Outlaw country is a subgenre of country music, most popular during the late 1960s and the 1970s (and even into the 1980s in some cases), sometimes referred to as the outlaw movement or simply outlaw music. The focus of the movement has been on "outlaws", such as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings (for reference, Waylon Jennings despised the term "Outlaw"), Merle Haggard, David Allan Coe and his Eli Radish Band, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Leon Russell, Hank Williams Jr., Townes Van Zandt and Billy Joe Shaver. The reason for the movement has been attributed to a reaction to the Nashville sound, developed by record producers like Chet Atkins who softened the raw honky tonk sound that was predominant in the music of performers like Jimmie Rodgers, and his successors such as Hank Williams, George Jones and Lefty Frizzell. According to Aaron Fox, "the fundamental opposition between law-and-order authoritarianism and the image of 'outlaw' authenticity... has structured country's discourse of masculinity since the days of Jimmie Rodgers."
Read more about Outlaw Country: Female Outlaws, Texas Country, Notable Artists
Famous quotes containing the words outlaw and/or country:
“The price on the wanted
poster was a-going down, outlaw alias copped my stance
and moody greenhorns were making me dance; while my mouth’s
shooting iron got its chambers jammed.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)