Twelve songs that reshaped country music in 1973

Country rock icon and general musical polymath Steve Earle does a fascinating podcast in which he posits that popular music in the West went through a stage of evolution in 1965 when Bob Dylan decided he wanted to be the Beatles and John Lennon decided he wanted to be Bob Dylan.

The resulting albums – Bringing It All Back Home and Rubber Soul – changed the face of western music by fully fusing R&B-based rock & roll with country-based folk music. Though specific genres would continue to exist, the walls were down. Hybrid music has been the norm ever since.

After that earthquake, it was left to each individual genre to handle the aftermath. Country music, for a variety of reasons, struggled with the new normal more than any other genre. In a very real sense, it is still struggling with the incorporation of non-traditional voices to this day.

12 songs that changed country music in 1973

Country music was as much a state of mind and geographic location as it was a musical style. Sure, it had resonator guitars. It had a narrative lyrical tradition that grew out of the mountain songs handed down from father to son. The songs told stories of heartache and faith. If it hewed closely to those mountain origins, there might be a fiddle, banjo or mandolin. But electric guitars were ok, provided they were clean and didn’t lean on the blues chords that came out of rock & roll.

They could be happy or sad, but they generally didn’t stray too far from the fundamental gifts of God and country and family.

Rock & roll challenged much of what country music stood for, and in the 1960s, country music had a decision to make. It fell to some powerful entities in Nashville, the country capital of the world, to decide just how to incorporate these new impulses into their traditional music. Their decision was to run a hard as possible away from the new music.

Where rock might feature shoddy, incoherent vocals, country music producers began using choirs to back up a pure baritone or pretty soprano. Where messy electric guitars flooded rock & roll, those same producers bathed their arrangements in strings. They employed a team of songwriters to come up with a never-ending supply of hummable tunes that fell into a few basic categories – happy love songs, sad breakup songs, sentimental family songs, and the occasional song about the merits of a good dog. They’d throw a lot of these songs at the wall and wait for a few to become hits.

Then – lather, rinse, repeat.

But the music didn’t care what the labels wanted. Country music wanted to try some new things. If you think that the battle over the country bona fides of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter is somehow new, take a look back some sixty years to Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, released by Ray Charles in 1962. It blended traditional country with soul and rock and big band – nothing was immune. It was sensational – one of the very best collections of music from the 1960s.

But was it country? Not according to Nashville.

Country music would eventually allow an African American to join their club. Former baseball player Charley Pride released his first country album a few years after Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds…, and by the late ‘60s, he was hitting the top of the country charts routinely.

“See,” Nashville said, “we don’t have a race problem. Look at Charley Pride.”

Sixty years later and they’re saying the same thing about Charley Crockett.

Eventually, Nashville faced a serious challenge to its dominance. The primary movement was called “outlaw country,” performed by songwriters like Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson who wanted a more frank type of country song – one that replaced “crying” with “drinking” and “love” with “sex.” (I can't use the actual word they wanted -- not in a family-friendly column.)

And then there were the bands who came from the south but loved rock & roll. They were sometimes called country rock and sometimes called southern rock, but the basic idea was the same. Electric guitars, distortion, prominent bass and drum lines, volume and speed – and not a choir or violin in site.

The outlaws chafed at the Nashville orthodoxy – known as countrypolitan for its soft-core attempt to make traditional country palatable in the suburbs. They gravitated toward Austin.

The rockers came from anywhere and everywhere – Florida, Alabama, Texas – even, wonder of wonders, California  (Bakersfield – the “country” part of Cali.)

You might say that the outlaws were country artists who were incorporating rock & roll into the music while the country/southern rockers were rock & rollers with a lot of country in their genes. Whether you like that definition of not, there’s no denying when it all exploded. If 1965 was when rock and folk united, then 1973 is when country shook off Nashville and embraced rock & roll – as a musical style and as an artistic ethos.

Here are a dozen songs – all from that extraordinary year of 1973 – that reshaped country music for all time.