(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Introducing ‘Twang’: Telling The Story of Country Music Like it is [1]

['Lane Wendell Fischer', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']

Date: 2025-04-24

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

I grew up listening to country music radio.

Music was the background to many childhood memories. George Jones crooned in the kitchen while my mom fixed supper. The Chicks harmonized in my dad’s old pickup as we drove through pastures checking cows.

Those songs told stories, sometimes about people like my family who lived out in the country. The sound of a slow-strummed guitar seemed to know the swaying of cottonwood branches like I did. A fast-moving fiddle understood what it felt like to barrel down an open dirt road.

But what I didn’t hear back then was the whole truth about country music. The radio didn’t teach me about Black musicians in the South whose fusion of string band rhythm and lyrical blues set the country genre into motion, or about Mexican vaqueros whose ballads shaped the swinging western sound.

The songs I grew up with on country radio counted for something, but not everything. They carry the sound, but forget the soil it rose from. They hum with history, but forget the hands that first struck the chord.

Whose voices were left out of the story? What did they have to say? We set out to find some answers in “Twang.”

“Twang” is a new podcast from the Daily Yonder that untangles the buried and beautiful roots of country music — one of the oldest, and perhaps most deeply misunderstood, genres of American music.

Each episode peels back a layer of history to reveal the genre’s full origin story: one shaped by hardship, migration, resistance, and hope. We follow the sounds and the people who made them, whether or not the Nashville machine ever claimed them.

This podcast is born from two places. One is love. A deep love for the way country music values place and people. For the poetry buried in both plain and riddled lyrics. For the way musicians can reveal tiny universal truths when they stay true to themselves.

The other is frustration. Frustration at how the industry has herded that love down a narrow chute, walled off by race, gender, sexuality, and class. Frustration that for so long, so many of us didn’t know the full story. That many still don’t. That many of the stories passed down, like so much of history, were incomplete by design.

So in our first episode, we begin at the beginning. We talk about the days before country music was commercialized. When struggling folks from all backgrounds traded licks and lyrics across porches and juke joints. Before record labels came along to slice music into marketable categories: “race records” for Black folks and “hillbilly records” for white folks, even if the sounds were almost indistinguishable. We talk about the instruments, too. The banjo, yes, with its African ancestry. The fiddle, a European transplant reinterpreted over and over again. These aren’t footnotes. This isn’t an addendum. This is country music. It always has been. ‘Twang’ host Lane Wendell Fischer dressed as Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, Halloween circa 2009. (Photo courtesy of Lane Wendell Fischer)

As the season unfolds, you’ll hear from guests and guides who know that music is never just music. It’s memory. It’s power. It’s politics. We’ll talk about land, labor, queerness, and race. About cowboy myths and protest ballads. About how music, at its best, tells the truth — even if only a few people are listening.

We’re not here to tell the whole story and burn country music down. We couldn’t if we wanted to. We’re here to widen our own frames. To ask: Who was always part of this story, even if they got written out of it? And what happens when we listen differently.

Because the truth is, country music has never been just what the radio says it is. It’s been the bruised beauty of a life lived close to the land and to each other. It’s been Black. It’s been female. It’s been queer. It’s been border-crossed and dirt-covered and sung into the dark by people who weren’t invited to tell their stories, but showed up anyway. “Twang” isn’t about rewriting history. It’s about telling the story of country music like it is. Listen to the companion playlist on Spotify.

Episode one is out now, along with a companion playlist featuring some of the songs and artists we highlight (and more). I hope you’ll listen — not just to the music, but to the lives behind that trademark twang.

This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.

Related

Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/twang-podcast-rural-remix-country-music-origins-evolution-telling-it-like-it-is/2025/04/24/

Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/