fans have no problem speaking of all these sub-genres under heavy metal.

Part of the problem, as I see it, are the “natural” taxonomy forking that has occurred – Country, western, bluegrass – and now there an effort to apply a dominate categorization after the fact. That’s much harder then starting out with a dominate category (heavy metal) to build off of.

Brody – Americana might give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but Hank III and th’ Legendary Shake Shakers don’t.

Baron: You mean most of what’s being produced in mainstream country, or most of what’s being produced, including rap and hip-hop garbage? If the latter, I agree with you. However, that’s not exactly a strong endorsement of cow-punk.

I couldn’t agree with you more on the Americana label. Americana seems to most peolpe to be code for inaccesible music that isn’t relevant (which of course its not, the Americana chart is full of really rad people).

I also completely agree that we can’t relinquish the term “country” to the pop country coming out today. Its not as if this situation is without precedent, in the early 70’s you had people like Olivia Newton John and John Denver dominating the charts and award shows, but of course Willie and Waylon didn’t throw their hands up and abandon ship (though nowadays it seems like Willie has taken an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach)

As far as the hyphen question goes, though it would be helpful, I think its unneccesary. Country has always been able to accomadate diversity. Hank, Buck, Willie and Cash present a pretty broad range of sounds and would require quite a bit of hyphens to properly label them, but country works just fine.

Country music is not like “pop” or even “rock and roll” fundamentally in that even though like those genres it is based around a popular music industry, unlike those genres country music is a form of “folk” music, or music that emphasizes tradition. To abandon the term “country” music would be to close the book on a great musical tradition and relegate true american country music to something of a musuem piece, interesting and worthwhile, but not alive, present, and working in peoples lives today.

I disagree that pop-country has corned the market of the country moniker and think relinquishing the title is a disservice to the greats that created the genre. Country, like metal and electronica, has mutated and evolved into so many differing sub-genres that I wonder if the term “country” can ever be used without a hyphen?

Matt- I’d put the “bad music” of Caddle (cow punk) and the Reverend Horton Heat (psychobilly) against most of what’s being produced today.

Naturally when I say Rock and Roll, I mean the Rock and Roll of the 50’s of 60’s, or Rock and roll that actually sounds like American roots music as opposed to like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin or Poison or Pearl Jam or Slayer who all may “rock” but who don’t play classic “rock and roll” music.