Member-only story

The Rate-A-Record What the Hell is Country Music Anyway Edition?

Warning: The Australians are Revolting!

Robert Gowty
3 min readMar 13, 2023
By the Author.

The genesis of this particular Rate-A-Record begin in England with our fine colleague, Alex Markham and the false attribution of the one hit wonder moniker.

Whether an artist is truly a one hit wonder has a certain geographic dimension to it.

The first artist that came to mind was Marc Bolan and T-Rex. In the UK, at his peak, he was arguably bigger than David Bowie, his friend and contemporary. Yet, he barely cracked the charts in the US, with only Get It On, re-dubbed Bang A Gong, managing to make any impact.

As much as the UK’s Glam Movement had uneven global impact, the same could be said for the country music emanating from the US of A.

On this front, two artists came to mind. Bobbie Gentry and Sammi Smith.

Reading Anthony Overs heartfelt reflections on the place country music played in his formative years in the desolate heartland of northwest Victoria I couldn’t help but reflect on my own general antipathy towards country music.

This is possibly genetic.

The only time I can recall my son screaming in agony for a particular song to be obliterated from the car’s sound system was when Marty…

--

--

Robert Gowty
Robert Gowty

Written by Robert Gowty

Extemporal Explorer. Music, art, fiction, science fiction, culture and technology. Tasmanian Existentialism. Aficionado of the number seven.

Responses (9)