Country music emerged in the postwar period as one of the most popular forms of American music. Although its first fans and performers were working-class and rural whites of the South, it is now popular worldwide.

Country music’s most recent influences are bluegrass music, cowboy music and western swing; its roots can be found in Scottish and English folk music, Cajun music and African American spirituals and blues. The music is renowned for plaintive songs about betrayed love, rendered in regional accents by voices often raw with emotion. The word “twang” has come to describe the vocal style of most country singers. The musical arrangements favor the steel guitar, the fiddle and the guitar, but the voice is always foreground. Concerts highlight singers and bands; the visual style of some of the performers—leather, lace and fringe—is also quite remarkable.

Most country performers remain white. Only two artists have challenged this norm: the black singer Charlie Pride, who was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and the lesbian singer k.d.lang, who emerged in the 1980s and borrowed freely from country forms in order to create her own persona.

Since the war, country music can be divided into a few distinctive styles: honky tonk, the Nashville sound, outlaw country and urban cowboy music. In the 1940s and 1950s, the great Hank Williams, who sang of love and loss in robust, rough and ironic tones, epitomized the honky tonk style. Other popular honky tonk stylists were Lefty Frizzel and Kitty Wells. The Nashville sound was slicker, more produced and centered around the renowned Grand Ole Opry theater.

The silky smooth voices of Gentleman Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold embodied this style in the 1950s and enlarged the fan base of country Singers like Patsy Cline combined honky tonk with the Nashville sound and paved the way for other female singers like Loretta Lynn. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard came to prominence in the late 1960s and established the style of outlaw country—a mixture of honky tonk with southern rock, which expressed a defiant blue collar perspective.

By the 1970s, country music began to go urban with Dolly Parton’s crossover hit “9 to 5” and the success of Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt and others who mixed country with more mainstream pop. Following upon the pop-influenced new country of Reba McEntire and Randy Travis in the 1980s, Garth Brooks became in the 1990s a country-based crooner with mass sex appeal, bringing country music to its largest audience ever.

Despite its great popularity at the century’s end, country music has lost some of its emotive poetry substituting polish for rougher tales of poverty and unfaithful lovers.