[Goat Mick]

I wish I had been on this weekend as I would have liked to follow and contribute more to this thread. I honestly love country music, it's raw and organic, just like it sprouted directly from the earth itself. And it's also not found (with a few exceptions) on commercial radio.

Nashville has always been it's own worst enemy. The major record labels in Nashville are run by guys from New York, LA, London and all over the world. They predominately don't know or even care about the history and tradition of country music, they know selling music and they know about making money. The Nashville labels have always been about making Country Music into something it's not. Listen to the songs from the 60's and 70's, they have orchestrated pop sounding studio musicians backing up the melody with string and horn sections. If George Jones and Conway didn't have such amazing country voices, their records would have sounded like show tunes.

Most of the guys we think about as being good classic country music artists made their names outside of Nashville and became popular enough to go back to Nashville and take control of their music and make the records their way. This was the Outlaw movement. Didn't have anything to do with being criminals, it meant they were breaking the rules of Nashville. Waylon and Willie and Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard...etc...etc...etc...