Country Rocks

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Television in fact has worked a revolution in the dissemination of the Nashville sound. The Nashville Network, which serves as an almost round-the- clock showcase for country music performers and their videos, has in nine years gone from 7 million subscribers to 54.5 million. On the strength of this success, TNN's owner, Gaylord Entertainment Co., formed a partnership last January with Group W Satellite Communications to acquire Country Music Television, a service with an ambition to do with country music what MTV did with pop and rock. In just 14 months its subscriptions have jumped 31%, to 15.7 million households.

The small screen quickly dispelled some further myths about country. "The image that people had of a country performer was Porter Wagoner -- a guy in his 60s who wears spangles and a highly tailored cowboy outfit," says Lloyd Werner, who heads sales and marketing for Group W. "But country fans discovered that country performers looked just like them." And cable executives discovered what they had already suspected -- that, in Werner's words, "a country music fan is not over 60 and does not wear bib overalls, drink Lone Star beer from a long-stemmed bottle and drive a 20-year-old pickup with a shotgun rack in the back."

Actually, the country music lover long ago abandoned the Southern holler for the middle-class suburbia of satellite dishes that politicians like to call the heartland. (Appropriately, the cornfield on the set of Hee Haw was recently transformed into a mall.) Republicans have understood this ever since Richard Nixon became the first President to visit the Grand Ole Opry in 1974. George Bush campaigned with country music stars Loretta Lynn and Peggy Sue, and made a pilgrimage to Nashville last year for the Country Music Association Awards. In many ways, the voters Bush was after are those who make up the majority of TNN's audience: 32% have an income over $40,000, and 13% make more than $50,000. They are in their 30s and early 40s, own their home, have one new car and one old one that they work on themselves, and when they travel, it is by car to places like Walt Disney World.

Country is also benefiting from the determined eclecticism of the twentysomething generation. At a Nashville concert by country hunk Alan Jackson, Brandi Byrd, 19, arrived with her hair teased into a punk sculpture, wearing a replica of an artfully threadbare Aerosmith outfit. At home she puts her Jackson and Brooks tapes alongside the work of groups like Whitesnake, Poison and Motley Crue. Says Julie Hall, a 23-year-old clerk at TNN: "I'm just as likely to buy the Black Crowes as I am to buy a Travis Tritt tape. I like good music. I don't care what it is."