The Invention of Twang

Last December, a nineteen-year-old SoundCloud rapper from Atlanta named Lil Nas X released a new track called “Old Town Road.” He tagged the song not as hip-hop, as he had done with his previous work, but as country. Its production featured a trap beat, sure, but so do plenty of songs on country radio. And it may have been more spoken than sung, but so are the talking blues and square dance calls that have been turning up in country music for approximately a century. Besides, its cowboy symbolism, Southern drawl, and banjo-driven instrumental track gave it an unmistakably country-and-western feel, even if the artist’s previous work didn’t belong to that category.

This unassuming novelty tune became a viral success on the video platform TikTok, eventually debuting simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Hot R&B / Hip-Hop charts when it was released as a single in March 2019. But then Billboard intervened, removing it from the country charts. In a statement to Rolling Stone, the editors explained:

Upon further review, it was determined that “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X does not currently merit inclusion on Billboard’s country charts. When determining genres, a few factors are examined, but first and foremost is musical composition. While “Old Town Road” incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.

Definitions of country music tend to focus on its thematic content—the American South, poverty, marital infidelity—or its prominent wordplay, or its typical narrative structure. But Billboard’s deviated from this template. Instead, it argued, the foremost quality is a musical one. It should sound like country music—whatever that means. In spite of citing the “elements” of country music as the determinative factor, the statement does not bother to specify what they are.

To be fair, these elements are hard to pin down. The countryness of country doesn’t reside in harmony: songs can have two chords, as do a number of classic Hank Williams tunes, or they can have thirty-two, like the jazz-derived compositions played by Western swing acts like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. It also can’t be reduced to its instruments, which are shared by various other genres—steel guitar, borrowed from Hawaiian music; the fiddle, common to European folk music; and, most ubiquitous of all, the electric guitar.

Given that plenty of country hits sound similar to “Old Town Road”—sometimes glaringly so, like Jason Aldean’s version of “Dirt Road Anthem,” which not only shares a core metaphor but also is based on a beat-driven instrumental with a rap vocal—it’s hard...