BuffettNews.com

A must read for any fan of Waylon, Willie, Jerry Jeff, Michael Murphey, Billy Joe Shaver, etc. Buffett even gets a very brief mention but the focus is on the aforementioned artists. Click on the image below to link to the article.

I read it in the waiting room of the carwash. Pretty well done.

I thought it was very well done myself, especially considering they got all of those people that were actually there to weigh in with their recollections. It also goes to show why I'll always be more fond of Whiskeytown, Slobberbone, Uncle Tupelo, the Old 97's, James McMurtry, the Gourds, the Drive-By Truckers and their peers than anything the world of commercial country music is likely to ever offer in the way of their cookie cutter idea of "country" music. There were several passages I found to be very quotable, including this one:

To say that Nashville eventually got hip to what was happening would be too kind. Rather, the industry identified a chance to make money and came up with the “outlaw” label, which now applies to one more subset of the Nashville establishment. While it rightly conjures images of Willie, Waylon, and the boys, other stars who made careers off it, like Hank Williams Jr., couldn’t have had less in common with hippie poets like Murphey and Fromholz. But something more than marketing persists in the label. It was coined to describe country songwriters who wouldn’t conform to traditional strictures, who insisted on making music that sounded right to them.

That's as true today when it comes to alt.country as it was back in the 70s when the whole Austin scene started gaining international attention.

great article, thanks for sharing it