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Articles on Country music

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Drake has made a career as a heartbroken player who sings and raps. Drake accepts artist of the decade award at the Billboard Music Awards on May 23, 2021, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

How Canadian R&B artists like Drake and Justin Bieber complicate ideas of race, music and nationality

Canadian R&B artists, including Drake, have built lifestyle brands that simultaneously reinforce and challenge dominant beliefs about R&B music as Black and American, and Canadian identity as white.
America’s overnight summer star, country singer Oliver Anthony, performs in Moyock, N.C., on Aug. 19. (Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

How this summer’s hit ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ was appropriated by both the right and left

Although its content is essentially libertarian, the No. 1 song of the summer in the U.S. resonates with both some Democratic supporters and those on the Trumpist right.
Dolly Parton is having a pop culture moment. The ‘Dolly Parton’s America’ podcast explores belonging and ‘home.’ Here she performs with Joel Smallbone, left, and Luke Smallbone, right at the 53rd Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn. AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

Dolly Parton’s broad appeal: She understands alienation, home and the need to belong

Why does Dolly Parton have such broad appeal, across lines of race, nationality, gender identity and sexual orientation?
Through his music, Lead Belly rejected the stereotype that country music was the domain of white artists, while blues music was reserved for blacks. Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

Lead Belly’s music defied racial categorization

Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection depicts the fully-formed artist – a blues musician, yes, but also a performer of string-band, country and pop songs.
Country music’s soaring popularity in the Northeast isn’t so much a novelty as it is a rebirth. US Navy

Stand by your Maine: country music’s Northern roots

This past June, radio conglomerate Clear Channel (now known as iHeartRadio) announced it was converting Boston’s 101.7 FM to a country station. The story they told the Boston Globe was a familiar one…

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