In his excellent Rough Guide to Country Music, Kurt Wolff devotes a chapter to the Nashville Sound. In his introduction, he charts its emergence back in the late 1950s as: “Goodbye fiddle leads, hayseed routines and nasal voices; hello string sections, background choruses and smooth sophisticated singing. This country-pop blend – or countrypolitan, as it came to be known – worked like a charm, as far as record sales and radio listenership were concerned”.
And he goes on to point out that, despite the scorn from some purists, this gave rise to many beautiful recordings from the likes of Don Gibson and Patsy Cline, and later, Charlie Rich, and even George Jones and Merle Haggard.
It is not an insult, therefore, to see the latest…

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