From UFO sounds to Celtic drones, sitar twangs to Tex-Mex accordion, country music occasionally loved to get a little weird. Fiddles and steel guitars may define the genre’s twang, but every so often, ...

The week Sturgill Simpson’s breakthrough, generation-defining second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, was released, the Number One song on country radio was Brantley Gilbert’s ...

When most people think of country music, images of old white guys, tractors, and landscapes of the American South tend to come to mind. Maybe you think of Dolly Parton or songs like “Wagon Wheel” and ...

The spotlights begin to fade on a stage in Floyd, not far from the misty Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia, and a banjo begins to play. Gradually, the strings pick out the notes to an ...

With the drop of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” in February, Beyoncé staked her claim in country music. Within 10 days of its release, “Texas Hold ‘Em” became a #1 charting song on Billboard’s ...

The singer is in her country music era. Beyoncé is going country -- a move that has sparked a lot of conversation in the country music world. The 32-time Grammy winner and Texas native dropped two new ...

Love it or hate it, there is no denying that the country has gone country. Beyoncé is touring on her Grammy-winning country album, “Cowboy Carter.” All races and ages are line dancing to ...

Watch how the violin and string instruments make varieties of sound and music. Professor Richard Church, conductor of the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra, introduces the violin and other ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Sughnen Yongo is a Midwest writer covering Black women, pop culture. The way we listen to and understand music has continued to ...

The growing popularity of Black country artists, spurred in part by Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” has sparked a conversation around the history of the genre and the past and present racial tensions ...

T he folder had been sitting unopened on Cassadee Pope’s computer desktop for years when she finally deleted it. It was a collection of photographs taken with mostly male country-radio programmers ...

“The greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” is not an accolade to be thrown around lightly. But The Rolling Stones have proven and re-proven why they deserve the title. Although they started as a ...