“That ain’t country” is one of my favorite phrases. I wonder where we, as a collective group of music lovers get the “cred” to determine what genre music falls into. Recently, I was asked if I thought country music was returning to its “roots\u201d with artists like Ashley Monroe, Luke Combs, Cody Jinks, and Midland \u2014 I replied, \u201cI guess\u201d but if you listen to country radio you can hear the Backstreet Boys, and a new artist named Walker Hayes, who is nothing like Clay Walker!<\/p>\n
As I was thinking about how to answer that same question for This is Country Magazine,<\/em> a Luke Bryan song popped up on my iTunes playlist. Luke is pretty and polished and one of the guys that gets beat up a lot for not being “country” but Luke IS a country artist \u2014 yes, someone polished him up and made him a superstar\u00a0but why wouldn\u2019t he want to appeal to the masses \u2014 he\u2019s pretty, and I would task anyone with finding a song more country than \u201cCountry Man.\u201d<\/p>\n I first met Luke when he was on tour opening outside of venues for Taylor Swift. A little known Ray fact is he played his first Chicago mini concert on the tailgate of my truck but I digress. The song that came up on my iTunes playlist was Fast. <\/em>As a dad watching his kids grow up, that song hit me in the heart; it is everything a country song should be. Fast <\/em>takes us from boy meets girl to boy and girls son playing under those Friday night lights and then Luke exclaims \u201c60 seconds now feels more like 30, sand in a glass sure falls in a hurry.\u201d As I listened I thought wow, this guy just told the story of the life I\u2019m living right now.<\/p>\n My advice, don\u2019t get caught up in the \u201cbeat\u201d or the \u201csnaps\u201d of what we hear as country music, listen to the words that weave a story. It\u2019s what Nashville does best. Stop worrying about who\u2019s getting played on your dad\u2019s country station because it\u2019s a waste of time that goes too fast.<\/p>\n RR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “That ain’t Country” “That ain’t country” is one of my favorite phrases. I wonder where we, as a collective group of music lovers get the “cred” [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[49],"tags":[47,48,46],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-country-music","tag-country-music","tag-country-radio","tag-luke-bryan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Luke-Bryan-.jpg?fit=1242%2C2208&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yOYN-6s","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblinraystevens.com\/staging\/6162\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}