Country-Pop is country music that has country instrumentation and song structures yet emphasizes pop melodies and lush, orchestrated production, in order to win a larger audience. The most familiar and popular form of country-pop was the Nashville Sound, which later metamorphisized into Countrypolitain. (read more)

Country-Pop is country music that has country instrumentation and song structures yet emphasizes pop melodies and lush, orchestrated production, in order to win a larger audience. The most familiar and popular form of country-pop was the Nashville Sound, which later metamorphisized into Countrypolitain. The Nashville Sound emerged in the '50s as a way to bring country music to a broad pop audience. The movement was led by Chet Atkins, who was the head of RCA Records country division. Atkins designed a smooth, commercial sound that relied on country song structures but abandoned all of the hillbilly and honky tonk instrumentation. He hired session musicians and coordinated pop-oriented, jazz-tinged productions. Similarly, Owen Bradley created productions -- most notably with Patsy Cline -- that featured sophisticated productions and smooth, textured instrumentation. Eventually, most records from Nashville featured this style of production and the Nashville Sound began to incorporate strings and vocal choirs. In the late '60s, the Nashville Sound evolved into Countrypolitain, which emphasized these kinds of pop production flourishes. Featuring layers of keyboards, guitars, strings, and vocals, countrypolitain records were designed to crossover to pop radio and they frequently did. The sound dominated the country charts in the '70s and stayed popular until the early '80s, when it was replaced by Urban Cowboy, a country-pop genre that was explicitly influenced by rock.(collapse)