Introduction

I'm from the city. Not any city either; I'm from smack dab in the middle Dallas, which is a pretty damn big city.  Having said that, I absolutely despised country music growing up.  In my adolescent mind I found no sentiments that could connect with songs about barbeque stains, friends in low places, or boot-scootin boogies.  To add to that, I was a little punk rocker as kid and subsequently an indie rocker as teenager and the glitzy glamor that dominated the mainstream country music was something I tried as hard as could to distance myself from.  I stood firm in these views up until about my senior year of highschool when my views began to change.  I'll get into more of the specifics of this story later, as it involves one of the major players of the alternative country genre; the main point is that around this time everything I had ever thought about what country music is changed.
Unfortunately, there's more subgenre names for "country music that doesn't come out of Nashville" than there are sad Hank Williams songs.  Alt Country, Americana, Country Rock, Folk Rock, Cowpunk, Outlaw Country, Roots Rock, Rockabilly, Progressive Country, Bluegrass, and "Cosmic American American Music" are just the first little handful that come to mind.  However, this litany and subgenres and historical musical movements shows that within the umbrella of the term "country music", there's a well of music as deep and genre blurring as there is under the term "indie rock".
For a few years now, whenever I get into a music conversation with someone that goes a little deeper than the tired rhetoric of "I like everything"; I've always tried to explain this genre that I love as "It's like the Indie Rock scene of country music, only it's been going on for 60 years now".  Over the semester I look to highlight specific artists within this broad umbrella of non-Pop Country, past and current, in order to further understand this stream of music that is so unique and tied to our country.