Few events in the American musical calendar make a Briton feel more lost than the Country Music Association awards. This is a huge, glitzy ceremony, screened live at primetime on ABC TV; it dominates the US ratings to such an extent that you wonder why any other channel bothers broadcasting for the duration. It is also almost singularly populated by people no one in the UK has ever heard of.
This year is a case in point. Of the 29 nominees, there are six who resonate in the UK. Two aren't actual country artists: American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson and Sheryl Crow, the latter up for a collaboration with Loretta Lynn – herself the solitary name from an age when the mainstream Nashville stars (Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers) could expect to have big UK hits. That era came to an end in the 1980s; the odd novelty hit aside, the twain haven't really met since then. Kenny Chesney is known in the UK not for his music – including All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan and She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy – but for being married to Renée Zellweger for four months. That leaves Lady Antebellum, who have made some inroads in the UK, and Taylor Swift, who's had a platinum album, albeit one that sounded almost nothing like country music and everything like polished teen pop. The rest are likely to provoke nothing more than blank expressions: Grace Potter, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts, Eric Church, Little Big Town, Chris Young, Zac Brown Band.
These acts, however, are huge in the US. Country's sales figures are mind-boggling, and don't seem to have been affected by illegal downloading – possibly because country fans tend to be older, possibly because of the efforts artists make to bond with their audience: the endless signing sessions, the meet-and-greets after every show, both standard practice in Nashville. In one year alone, Rascal Flatts sold 9m albums in the US; that's as many as Coldplay's Viva la Vida sold all over the world. A big country hit such as the Band Perry's If I Die Young can expect to sell 3m copies. Are we in the UK missing out? I spent a week steeping myself in modern country, listening to every nominated track, to find out.
It would be lovely to report that the cliches are desperately wide of the mark, that there is a whole world of new music to discover. Certainly there is some good stuff. If you can get past the title, the opening of Eric Church's Country Music Jesus is a wash of grinding backwards guitars and hymnal vocals: no one's going to confuse it with Gang Gang Dance, but it's pretty radical by CMA standards. So are a duo called the Civil Wars, whose album Barton Hollow is fantastic, a collection of thoughtful, hushed, opaque ballads. Their presence among this year's nominees seems as improbable as Belle and Sebastian waltzing off with a Metal Hammer Golden God award. But country is not the place to come looking for what you might call blue-sky musical thinking. There are still a lot of songs called things like Damn Right I Am and Like Jesus Does and When You Love a Sinner, performed by an apparently limitless supply of women with ginormous blond hair and middle-aged men with goatees and Stetsons. And, yes, there are a lot of lyrics about tractors.
You could view this as evidence of a desperate lack of imagination. Certainly, five-times-nominated Jason Aldean's explanation as to why he called his album My Kinda Party – "It's what the fans have come to expect on my records" – doesn't suggest a mind working overtime to break down musical boundaries. (Then again, he is operating in a world in which someone felt it necessary to ask him why he'd called his album My Kinda Party. As album titles go, it's not exactly Nurse With Wound's Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.) But the more you listen, the more you realise that reiterating cliches is at least part of the point, a source of defiant pride among country artists. "It ain't hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns and momma, that might be true," snarls Paisley, on the title track of his album This Is Country Music. "But this is country music and we do."
In search of guidance, I turn to Bob Harris, whose career has taken him from the sibilant host of the Old Grey Whistle Test to country's most visible British advocate, thanks to his Radio 2 show Bob Harris Country. When I speak to him, he's just finished recording a session with Toby Keith, who, thanks to his notorious 2002 single Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American), has come to embody pretty much everything some people hate about latter-day mainstream country: musically conservative, not just politically reactionary, but bellicose with it, a kind of sonic equivalent of a poorly spelt banner being waved around at a Tea party rally. Harris is a Toby Keith fan – "They throw quite a lot of big production at their records, but when you strip all that away, what you're left with is raw talent and that supports everything" – but it was not ever thus. Initially, he says, he had reservations about taking on the radio show. His tastes coincided with those of most British fans, who are happy to buy into the less glossy sound of alt-country, or of country-influenced Americana such as Band of Horses or Bonnie Prince Billy. "In the Whistle Test era, I loved things like the Flying Burrito Brothers and Emmylou Harris. There was pedal steel guitar all over Neil Young's records. There was a straight line from that music to Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, Gillian Welch. I'd taken much less of Alan Jackson and George Strait, but then you go to Nashville and discover that. I found myself becoming a huge convert. I really think Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland has one of the best voices anywhere. Great musicianship and strong songs." He thinks a wider audience might follow if only British labels would stop faffing with the sound of the records. "They sometimes put out an entirely different mix to the one released in America, closing the faders down on the pedal steel and fiddle, leaving it as more of a rock mix. It dilutes everything. The record companies should have the courage of their own convictions."
This seems a pretty inarguable point. Even if you're not a fan, it's hard to see how country could be improved by stripping it of its sonic USP. Remove country's links with its forebears, and you're left with unambitious if well-turned soft rock, not something Britain is exactly lacking in. If you want an example, and your stomach is strong enough, examine the oeuvre of Ronan Keating. His two biggest hits, When You Say Nothing At All and If Tomorrow Never Comes were mainstream country tracks, originally performed by Keith Whitley and Garth Brooks respectively, ruthlessly divested of grit.
Perhaps British record companies mess with the sound of mainstream country in the belief that it is culturally too alien for British ears. "There's a core fanbase here that loves the American feel of it, loves the American fairytale aspect of it," suggests the producer of Bob Harris Country, Al Booth, who actually has a Country Music award of her own (for Outstanding Contribution to the Advancement and Promotion of Country Music Internationally). "But if it's people in cowboy hats talking about pick-up trucks, it's hard to find a connection."
I'm not so sure. For one thing, it's not as if British audiences turn their noses up at hip-hop, which you could argue stems from a culture equally alien. And while I never really want to hear the work of country duo Montgomery Gentry again, that's only partly because their shtick rests on a curious combination of wild, ungovernable rebel posturing and Daily Mail-letters-page politics (think the Bullingdon Club in a Stetson). Their album opens with a hearty endorsement of murdering burglars, and isn't always as charming as that. But I'm less bothered by the lyrics than by the fact that their music is awful, a kind of antiseptic version of 70s southern rock. When the music is good, the cultural differences melt away. There's something hugely enjoyable about Paisley's This Is Country Music, regardless of his bullish devotion to the world of trucks. As Harris says, these are good songs, brilliantly played, which may explain why – his negligible UK record sales notwithstanding – Paisley recently filled London's O2 Arena.
Maybe the Nashville good will eventually out in the UK. But having listened to all 101 CMA-nominated tracks, I'm not entirely converted. There's too much that is bland or saccharine; after a while, it all starts to meld into one. Sometimes, a song breaks through thanks to its pitiless melodic efficiency: you can see why the Band Perry's If I Die Young sold 3m copies, and you could see it doing something similar in the UK. And, just occasionally, you alight on something great: the Civil Wars, for instance. I fire up Spotify and listen again to Paisley blithely informing me that 80s Nashville behemoths Alabama make for a better seduction soundtrack than Barry White. I don't believe him for a minute, but it doesn't matter: he appears to have got under my skin, Stetson and all.
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