Few musical genres capture the art of telling a sad story beautifully quite like classic country and Western songs. This storytelling music comes from places where life is hard: working-class Southern ...

Country music as we know it today goes back almost 100 years. While the history of the genre goes back much further, the commercialization of country music began with the Bristol Sessions—a set of ...

But, counterintuitive though it might seem, I don’t think sound is always a helpful way to understand genre. I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, ...