Not all music fits a stereotype, but some does. Country music is (by its very definition) NOT Urban music, rock or classical. Historically, it's the music of the common man (and to be more precise) the music of the southern common man. When Loretta Lynn wrote Coal Miners Daughter, she wasn't making it up off the top of her head, it was the story of her life, a life very similar to my own. When Dolly Parton wrote Coat of Many Colors, it was a story from her own childhood, a childhood she experienced less than a hundred miles from where I sit, typing this.
Country music is music about a people. Music that can (and often does) resonate with groups who live outside the region of country's birth, but that will never have the meaning that it does to those who've lived it. I take this wholesale abandonment of the roots of country very personally, because country music is MY music. It's the story of MY life, or rather it was. Now it's just the same as everything else. The stories of people I cannot relate to, in the way that I could relate to "Mama Tried" or "Long Black Veil".
Now people can argue that country has changed because the people who listen to it have changed, and to a point that's true. But I hear the folks around me talking about switching off their radios in ever greater numbers, simply because the music no longer speaks to them. There's room for the Taylor Swift's out there, but there's room for the next Merle Haggard or Hank Williams too. Problem is, you'd never know it listening to the CMA's or country radio.
