Country Rocks

It was a time of new prosperity in the U.S.A.

And all the fortunate offsprings never had to pay

We had sympathy for the devil and the Rolling Stones

Till we got a little older

And found Haggard and Jones

A generation screaming for more room

Kids of the baby boom

-- Bellamy Brothers, 1986

Baby boomers have gone through a strange musical journey. For a time, rock music was their essential cultural touchstone, a vein of deep feeling that seemed to flow through nearly every one of them. If the oldest boomers grew up on early Stones and the youngest arrived just in time to catch Van Halen, at least they possessed a lingua franca.

Then along came advances in studio technology and radio-station niche marketing. Leading-edge music is now subdivided into such abstruse and sharply segregated categories as Christian Rap, Acid Jazz and Grunge Rock, and it can be created, almost untouched by human hands, with something called a Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The two major currents of pop today have much to do with attitude and little to do with musicality: heavy metal speaks to priapic barbarism, and rap is so belligerent that for some it verges on antimusic.

So who's topping the charts? Well, how about a balding Oklahoma country singer whose idols include James Taylor and John Wayne, who prances across stage like a cross between Mick Jagger and Ferris Bueller, swinging from rope ladders and smashing his guitar, and who brings 40-year-olds to tears with his existential hymns about accepting life's incidental malice? Rock may be moribund, but Garth Brooks sure is thriving.

By their sheer demographic weight, the nation's 76 million baby boomers continue to determine America's musical preferences. And what America currently prefers is country. Brooks now outsells Michael Jackson and Guns 'N Roses, country radio is trumping Top 40, and Nashville is churning out new stars so fast that Randy Travis' six years in the limelight qualify him as an elder statesman.

Significantly, country has achieved its new luster without abandoning its heritage: a heritage so stubbornly rooted in storytelling and simple melody that it has never quite left behind the farm in Poor Valley, Va., where a moody lumberman named A.P. Carter and his clan picked up guitars seven decades ago and invented the Carter Scratch. The new wave of country singers is dominated by artists who have succeeded largely on their own terms, consolidating an eclectic mix of contemporary sounds with old-fashioned catches in the throat, tinkles of the mandolin, sugary sobs and vertiginous swoops of pedal steel guitar. This generation's performers are the first bred on both rock and country who are consciously choosing Nashville, as Vince Gill did when he turned down a chance to join the rock group Dire Straits in favor of continuing his country career.