Questionably Country

Dolly Parton and Country Boundaries

0:00Nate, I want to play you three quick clips, and I want you to tell me something. Are these country songs? Ooh, a vexing question. Song one. Islands in the stream. That is what we are. No one in between. How can we be? Song two. Working nine to five. What a way to make a living. Barely getting by. It's all taking and no giving.

0:30And song three is a bit of a twist.

0:45Obviously, these three songs are by Dolly Parton. After Jolene, Island in the Stream, and Nine to Five are Dolly's most streamed songs. The last song, Rockstar, is off of her 2023 album called Rockstar. Sadly, we just lost Dolly moments before taping the show. You know, she was a huge trailblazer. She was the one thing that we could all agree on. She grew up in rural poverty, but went on to write over 3,000 songs in her life, becoming a star on the screen, an entrepreneur. And I think a visionary with a really expansive vision of what is country music and what country can be.

1:20Are these songs country? Such a simple question. And yet I'm sweating bullets trying to come up with an answer here. Sure. I'm going to say, yes, they are country. Well, in the spirit of Dolly, today we're going to be looking at the current boom in country music and the boundaries that it's exploring. Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. Want to take your sports fandom to the next level? Gemini is a game changer for staying in the action and turning up everything you love about the game. Let's say you want to create a custom leaderboard that compares your fantasy picks with upcoming trade prospects.

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Defining Country Music Genre

2:42Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Okay, so in August of 2026, country music, for the first time ever, took the top five Hot 100 slots. Wow. Yeah, right? So what I want to do is listen to these five songs and see what they tell us about country music.

3:14And I want to ask that same question. Are these country songs? I feel like the question of what is and what is not country is endlessly fascinating. Yeah. Sometimes combative. And yet it's pretty important in a way, not so much for ultimately deciding, is this thing country or not, but what those conversations say about what we value in music and how we define genre itself. You know, so often country music is thought of as being in a particular geography, maybe from the South.

3:45It's thought of as being traditional, maybe lower C conservative. But country music is also one of our foundational American popular genres. Yeah. It does maybe move a little more slowly. It's interested in the present, but also the past. And, you know, it cares a lot about working class people. It cares about multi-generational storylines that, you know, you can be of many different ages and be a country star.

Analyzing Choose in Texas

4:11Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to listen to the top five songs in the order that I have chosen most country to least country, beginning with one of the most important songs possibly ever now. Ella Langley's Choose in Texas. She's from Texas. I can tell by the way he's still stepping around the room.

4:35And judging by the smile that's written on his face, there's nothing I can do.

4:43No, yeah, it doesn't take a crystal ball to see. A cowboy always finds a way to leave. Drinking Jack all by myself.

4:57So Choose in Texas is a song that hasn't just grown on me. It's grown on the entire country. Yeah. As of this recording, Choose in Texas is tied with two other songs for the longest running number one song in the country. And when I say in the country, I don't mean country music. I'm saying in the entire country. Yeah. On the Hot 100. Tied with Old Town Road, Lil Nas X.

5:27And another country crossover, Shibuzzi's a bar song, Tipsy. Someone pull me up a double shot away. Double shot away. They know me and J. They don't gotta hit streets. There's a party downtown near Fifth Street. Everybody at the bar gets hit. The fact that every song to set these record-breaking runs at number one is A, come out in the last six years,

6:00and B, if not full country, country-adjacent in some way, is kind of a wild statistic. And to be clear, there is someone who is reigning supreme at number one. That is Moriah Carey, All I Want for Christmas Is You. But not counting holiday songs. These three are tied. Actually, by the time that this episode comes out, it's entirely possible that Ella Langley is going to break that record and be the longest-running number one for a non-holiday song.

6:33I'm not totally surprised, given that Billboard has changed the way it calculates the success of songs that we're seeing kind of more songs in general stay at number one. I'm kind of surprised that this song might be the record-breaker, though. Choose in Texas. Not because it's not a great song, just because it's kind of chill. It's a little lugubrious. I'm like, why is this song resonating with people so much? I have to know. I honestly think this is a really great track that can appeal to a lot of folks.

7:03It uses Texas as a stand-in for another countrywoman. Yeah. There's a real tension in this song set up between Tennessee and Texas, which is real in country music as well. You know, Nashville is the hub of recording. Texas is where real ranching cowboys reside. And so in Choose in Texas, we have this entourage of Tennessean and Texan symbology. On the Tennessee side, we have Memphis blues we used to sing.

7:34Ella Langley also is drinking Jack all by herself. Jack Daniels is made in Tennessee. Yes. And then there's all of these great references to other country songs. Langley sings, well, I guess he forgot about the smoky mountain rain. I guess he forgot about the smoky mountain rain. The smoky mountains aren't just in Appalachia, Tennessee, but also smoky mountain rain was a number one single from 1980 by Ronnie Millsap.

8:07Smoky mountain rain keeps on falling. So on the side of Tennessee, we've got its whiskey, we've got its cities, we've got its mountains, and we've got its songs. Texas also has its iconography in the song. We have Two Steppin', of course, a style of dance done in Texas. We have another country song reference, Eastbound and Down by Jerry Reed.

8:37Well, I'm eastbound and down, and I can't help but cry. Cause I'm 40, it gets lonelier with every mile. And a throw to I-40, the road you can take from Tennessee to Texas. Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin'. Are we gonna do what they say can't be done? But my favorite Texas reference in, choose in Texas, is her nod to the song Amarillo by Morning. He always loved Amarillo by Morning.

9:10I should have taken that as a warning. Amarillo by Morning, a 1973 song by Terry Stafford, but made famous by George Strait. Amarillo by Morning, up from San Antonio, everything that I got is just what I've got on. I actually think that, as great as this lyrical reference is, there may be a subtle nod to another George Strait song going on here from 1987, the song All My Exes Live in Texas.

9:48But all my exes live in Texas, and that's why I hang my hand in Tennessee.

10:02Oh, I see what's going on here. What's going on? It's a little reversal of the choose in Texas dynamic. Exactly. George Strait has to hang out in Tennessee, cause all his exes have chosen Texas. And Ella Langley is feeling sad because her beau has chosen Texas over Tennessee. So this is a long-standing rivalry between these two states. Interesting. Yeah, and I love it. She's turned it kind of into the other woman kind of song.

10:32Hearing all these references in Choose in Texas to folks like George Strait and Ronnie Millsap reminds me that Miranda Lambert is one of the co-writers on this song. And that's something she loves to do in her work as well as, like, shout-out folks like Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson in the course of her lyrics. So there are so many different nods to historical country songs going on in Ella Langley's Choose in Texas. But there's one moment in particular that really stands out to me as exceptional songwriting that isn't so much a reference to another song, but rather a clue to where the song is going to end up that plays at the very beginning.

11:12You and I just recently did a series about song form in which I had sort of derided the intro thick-headedly as, you know, something we should move right past as fast as you possibly can. Not in the case of Ella Langley's Choose in Texas.

11:42Whoa, are you saying there's some secret message in this beautiful intro of these chorus of guitars playing together? Yep. Please enlighten me. So what you're hearing are the guitars of Tom Bukovac, also known as Uncle Larry, one of the great session guitar players in Nashville. And he has a great YouTube channel, 501 Chorus Echo, a nod to a famous effect device. And he recently posted a video of the isolated sounds of this recording, talking about how he got this iconic riff.

12:21Now, typically, if you're going to play electric guitar in a country song, what guitar and sound are you anticipating to hear? Like pedal steel, perhaps? Definitely pedal steel. If you're going to play electric guitar, though. Oh, like Telecaster, I guess? Telecaster. Telecaster has got that twang. You know, the Telecaster is that really bright guitar sound, and it has this long-running history with country music. Going back to its debut in the early 50s, the guitar player Jimmy Bryant was a famous country sort of Western swing player who was seen on TV alongside Speedy West.

13:01That is a Fender Telecaster. It is seen on TV in the early 50s. Other people start picking it up. James Burton, who played famously with Elvis. Luther Perkins, who played with Johnny Cash and is really known for making that boom-chuck-a-boom sound.

13:22Waylon Jennings played a Telecaster. Brad Paisley plays a Paisley-painted Telecaster on his track Cluster Pluck. The Telecaster has the twang, the bite, the snap. It imitates some of those pedal steel kind of sounds as well. But when we're hearing Ella Langley, we're not hearing the sounds of the Telecaster. Da-da-da!

13:53Nate, I hate to break it to you. That is a Stratocaster. Aaaaaah!

14:02Insanity. People running, screaming, tearing down the walls. What? A Stratocaster? The Stratocaster, of course, is the guitar that Fender releases after the Telecaster. It has the sort of famous two little horns coming off of it. The Stratocaster is often associated with Texas and Texas roadhouse blues. It has a more nasal quality, a little brighter. And people might have first seen a Stratocaster in the hands of Buddy Holly, the famous pop singer from Lubbock, Texas, played a Stratocaster.

14:34That'll be the day when you say goodbye. The Vaughn brothers, Jimmy and Stevie Ray Vaughn, both played Stratocasters. So that's Stevie Ray Vaughn's Texas Flood. I'm telling you, Stratocaster, Texas. Now, why the Stratocaster at the beginning of the song, Choose in Texas? It's like the siren song of Texas that is beckoning the guy in this narrative to come back to the Lone Star State.

15:12This is a song that knows its references all the way down to what guitar to play. Bukovac, in his video about making the record, said that when Ella Langley came into the studio, she had a whole playlist. She had a playlist of all these, like, great old, like, 80s, 70s, 90s country records. It's, you know, reference for tones for everyone, vibes, you know. And I think I might have identified one of the essential references that is hiding in the background. It's Conway Twitty's song, Slow Hand. So not only does it share a very similar Strat-style opening riff,

16:00it even uses the same harmonic progression, moving from that two minor chord back home to the one chord. Come on, baby. Okay, but even cooler, Twitty's song, Slow Hand, it was a number one hot country song from 1982, was, in fact, a cover of a non-country song.

16:33The 1981 song, Slow Hand, by the Pointer Sisters, originally went to number seven on the hot R&B slash hip-hop song chart. As the midnight moon was drifting through the laziest sway of the trees. So, Nate, are we hearing country music? Oh, Charlie, I don't know. You've scrambled my brain at this point. What is genre, Charlie?

17:04I feel like this conversation is reminding me that there are definitely musical cues that point to genre sounds, you know, a Stratocaster, a Telecaster, a twang in the voice, a certain rhythm or feel. But then there's also, like, lyrical cues for genre. There's even, you know, the way an artist dresses or presents themselves that might signal a genre. Genres can't be so easily contained by saying, like, oh, it's, you know, this sound.

17:37It's this whole, like, matrix of complex associations that we have with a single style.

Duets and Soft Rock Elements

17:43Well, I think Ella Langley really lets loose on this idea of genre on another one of her songs that has been in the top five. It is her song, I Can't Love You Anymore, to duet with Morgan Wallen. I can't love you anymore Can't keep chasing you round, round the back of my mind I can't need you anymore Can't keep sharing this bed with your ghosts every night I hate that your kiss, let it burn on my lips

18:16Oh, baby, how do I tell my heart it ain't yours when I said it before? This one's a bit more of a slow burn A feud between two ex-lovers Can they manage this thing anymore? We've got all kinds of metaphors of things burning down There are cigarettes, there are pictures that are burnt up There are burnt lips left behind Is this country music? Oh, man, this one feels like more of a stretch Like, the vibe is very soft rock to me in a lot of ways

18:47And yet, we have that familiar twang in both of their voices We have these kind of country-esque harmonies And kind of a lyrical narrative structure That has the sort of sense of loss and nostalgia That so many country songs have So, yeah, why not? I think it's country Why not? Yeah Importantly, if you're going to write a country song There's all kinds of cliches you can write about You've got blue jeans, you've got whiskey And, of course, you've got trucks Now, we don't quite have a truck in the song

19:17But we have a nod to a truck Here's Morgan Wallen's verse Just when I think you let me let you go There's a picture of us covered in dust on the dash So you let it up just to see the smoke Roll me plus you with a dare on the back Look at that Dusty photo on the dash So, yeah, it's not calling out, you know, a Ford F-150 As some other of Morgan's peers might

19:49But, you know, it's implied, indeed Country is a much broader genre than we might think I mean, frankly, every example we've heard In the course of this episode points to that So many of these songs When you start to think of them in this way And listen to them as a blank canvas Rather than a country iconic track You go, huh, country has always been pretty expansive, hasn't it? And, yeah, Dolly is like the poster child for that Propel Fitness Water With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins

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21:21That's O-L-L-Y dot com Well, let's see if we can challenge this idea even further On I Can't Love You Anymore Ella Langley is singing with Morgan Wallen Who also has one of those top five songs Been By Now is the song It is his follow-up to his huge album I'm the Problem He is planning the release of his fifth album And so this is the first single off of that It is Been By Now This is wild

22:11I mean, it feels like we are on the far borders of country at this point It feels more like Coldplay with a twang Oh my god, I was gonna say the same thing It is so Coldplay coded, this track We have references to being out in the stars Coldplay loves being out in the universe We've got synth pads, sequences Yeah The drums feel like they are super tightly quantized Almost sequenced drums Very ambient guitars There just happens to be some vocal twang That twang is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

22:43I get why it's in the top five It's got a very catchy melody Indeed It's very smooth I mean, this is clearly a crossover song That is gonna play on Adult Contemporary It's not just a country track by any means It's got twang But it really shows that, you know, country music plays everywhere And does sort of bleed into other genres

Taylor Swift and Crossover Tracks

23:02Amongst the country songs that have broken this record There is a return to country Taylor Swift has a song I Knew It, I Knew You For Toy Story 5 Yeah And it has been codified, a country song I remembered I loved you Came back when it mattered I saw you Standing there in the light of the window Wearing that teen smile Man, it's been a while But I knew it, I knew you Taylor, of course, debuted as a country artist And then gradually over her career

23:34To much controversy and consternation Sort of abandoned her country roots To move into a more mainstream pop direction So, the fact that this latest song for the Toy Story franchise Is being categorized as country Is kind of an interesting step in her career arc Is it simply that the character Woody from Toy Story Happens to be a cowboy? Maybe there is a little bit of country in here There is a banjo

24:06But primarily we're hearing the sound of bleachers This is another collaboration with Jack Antonoff His band Bleachers And many of the musicians from that band are here So, we're getting sax and harmonica mixed with that banjo It's a very different kind of country sound, if you will There's other references here as well That I'm not sure if it supports country The very introduction of the song A lot of people have noted that it sounds quite a lot like Squeezes Tempted Wait, play it again?

24:43The Taylor?

24:47Yeah, country-esque I heard one more nostalgic reference Sweet Jane In the Taylor Swift track Came back when it mattered I saw you Standing there In the light of the window Well, and that's some smile Man, it's been a while But I knew it, I knew you Sweet Jane I knew it, I knew you But I loved you Came back when it mattered What have you done, Charlie?

25:13If you take Sweet Jane By The Velvet Underground And you stem remove the vocals And you put Taylor Swift's on top You have a very similar kind of vibe At the end there The song actually switched back to the production Of I knew it, I knew you But with the synth solo Of the ending of Sweet Jane Which kind of mimics the horn stabs And the harmonica stabs In the Taylor Swift song I knew it, I knew it, I knew it

25:46I love hearing that because Not only does it work so well together But it really highlights The lack of twang In Taylor's performance, you know This is not our song era Taylor This is like 2026 Taylor And there's no twang to be found But there are other Taylor references Arguably Tell me more If Taylor's going to make musical citations Outside of her world Of course she's going to also do so Internal to her own enormous catalogue Taylor was recently talking about this song

26:31She brought it to Max Martin and Shellback As a burning slow ballad And they were like What if it were dubstep? I think that there is A tiny lyrical nod I knew you were trouble A lyrical refrain That she also uses in the song Cardigan But I knew you Dancing in your Levi's Drunk under a streetlight I knew you Hand under my sweatshirt Baby kiss it better

27:02So when we hear I knew it I knew you We're hearing the larger Taylor universe And even though some of these references Might be towards other throwback Americana Perhaps what we're getting is an easter egg Of what's to come Is Taylor going to return with a full-on country force? That'd be quite an era We'll see

Boston and Regional Radio Stations

27:23Alright, I've got one more track for you, Nate And this is a country song According to Billboard About the city of Boston By the artist Stella Lefty On a train back to Boston And we're jumping the gun And I'm telling you Baby this is the part where I'd run But I like it when you're nice Like it when you're nice to me Well, in terms of the countryness of it all I mean, I do hear some subtle pedal steel guitar

27:55In the background I do hear some country style pronunciation Call it the diphthong effect One of the hallmarks of the southern twang Is you diphthong vowels That is like sing between two vowels I hear that especially when she sings But I like it when you're nice I like it when you're nice to me There's elements here for sure Yeah Though Boston is probably not the first city

28:26You'd associate with country lore We're far from the Abilines and Amarillos Of our choosing Texas world Alright, I want to come back To the countryness of Boston in a minute But first, there has been a lot of other discourse About this song Many commenters have talked about The privilege that Stella Lefty Comes from Yes Her father is a billionaire Of the group on Fortune There's been questions about You know, can you write a country song If you've grown up in Chicago And you're writing a song about Boston Does that make sense? The song was written about a date

28:58With her boyfriend She first posted it as a demo To TikTok and it blew up We've got a lot of positive reception Before she even released it though She had someone reach out and say This sounds familiar We're from Noah Kahn's team This sounds a little bit like Stick Season by Noah Kahn Noah Kahn is a named songwriter

29:35On Stella Lefty's song They gave credit before releasing it To the public And I'm curious You know, you do some forensic musicology work Yeah How similar you actually think These songs truly are I've, maybe to help you out Mashed them up So that's Stella Lefty Singing against the music of Stick Season

30:07Here's Noah Kahn Singing to the music of Boston And here they are singing together I had to put them in the same key That's really cool hearing them back to back

30:46I mean, kind of more discrepancy Than you might initially anticipate When you hear them like that They don't align perhaps quite as much as I'd thought Yeah And yet from a forensic musicology perspective If we transcribed these And put all the notes on, you know, a musical staff I think we'd see that there's a lot of overlap A lot of moments where we see the exact same melodies Not only that, it's like the same overall structure

31:19Of these phrases The way they're broken down into smaller measures And how each of those repeats In the kind of same way as the other So, yeah, it's not maybe as much of a slam dunk In terms of the similarity As many on the internet would like to claim Yeah But it's enough And especially in this age Our post-blurred lines age Of increased copyright litigation That you don't want to get caught out

31:50Right You know, without just extending an olive branch To someone like Noah Kahn, I think So here we have Noah Kahn getting a songwriting credit And sell a lefty song You know, Noah Kahn I think of as the Prince of New England Right now If you want to see Noah Kahn at Fenway Good luck Everybody else in New England Is trying to catch Noah Kahn He is singing about All of the trials and tribulations Of growing up in New England And people really have connected with it I hadn't thought of him so much As a country artist

32:21As more of like a Indie folk Maybe Americana Right Probably where I would even place Stella Lefty's music If not for the pedal steel And that twang And yet I was trying to think like Is there a way that we could assess Whether or not New England And country music Belong together I was able to find A geolocating website That can look up All of the radio stations In your zip code And it turns out In my zip code in Brooklyn No country radio stations In Back Bay Boston There are two country radio stations

32:53That you can pick up In my hometown of Maine You can pick up Three country radio stations And if you go to Burlington, Vermont You can pick up Six country stations More than any other genre Well that's surprising And revealing It's almost like Country Isn't a state It's a state of mind See what I did there That could be a country lyric Couldn't it That is a good country lyric Thank you

The Expansive Tent of Country

33:17Despite the inherent Issues of inclusion In the genre That have plagued it for years I think it's a very large tent Like You know Country draws from Mexican guitars And cowboy hats West African banjos Ukrainian embroidered suits It's not surprising That All of these Number one Country songs That Stella Langley Is competing with Have been songs about Who is included in country You know Shabuzi's bar song Lil Nas X's Old Town Road Have raised those questions

33:47In a lot of ways I think that the fact That country music Is so popular Just shows that It really is The people's music And for so many people The work of Dolly Parton Brought them there Yeah She's someone who Talked about Rural poverty And equity in the workforce And complex human relationships In the 3,000 plus songs That she published In her life So I'm really Saddened by her loss But also Really delighted In going through The work of Contemporary country music And still seeing how It is such a broader tent

34:17The Maybe the The view that Dolly Parton brought To the genre Not the More stereotypical Narrowness It's not just Twang Trucks Whiskey Dirt roads Blue jeans It's all of us Experience a membership

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