There are few genres of music that carry as many preconceived notions as country. Beers, boots and hats, Ford F150s, and many more images spring to mind — many that are indeed abundant in the public images and styles of modern country stars. But there was once a time when the superficial materialism often associated with the Nashville scene was nonexistent. A time when an ordinary redneck with a guitar wasn’t concerned with trucks or lifestyles – but with more collective matters such as poverty, inequality, and imperialism, using songs to highlight these and fight to fix them.
Put another way – when Johnny Cash recorded the 1969 live album At San Quentin in the eponymous prison, he wasn’t there to advocate for harsher sentencing and putting punishment before rehabilitation. It’s plain to see that country artists of the past wrote from a left-wing perspective politically, while nowadays it’s an assortment of right-wing populism, most obviously Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town. How did this shift happen, and is it a true phenomenon or solely how it appears on the surface?
By the 1970s, the outlaw country subgenre that embraced progressive politics was on its way out, but it had produced superstars like Cash and Willie Nelson, (the latter of whom famously sang that “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other”) selling hundreds of millions of records. Pop stars and further commercialisation swept in over the following decades, the beloved Dolly Parton finding worldwide success by blending pop sensibilities with a country sound.
It is this trend of commercialisation and a profit driven incentive that can be seen as the prime culprit for pushing country to the right. As country pop continued to thrive into the 21st century, the loosening boundaries of what constituted country created a kind of status quo amongst the Nashville elite, a return to origins that came to mirror the American political establishment. With country artists amassing such success, “real” country came to revolve around wealth, and the rise of Trumpism in the 2010s was a happy marriage to this attitude.
Even if country stars and their fans can be broadly construed as right wing politically, there isn’t exactly stone cold evidence to mark it with. When taking the digital brand Taste of Country’s list of the top 10 country songs of 2025 compilation, not one of them is an inextricably political tune – most focus on heartbreak, redemption, and self-empowerment. While there are religious undertones and Deep South imagery, there’s nothing so obvious as a guitar emblazoned with the words “This machine kills fascists”. Zach Bryan, who recently sold out America’s biggest stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, caused controversy in a snippet of his unreleased song Bad News with lyrics criticising the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump regime. He responded to backlash from Trump supporting fans by saying “This song is about how much I love this country and everything in it”.
What Bad News and the seemingly apolitical country hits of the year indicate is that left wing and right wing politics in country music, while inseparable from the genre, are often defined by optics more than actual discourse. They range from loud and proud to subtle dogwhistles, from activism to lazy endorsement to expand a fanbase. The swing from left to right is real, but at its core is a reflection of two different time periods — which speaks to the importance of music as activism and expression, to amplify what’s important and to fight for what’s right.
