re: #2 Charles

But none of those bands were “country western.” CW is a very specific type of cheap sentimental music, by the likes of Merle Haggard, Lee Greenwood, etc., often with a right wing slant. The kind of music they featured on “Hee Haw.”

That’s why I say Americana is not the same as “country western.”

Again, there is the Nashville commercial AM Top 40 Country mass-produced to a fixed formula and served up to a ready audience, but even there the Bakersfield Sound and Rebel Country managed to work its way around the fringes, WIllie and Waylon and the Boys et al.

Remember how Kenny Rodgers was once a psychedelic-tinged pop singer until he went full country? And Dwight Yoakam came out of the punkabilly scene.