Becoming the first California-born artist to become a Grand Ole Opry member makes the invitation historic, and speaks to how the Opry continues to try and expand its membership beyond the institution’s conventional borders.
Reigning Saving Country Music Artist of the Year Charley Crockett continues to be the hardest working man in country, pumping out records at a two-per-year clip (don’t be surprised if there’s two more in 2022), and he’s just announced a slew of new tour dates.
Saving Country Music’s reigning Album of the Year winner Tyler Childers will be hitting the road hard and heavy in the first part of 2018 behind his award-winning record Purgatory, including some stops on some big stages, marquee performances at major festivals, and many other dates coast to coast in between.
Each year the release of the Stagecoach Festival lineup is a point of intrigue as people sift though the names and remark on the font sizes, and see who has been tapped to play the 3-day event in Indio, CA in April. As arguably one of the biggest country music festivals all year, the artists booked say a lot about who is rising in country music.
Every year the release of the lineup for the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California is a good case study into who to watch for on the rise in country music. Similarly, every year a ruckus is made by traditional and independent country fans about how certain names are assigned a larger font than others in what seems like a backwards system.
Indio, California’s country version of the massive Coachella Festival bucks the trend of most corporate country music festivals by casting independent artists and legacy acts in their lineup right beside some of the biggest current names in the country music industry as well as major label up-and-comers. This is the environment that cultivates cross-pollination between independent artists and a wider fan base.
Texas music is becoming hard wired and institutionalized, and this creates a few game-changing, long-term effects on the overall country music landscape. It is offering a template to the rest of the music world, and not just country music, of how to regionalize and organize a group of like-minded musicians and fans together to where they’re not dependent on corporate America’s traditional musical industrial complex.