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If you’ve attended a mainstream country concert in the past decade, you’re probably familiar with the part of the set where the headliner sprinkles in a non-obvious cover from an adjacent genre like pop, R&b, or classic rock. It’s a move with any number of purposes: to show an artist’s range of influences, to reel in a drifting crowd with a massive hit, to appeal to a wider audience, or to highlight how fluid and arbitrary genre borders really are when you strip a song back to its essentials.

Jerry Bradley, a towering Nashville music executive who helped guide the genre into the modern era and bring about its first ever platinum-selling album — Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser’s Wanted! The Outlaws — has died, The Tennessean reports. He was 83.

Bradley’s family confirmed his death, but did not provide a cause.

Bradley was born into country music, the son of Owen Bradley, a prominent producer who helped create and shape the “Nashville Sound” during the Fifties and Sixties. Jerry began his career shadowing his father in the early 1960s,...

In the way it avoided a conventional timeline or stories behind the making of some of his best-loved albums, Bob Dylan’s 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One wasn’t a remotely traditional memoir. And let’s not even start on the whirligig prose in his Sixties head-scratcher Tarantula. Next to them, his third book, The Philosophy of Modern Song (which is out next week), would seem comparatively straightforward: essays on 66 of his favorite songs, billed, on its inner flap, as “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting.”

Dylan...

Ralph Emery, a radio and TV host who became as famous in the country world as most of the stars he interviewed over the decades, died Saturday at Tristar Centennial Medical Center in Nashville. He was 88. No immediate cause of death was given.

Emery’s renown as, alternately, “the Dick Clark of country music” or “the Johnny Carson of country” was significant enough to earn him a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007, in addition to the more expected plaudits befitting a top broadcaster in the industry, like his membership in the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame, an honor that came in 1989.

“Ralph Emery’s impact in expanding country music’s audience is incalculable,” said Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.”On radio and on television, he allowed fans to get to know the people behind the songs. Ralph...

Whether it’s coming out of Nashville, New York, L.A., or points in between, there’s no shortage of fresh tunes, especially from artists who have yet to become household names. Rolling Stone Country selects some of the best new music releases from country and Americana artists. (Check out last week’s best songs.)

Joel Crouse, “On My Way (Acoustic)”

Joel Crouse’s 2020 EP Wasteland found the Nashville songwriter and onetime Taylor Swift tourmate in particularly vulnerable form, singing about intimate personal struggles from rehab to financial ruin. For...

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum found the inspiration for its upcoming fundraising event from an unlikely source: penguins.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when museums and nearly everything else were forced to close down, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium managed to create a viral moment by letting its penguins roam loose in the facility and broadcasting the shenanigans online. The penguins were early quarantine stars. Country Music Hall of Fame CEO Kyle Young was among those watching.

“They were looking at the fish swimming around,” Young recalls.

Johnny Bush, the Texas country-music veteran who co-wrote Willie Nelson’s signature opening number “Whiskey River,” has died at 85. Bush’s manager confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone.

Born in Houston in 1935 as John Bush Shinn III, Bush received his big break from Nelson, who helped him land a job as a drummer in Ray Price’s band, the Cherokee Cowboys. Nelson would go on to bankroll Bush’s debut single, 1967’s “Sound of a Heartache,” and vouched for Bush’s talent in a message on the back...

Each month, the editors and critics at Rolling Stone compile a list of must-hear new albums. Our picks for April include Fiona Apple’s finest album, the Strokes’ weirdly chill comeback and Rina Sawayama’s nu-metal-loving pop breakthrough.

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters

For longtime fans who are expectantly, perhaps giddily, steeling themselves for another brutal LP from Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she’s...

Country-trap performer Breland enjoyed a viral hit earlier in 2020 with “My Truck,” an irresistible ode to pickups that zoomed to the top of Spotify’s charts after Tik Tok users began using it enthusiastically. After signing a new record deal, the Atlanta-based performer has returned with a remix of “My Truck” featuring Sam Hunt.

The new version retains the same ghostly, cavernous thump as the original, with Breland starting it off with his familiar declarations: “You can say you hate me/You can call me crazy, but/Don’t touch my truck.

Sam Hunt was the musical guest on Monday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, turning in an at-home performance of his current single, “Hard to Forget.” Hunt released his new album, Southside, on April 3rd.

Where many televised and livestreamed performances during the Covid-19 pandemic have been fully acoustic out of necessity, Hunt is able to approximate a portion of his live sound with the help of technology. Seated in front of a giant studio monitor and racks of synthesizers, he dials up the Webb Pierce-sampling...

Sam Hunt has taken more than a few knocks for his progressive approach to country music — the hybrid of synths and programmed drums, Drake-ian brooding, and sung-spoken delivery that defined his 2014 debut Montevallo. But detractors be damned, the album turned the towering Georgia native into a crossover star.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear Hunt begin his long-awaited follow-up Southside with an acoustic guitar and the line “I put the whiskey back in the bottle/Put the smoke back in the joint” as he tries to...

Just a few weeks ahead of the release of his much-anticipated second album Southside, Sam Hunt premieres the video to his latest single, “Hard to Forget,” which samples Webb Pierce’s 1953 country weeper “There Stands the Glass.”

The video begins with Hunt singing along to the Pierce sample, before seguing into a montage of colorful characters who are staying at a motel: a circus clown, two brawling card players, a cowboy with a goat.

“Hard to Forget” is slowly climbing up the country radio charts, not long after “Kinfolks” became Hunt’s latest Number One.

One morning last fall, Luke Laird was eating breakfast and listening to one of his favorite Apple Music playlists, Honky-Tonk Essentials. When Webb Pierce’s 1953 hit “There Stands the Glass” started playing, Laird had a strange thought.

“I was like man, ‘What if I made a beat and sample that?’” he thought to himself.

After breakfast, he recorded a crude 13-second voice memo in a Nashville parking lot, in which the hit songwriter (“Pontoon,” “Drink in My Hand”) hummed the melody of Pierce’s chorus while beatboxing a rough sketch of a beat.

It’s been a little while since Sam Hunt dropped a certifiable banger. The country-pop innovator, loved and hated in equal measure, has largely stuck with the moody introspection of “Downtown’s Dead” and “Sinning With You” since dominating American radio with 2017’s “Body Like a Back Road.” But he’s made it worth the wait: His latest release, “Hard to Forget” (from the upcoming album Southside), is an undeniably great party jam featuring one of the most straightforwardly country vocals he’s ever laid down.

It revolves around a...

Sam Hunt has revealed the track list for his long-awaited second album Southside. The new project will be released April 3rd via McA.

Pre-orders for the album on Hunt’s website show the full list of 12 tracks on Southside, six of which have previously been released. Those include the 2017 songs “Drinkin’ Too Much” and the record-breaking smash “Body Like a Back Road,” plus “Downtown’s Dead,” “Kinfolks,” “Sinning With You,” and the Webb Pierce-sampling “Hard to Forget.” Among the as-yet-unreleased tunes are “2016,” “Young Once,” and “That Ain’t Beautiful.

Add it to the list of left turns from the enigmatic country artist — Sam Hunt’s new track “Hard to Forget” opens with a lengthy sample of 1950s honky-tonk star Webb Pierce‘s classic “There Stands the Glass.”

Apart from the fact that it samples a 67-year-old country song, “Hard to Forget,” the latest preview of his recently-announced album Southside, also feels like the most obvious radio-friendly hit from the “Body Like a Back Road” singer, following the more downbeat, introspective releases “Sinning With You” and “Kinfolks.”

“I got a bottle of whiskey,...

From toiling in the cotton fields of Mississippi to being enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame, Charley Pride’s journey out of the segregated South was fraught with adversity. In the upcoming PBS American Masters special, Charley Pride: I’m Just Me, debuting nationwide on Friday, February 22nd, at 9:00 p.m. Et, the country legend’s hardscrabble upbringing, his important role in destroying cultural stereotypes and the impact he would have on future generations of aspiring country artists are explored in depth. Pride and wife Rozene were interviewed for the film,...

By the late 1970s, a lengthy battle with drugs and alcohol had earned country music legend George Jones the pejorative nickname “No Show Jones,” as his concert and public appearances became more erratic and unpredictable. But on February 17th, 1998, with those struggles mostly behind him, the singer debuted his own music/talk show on Tnn, the Nashville Network, welcoming longtime friends and rising country stars of the era in a relaxed and informal setting.

The George Jones Show began as a series of six hour-long specials with an episode featuring...

From her Tony-winning title role in Broadway’s Hello, Dolly! to one of her signature songs, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” – sung on film by Marilyn Monroe and covered in 1983 by Emmylou Harris – Carol Channing’s effervescent presence on the stage and in film and TV roles was accompanied by an unmistakably unique voice, making her one of the most recognizable entertainers of the past half-century.

Channing, who died Tuesday at her home at age 97, made numerous appearances on both the big and small screens and, apart from...

Fifty-five years ago this summer, on August 4th, 1963, housewife Connie Smith won a talent contest in Columbus, Ohio, earning a performance spot on a local Grand Ole Opry concert where songwriter Bill Anderson took note of her and encouraged her to make a trip to Nashville when the two met again at a New Year’s Day concert in Canton, Ohio.

As 1964 unfolded for the young wife and mother, she garnered yet another invitation – this time a spot on the popular Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree, which followed the Grand Ole Opry on Wsm radio.

May Mel Tillis rest in peace.

The country music singer-songwriter died at the age of 85 early Sunday morning at Munroe Regional Medical Center in Ocala, Florida. A representative for the Country Music Hall of Fame member cites respiratory failure as the cause of death, following a lengthy battle with intestinal issues.

Related: Country Music Legend Don Williams Dead at 78

Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, tells Et that Tillis' death "brings such sadness" and describes him as "one of the funniest and most genuine people."

"Mel Tillis spent a lifetime giving us joy and laughter and music, which is why his death brings such sadness," Young says. "Had he never stepped on a stage, he would still have been one of the funniest and most genuine people on the planet. But his whimsy and warmth were only a part of his appeal."

Young continues, "He wrote some of...

Robert Duvall has a few inviolable rules when he's making a movie: If there's a horse to be ridden, he will ride it; if there is a dance to be danced, he will dance it, and if there is a song to be sung, he will sing it.

"Those three things I am going to do myself without a double, unless it's a dangerous stunt," the legendary actor tells Rolling Stone Country.

So when the script for his new film, Wild Horses, called for him to sing the western standard,...

“Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste; the punctum can be ill-bred.” —Roland Barthes, Camera LucidaThe first rude challenge of this movie is watching it without permanently devaluing Spring Breakers as a hot, precious high-conceptualist mess compared to the crisp genre elegance on parade here. I can’t be certain, but it seems like Harmony Korine dreamed up his movie drowsing behind his shades during a matinee reverie of this insta-classic. If not, he should have! The plot has a documentary-like simplicity. Maybe it really happened. Ancestral fish-freaks buzzsaw into the thumping “sexy-time” heart of American youth culture, during a Spring Break weekend on a desert lake in Arizona. That’s it. The Sayles/Dante original, recall if you must, was a lame anti-authoritarian parable (the seminal proto-SyFy Channel movie) with occasional dark comic touches. Piranha 3D is not a parable of anything, thank Corman! It...

Florida Georgia Line broke a country music record this week. The duo, made up of Floridian Brian Kelley and Georgian Tyler Hubbard, just reached new heights with their hit single, "Cruise."

Originally released last August, "Cruise" has now spent a total of 22 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, the most for any song in charted history. Billboard reports that "Cruise" beat out some major contenders for the title: Eddy Arnold's "I'll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)" spent 21 weeks at No. 1 between 1947 and 1948, Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On," also at 21 weeks in 1950, and Webb Pierce's "In the Jailhouse Now," which matched the total in 1955.

Florida Georgia Line debuted "Cruise" as a part of the band's 2012 Ep, "It'z Just What We Do." The track later appeared on Florida Georgia Line's debut studio album, "Here's to the Good Times,...

I didn’t think I would have to insult the intelligence of our readers by pointing out a very simple fact, but based on the first comment we received, I guess I should make something clear. This is a list of our favourite soundtracks of 2011. We are currently working on a list of the best original scores, which should be posted sometime within the week. Let us know if you think we left out any soundtracks you would recommend. Enjoy!

10 – Young Adult

One of the themes of Jason Reitman’s upcoming film Young Adult, is the idea of being stuck in the past, and trying to relive your glory days, and so it’s no surprise that the soundtrack to the film is loathed with 1990s alt-rock cuts. Due December 6th via Rhino Records, the fifteen-track disc features the Replacements, the Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr., Teenage Fanclub, Cracker, 4 Non Blondes, Veruca Salt and many more.

Willie Nelson's upcoming album will feature classic covers of country songs from the 1950s. Titled Remember Me Vol. 1, the album is a collection of 14 tracks originally sung by artists like Johnny Cash, George Jones, Webb Pierce and Rosemary Clooney. Nelson's album also features seven country songs that topped the charts like Cash's 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' and Tennessee Ernie Ford's 'Sixteen Tons'. Nelson apparently hand-picked the songs, which have been taken from his sessions with producer James Stroud. The full track list for Remember Me Vol. 1 is: 1. 'Remember Me' (Ernest Tubb)

2. 'Sixteen Tons' (Tennessee Ernie Ford)

3. 'Why Baby Why' (George Jones)

4. 'Today I Started Loving You Again' (Merle Haggard)

5. 'I'm Movin' On' (Hank Snow)

6. (more)...

More and more I’m forgetting the past…

Webb Pierce’s lyrics open the remake to Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and upon watching the remakes that have littered the wasteland of the horror landscape over the past decade, few songs seem more befitting to a remake of one of Craven’s most feminist works.

It’s not that I entirely dislike Alexandre Aja’s 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, it’s simply that I don’t care for it one way or the other. It’s slick, it’s pretty, and it spends its first ten minutes establishing the gruesomeness of nuclear warfare, nuclear testing, and… More...

In the late 1950s/early '60s, rock 'n' roll was still in its infancy, drawing from such musically and racially disparate genres as country, R&B, gospel and blues for influence and inspiration. It had only been a few years since Billboard stopped calling R&B songs "race records," and the U.S., especially in the South, remained racially divided, with many black women serving as maids for white families.

Tate Taylor's upcoming film adaptation of the popular 2009 book "The Help" explores the racial and class dynamics between the titular maids and the families they support, with an accompanying soundtrack that draws from folk, country, doo-wop and early rock 'n' roll.

With the exception of "The Living Proof," a new song written and recorded by Mary J. Blige, "The Help" soundtrack is period-appropriate, combining classics such as Bob Dylan's folky "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and...

Geffen/Interscope Records has announced the details for the soundtrack release of the upcoming drama The Help. The album features the original song The Living Proof written and performed by Mary J. Blige, as well as a number of period songs from artists including Johnny Cash and June Carter, Dorothy Norwood, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, The Orlons, Bob Dylan, Mavis Staples, Bob Dylan and Chubby Checker. None of Thomas Newman’s original score is included. Check back for updates on this page if a separate score album is announced. To pre-order the song soundtrack, which will be released on July 26, 2011, visit Amazon. The Help is directed by Tate Taylor and stars Emma Stone, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Mike Vogel and Cicely Tyson. The movie will be released on August 12. For updates on the film, visit the official movie website.

Here’s the track list of...