&quotI SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT”;

One might think that calling a country musician “too hillbilly” is like calling Tchaikovsky “too classical.” But Watson’s lonesome peregrination from beer joint to beer joint is symbolic of the wilderness to which nearly all traditionalists have been exiled in the 1990s. Interviewed recently for Naked Nashville (a British documentary that aired in America last October), Watson put his finger on the crisis of country music: “Strangely enough, I’m considered alternative country nowadays because country-music mainstream isn’t anywhere close to country. It’s pop.”

Over the last decade, that mainstream has exploded in popularity. Between 1990 and 1997, country music grew from $ 700 million a year to $ 1.8 billion a year. CD sales have quadrupled. Two of the five best-selling albums of 1998 were by country artists (Garth Brooks and Shania Twain), as were three of the ten highest-grossing concert tours (Brooks, Twain, and George Strait). Brooks’s new album, Double Live, set a record by selling more than a million copies the first week after its release in 1998. One of the hottest acts to pick up Grammies last week was the Dixie Chicks, a young trio of scantily dressed country musicians with significant pop success.

In exchange for this popularity and prosperity, country music has been asked merely to surrender its soul. And it has. Except for an occasional, mournful chord from a fiddle or a steel guitar, added like an afterthought, this new music is a southern version of poprock — adult contemporary with a drawl. The dominant cacophony of electric guitars and percussion, the signature instruments of rock ‘n’ roll, make today’s acts sound more like Lynyrd Skynyrd than Lefty Frizzell. On Country Music Television — a sort of newfangled Grand Ole Opry and the industry’s answer to MTV — the performers appearing on country videos form a bizarre parade of ersatz cowpokes. The men are either permed dandies in brand-new cowboy hats or scruffy, long-haired, garage-band types; the women sport the scant clothing of MTV and a strained, pseudo-feminist attitude.

It is oddly appropriate that Naked Nashville showed Dale Watson being honored at the British Country Music Awards — a ceremony that sounds like something Monty Python might have dreamed up. But in fact, country music owes a great deal to Britain, or at least to British folk songs. Some country songs — “The Great Speckled Bird” is one — can be traced back to English colonists before the American Revolution. Others, such as “Sallie Gooden,” come from the Scotch-Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century. “Frankie and Johnny” has more than a hundred variants, all deriving from a Scottish ballad.

Even more than British folk songs, however, country music derives from lower-class gospel music — the hymns of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Methodist and Baptist revivals. The camp-meeting songs of the Second Great Awakening molded the nascent music of the South. Leaders of the camp meetings would “line the hymn,” reading aloud verses to the congregation, who would then sing them back. Those hymns stamped on country music a simple structure and revivalist view of human responsibility that endure to this day.

Of course, in time, those same southern roots would bring country music into contact with a formidable rival, the blues. The blues’ influence on country music was evident even before the birth of recording. Early in their careers, many of the first country stars performed in minstrel shows, paying a backhanded compliment to the popularity of black music at the turn of the century.

At that time, the fiddle (a traditional Celtic instrument) and the guitar (an upper-class instrument in eighteenth-century England and America) produced country’s standard harmonies. It was, however, in the 1920s and 1930s that the music found its most distinctive modern sound by adding to this the steel guitar (like the ukulele, an import from Hawaii). Its familiar, doleful twang — the perfect complement for lugubrious lyrics — made the steel guitar what historian Bill C. Malone has called “virtually the defining feature of country music.”

Much of this history is traced by a marvelous record set selected and annotated by Malone, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music; it’s there you can hear the developing instrumental innovation that — when it joined with the blues — finally defeated traditional country. Bob Wills and the Texas Play-boys began by introducing drums — along with horns and reeds in a jazz fusion inspired by the big-band craze of the 1930s and 1940s. And in 1941, country giant Ernest Tubb fatefully popularized the electric steel guitar, using the leviathan instrument so his music could be heard from jukeboxes above the rowdy din of the new honky-tonks.

The blues, the electric guitar, and drums came together in rock ‘n’ roll, the new musical genre that would prove country’s undoing. Southern musicians who came of age in the 1950s grew up hearing both country and the blues. The advent of the electric guitar allowed them to move freely between the two. Bill Haley started out with a band called the Saddle Pals, which he turned into the Comets to record “Rock Around the Clock,” the first big rock-‘n’-roll hit. Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly commenced their careers as country singers (though, in a reverse twist, 1970s country superstar Waylon Jennings started out as one of Buddy Holly’s rock-‘n’-roll sidemen). The most famous country singer to cross over to rock was, of course, Elvis Presley. His first single featured the blues tune “That’s All Right, Mama,” with a snappy version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a country waltz, on the flip side. Before he was the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis was known as “The Hillbilly Cat.”

As rock ‘n’ roll earned the allegiance of adolescent Baby Boomers, country singers recognized the greater profits to be gained by making concessions to the new music. The pop-country sound that such “crossover” artists invented emphasized electric guitars and drums in hard-driving melodies previously foreign to country. The three-beat meter common in country waltzes gave way to the four-beat standard in blues and rock. Country singers of the time, many of whom are regarded today as dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, ardently embraced these changes. Marty Robbins recorded versions of “That’s All Right, Mama” and “Long Tall Sally,” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” combined trumpets with an unmistakable rock beat. Even George Jones, venerated today as perhaps the quintessential country traditionalists, recorded a song entitled “Rock It.” If the Beatles could perform a version of Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally,” it was partly because Ringo had a soft spot for country tunes, but mostly because Buck Owens had already moved toward rock ‘n’ roll.

Garth Brooks is the most popular singer of the 1990s, in any genre, and to listen to one of his albums is to lose any doubt about just how thoroughly rock has routed country. Brooks admits that such heavy-metal bands as Kiss helped forge his style. His 1997 album, Sevens, relies on a rock beat that ranges from strong to overwhelming. Perhaps unintentionally, the album is also a sprawling tribute to practically every major mode of country music popularized — and subsequently adulterated — in the twentieth century. The songs range from honky-tonk (“Longneck Bottle”) to pop-rock romance (“You Move Me”) to mildly bawdy (“Cowboy Cadillac”) to gospel (“Fit for a King”) to tragic balled (“Belleau Wood”).

The female country singers of the 1990s, as a group, have had even greater success. In 1998, LeAnn Rimes’s “How Do I Live” spent more weeks in the pop Top 40 than any single in history. Shania Twain has become one of the most successful pop acts in the world. Her husband-producer, Robert “Mutt” Lange, produced albums for heavy-metal bands AC/DC and Def Leppard, and her music relies on a strong rock beat. Twain recently accentuated her international status, announcing that she and Lange have purchased a home in Switzerland — not exactly within driving distance of Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry.

Country lyrics have also evolved. Songs with raunchy words were long performed in saloons, around campfires, and at the fringes of the recording industry. A typical example is Jimmie Rodgers’s 1929 “Everybody Does It in Hawaii.” Still, not until the 1970s did major performers begin warbling these lyrics indiscriminately for the public, when such successful songs appeared as Conway Twitty’s “You’ve Never Been This Far Before” and the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me?).”

It was during the 1970s as well that an awareness of drugs more typical of rock ‘n’ roll began to appear. In 1970, the Country Music Association selected as Song of the Year Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Written by Kris Kristofferson, the song is a strangely moving ode about recovering from a drug hangover. At the margins of country, the Flying Burrito Brothers — a folk-rock fusion band founded by Gram Parsons, formerly of the Byrds — wore sequined suits emblazoned with marijuana leaves.

In the 1990s, female country stars have cast off another of the industry’s old-fashioned inhibitions — and made yet another compromise with rock — by wearing increasingly less clothing. Shania Twain made news by exposing her navel in the mid-1990s (a milestone at which the jaded fans of rock will surely smile). Mindy McCready one-upped Twain by piercing hers. The hottest new female country group, the Dixie Chicks, are three highly talented female musicians whose scarce attire has earned them otherwise misplaced comparisons to the Spice Girls. In January 1999, viewers of a talk show on the Nashville Network witnessed the spectacle of Loretta Lynn — apparently in response to these trends — garbed in an elegant dress with a see-through midriff.

The marketplace has spoken, and it is clear that country music — at least the gentler, unpretentious, authentic version — lacks appeal in our frenetic, sex-obsessed culture. Yet traditional country music at least merits a eulogy. Country has bequeathed to us songs that affirm and celebrate rural life, genuine romance, wholesome pleasures, and unaffected patriotism.

From its infancy, country was a sonorous defender of custom and national pride. By contrast, rock ‘n’ roll matured during a raucous decade of mass protests against tradition, authority, and patriotic duty. The few vaguely nationalistic songs rock ‘n’ roll has spawned (Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses”) are deeply ambivalent about the worth of the nation. There is no such discomfort in country music. A sampling of famous country songs in defense of beleaguered traditions include “Why Do You Bob Your Hair, Girls?” by Blind Alfred Reed (a criticism of the fashion trends of the 1920s), Uncle Dave Macon’s “The Bible’s True” (against evolution), and Ernest Tubb’s “Love It or Leave It,” written during the Vietnam War. During the Reagan-Bush years, “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood became the unofficial theme song of GOP national conventions.

Among country singers, Merle Haggard and Hank Williams Jr. have been the most bellicose and prolific defenders of rural folkways and national traditions. Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” may have been written as something of a self-parody, but the public cherished it, Richard Nixon proclaimed it one of his favorite songs, and Haggard followed it up with the seriously intended “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” Such Haggard songs as “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” and “The Roots of My Raising” praise the often disparaged contributions of country folk. “Mama Tried” is a classic declaration of personal responsibility.

Known to many Americans as the bearded singer who introduces Monday Night Football, Hank Williams Jr. has written songs even more assertive. In “Mr. Lincoln,” Williams tells the former president of the woes that have befallen modern America, including the fact that “now they sue the manufacturers of the guns.” He crooned the ultimate tough-on-crime song, “A Country Boy Can Survive,” as well as a hilarious rebuke to various liberal interest groups entitled “The Coalition To Ban Coalitions.”

Country music similarly exalts religion without embarrassment. Among rock performers, only blacks acknowledge their Maker with the same regularity and reverence. One of the first hit records of country music was the gospel song “Peace in the Valley,” written by the accomplished black songwriter Thomas Dorsey. Virtually all of the most famous country performers either were children of preachers of had learned to sing in church. Even some of the worst drunks, profligates, and excons in the bunch piously sing gospel songs on their albums. Except for “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” Hank Williams’s most famous track is “I Saw the Light.” Arguably Haggard’s best work is his gospel album, The Land of Many Churches, partly recorded in the garden chapel at San Quentin prison, where Haggard once served time.

The “alternative country” of Dale Watson and his fellow counterrevolutionaries — the Old 97’s, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Wilco, Tarnation, and BR5-49 — may yet restore to country some of its erstwhile character. A small but growing number of radio stations feature traditional country. Perhaps in reaction to the dull uniformity of Nashville’s “hat acts,” overall sales of country music have declined slightly over the last couple of years. As the program director of an Atlanta radio station complained recently, “We got to the point where no one stood out from the crowd.”

Of course, such a resurrection of country music would not be necessary, and would not face such long odds, if country had not proved so susceptible to conquest and assimilation by other modes of music. That susceptibility certainly owes something to the lure of money. But it may owe even more to the fact that country music was, after all, country — and southern, to boot.

Much has been written about the inferiority complex of southerners. In his history, Country Music U.S.A., Malone notes wryly, “Many country entertainers, such as Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette, still privately describe themselves as hillbillies, but respond bitterly if someone else calls them that.”

This common feeling was crystallized in 1991 when Merle Haggard’s lifetime achievement was recognized at the American Music Awards. Shoehorned between various rock performers and forced to accept his award amid teenage cheers for MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, Haggard struggled with obvious discomfort. “Sometimes,” he said with a pained smile at the outset of his speech, “it’s hard to be an ol’ country boy.”

Too hard, in fact. At that moment, even a man as wealthy and famous as Haggard betrayed the same longing for acceptance and respect that has propelled so many country singers to sell out. These singers crave crossover success for the same reason so many southerners take speech classes to change their accents: They want to lose the sense of inferiority they’ve had since Appomattox. They want to fit in.

That leaves rebels like Dale Watson struggling self-consciously to recreate the traditional forms of country music. But if they fail and the music fades, we will regret jettisoning this melodious medium for conversing with our ancestors. Rockified 1990s singers like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have abandoned more than just old-fashioned musical forms. Traditional country music was also about the old-fashioned virtues that today’s popular music mocks so profitably.

Andrew Peyton Thomas is an attorney in Phoenix, Arizona.