It has been a long, hot day in the desert of southern California, and the sun sets over the Indio Hills, among the palm trees and the cacti and a resplendent giant statue of a wild horse, 80,000 cowboy hats cast a silhouette as far as the eye can see. A town of tents in the Coachella Valley ring out with honky tonk, fiddles, and the opening bars of John Denver.
I see “Take Me Home, Country Roads” performed about five times during the course of Stagecoach, the world’s biggest country music festival. It surprises me – I’d expected that song to be too clichéd to be beloved, but it’s not the only time my assumptions were wrong. I should have worn cowboy boots instead of old trainers to protect my feet from the dust, my clothes should definitely have more horses on (I’d thought my old Shania Twain T-shirt might be too on the nose but it actually doesn’t go far enough) and the bandana round my face is no costume, but shielding me from the desert sands.
Here, way out west, women in double denim and men in T-shirts asserting their bearers’ rights to freedom (to drink, truck, love, shoot) are grabbing the country lifestyle by the horns – literally. They line up for barbecue demonstrations, a DJ tent playing country-EDM remixes, a mini-rodeo to Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban songs, bespoke leather engraving, and for an enormous arena devoted to the cowboy drama Yellowstone.
American flags blow in the wind and adorn everything, from boot straps to guitar straps to jock straps. I have never felt more British in my life (but in my paisley bandana, ramming down a foot-long corndog, surely nobody would know).
Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California (Photo: Andy Barron/Goldenvoice)I have always loved country music, but it has not always been cool. And given how much of 2006-2008 I spent on a crusade to convince my classmates to listen to Taylor Swift, I would know. The Chicks are my idols, Alison Krauss is the sound of home, Steve Earle the soundtrack to every long car journey, and I spent my deeply uncool formative years trekking to Rascal Flatts, Miranda Lambert and Lady A shows, bragging that I listened to Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris before everyone else.
For a very long time, with concessions made for Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash, country was dismissed as a niche – banjos written off as naff, Stetsons as camp cosplay. No matter that its roots are in European (and for too often overlooked – African) folk music, nor that country’s only requisites are “three chords and the truth”. This was something distinctly American – a sensibility and storytelling that we in Britain can never fully understand.
But something’s been shifting in the past decade. The UK’s country fans were once a small community of people, which often skewed a little older, who listened to Bob Harris on Radio 2 every week, made an annual pilgrimage to C2C festival and recognised each other at Emmylou Harris concerts.
Now, though, country music has gone mainstream. Hearing a fiddle doesn’t make us flinch; country artists don’t have to release an “international” or “pop” remix to placate our accordion aversion. Songs like “Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey, “Austin” by Dasha and the “Fast Car” cover by Luke Combs go viral, get played on Radio 1, and musicians like Zach Bryan take up a two-night residency at London’s BST Hyde Park festival. Last year, Morgan Wallen, the divisive megastar with his trap-infused songs of heartbreak, became the first country artist to headline BST.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour (Photo: Parkwood Entertainment/PA)Thanks to these stars, and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album – the tour of which rode through Tottenham last week – in 2024, country music had its biggest share of the music market this century, more than doubling its share of the singles market compared with two years ago. The UK’s Eurovision entry was country-pop; next month, south London will host the inaugural two-day Country on the Common festival, featuring UK country acts The Shires and Ward Thomas, and this September, country institution The Grand Ole Opry will celebrate its 100th anniversary with its first ever show outside Nashville at the Royal Albert Hall.
In a trailer at Stagecoach, before a high-energy, lasso-looping set by country-pop star Dasha (in chaps, naturally) I meet Amazon Music’s Head of Country Music, Michelle Tigard Kammerer. She has worked in country radio and at the country record label Big Machine – which first signed Taylor Swift – and has watched on and celebrated as Britain’s country fandom exploded.
There was the crossover effect of Swift and later, Musgraves; the growth of festivals like C2C, which began in 2013 in London, spread across Europe and has now become an important booking for American artists, and the expansion of country stars touring huge venues like The O2 outside the US.
She believes there have long been “little fires” burning – a viral song, a breakout star, the devoted followings of artists like Wallen, Bryan, Chris Stapleton or Kane Brown –that in the last couple of years, have helped country music alight.
Zach Bryan headlining Stagecoach 2025. This month he’ll play two nights at BST Hyde Park (Photo: Miranda McDonald/Goldenvoice)And streaming not only helps spread music more easily around the world – freeing country music from its once-powerful labels and radio stations – but also removes the “stigma” around it, encouraging more people to embrace it on its own merit, regardless of genre.
There has been a 75 per cent increase in the last two years of country music streams on Amazon UK, and once those British fans find it, they stick around: the average country music listener on Amazon streams for 55 hours per month, which is 25 per cent more than the normal UK streaming fan. This year, Stagecoach’s live stream was rebroadcast in UK time to cater to them.
“The music is globally available and people are leaning into it, and then going down a rabbit hole. And all of a sudden the people that said, ‘Oh, I’m not a country fan, but I like… are saying, ‘maybe I am a country fan’.”
Then there are the musicians “going country”. For an artist like Beyoncé, it was a political move as much as an artistic one – reclaiming the genre that for too long dismissed the value and contribution of Black artists. “Beyoncé is from Texas,” says Kammerer. “It’s always been around her. So for her, it’s not necessarily this giant jump. She feels like it was in her blood.”
Likewise for many other artists, releasing country songs is not a radical move. “Post Malone [whose F-1 Trillion album was a series of collaborations with major country artists including Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson and Parton] loves 90s country, he grew up on 90s country, and he’s an encyclopaedia of 90s country,” Kammerer says.
Chappell Roan grew up with country music (Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images)“Chappell Roan grew up in the Midwest and always had country music around her. It wasn’t necessarily that she was wanting to jump into country and say, ‘I’m a country artist now’, but as an artist, she had something to say in that genre, and that message lent itself to a country song.”
“The Giver” is an irresistible, subversive lesbian banger – and she found writing it as a country song nostalgic and freeing. Lana Del Rey’s Stagecoach set, in which she heralded her genre switch, is one of the weekend’s most anticipated: typically mournful and romantic, but with a playful, bluesy, smoky country twist.
“When you have those global superstars that are crossing over to country,” says Kammerer, “it’s just the first toe in the pool of going, ‘Oh, well, if they’re doing it like, maybe it’s cool’.
“It’s becoming more fluid and people are finding out that all of these genres are a lot closer than they thought they were.”
At Stagecoach I’m struck that alongside the line-up’s biggest names – Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Zach Bryan – and the rising stars – Dasha, Shaboozey, Tucker Wetmore – are artists I had never considered as country before: T Pain, Nelly, and even Mumford and Sons.
Shaboozey has helped country music take off in the UK on streaming (Photo: Anna Downs/Goldenvoice)Country’s themes of love, loss and longing might be universal. But the stereotypes that long put Britons off do remain: the God, guns and trucks (I see this on a few T-shirts), or the dominance of R&B-infused “bro country”, which lusts after women in Daisy Dukes. But the more popular it becomes, the more people are able to see that is only one part of a very broad church. I have always preferred music that leans toward Americana and Bluegrass, and my own favourite acts at Stagecoach are Sturgill Simpson, Ashley McBryde, Alanna Springsteen, and Flatland Cavalry.
“There are always going to be those songs like ‘I was in a cornfield’, sure, because that’s sometimes how people grew up, and those songs speak to people,” says Kammerer.
“And if you want to, you can stay in the farms and a truck and a barn and all of that, and maybe they want to live in that life for a little bit,” she says. “And there’s also a nostalgia – you can talk about riding a horse in a desert, and maybe you were never on a horse in a desert, but you can see it in your mind, just like reading a book. You can be transformed.”
Stagecoach is the world’s biggest country music festival (Photo: Textli Gallegos/Goldenvoice)But that doesn’t represent most of what country really is: honest, authentic storytelling, and when the songwriting is good, it moves you no matter where you come from or what genres you think you like. “At its core, country music is simple. Look at Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. That was a country song – and that doesn’t have a truck. Whitney Houston did it, and it became a pop song, and now it’s one of the most covered songs in history.
square LEAH WILLIAMSON I listen to country music before every football match
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“Country is about friendship. It’s about gathering people together, about having a good time, about a simple life. No matter where you come from, whether you actually come from the country, you come from the city, or whatever, you can identify with those things.
“These are the songs that have played at our weddings and our funerals, that have soundtracked our and heartbreaks and new loves. And so now, the world is experiencing it with us.”
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