Steve Earle recently said, basically, that most modern country music sucks.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/steve-earle-country-music-nashville-chris-stapleton-kendrick-lamar-oasis-a7791486.html"The best stuff coming out of Nashville is all by women except for Chris Stapleton," he said. "The guys just wanna sing about getting f***ed up. They're just doing hip hop for people who are afraid of black people.
"I like the new Kendrick Lamar record, so I'll just listen to that."
"Hip hop for people who are afraid of black people" is the funniest thing I have heard said about country music in a long time. A close second is the observation that with the advent of the self-driving car, country music singers will be able to lament that their trucks left them too.
Steve Earle, at the height of his success, had an image as a tank-top wearing, bad-ass tough-guy type, but his sympathies were always more with the Dixie Chicks... a guy with a strong anti-war, anti-hate viewpoint, which came out in some of his later music. But first and foremost Steve Earle is a storyteller.
His biggest commercial hit, Copperhead Road, remains a staple of "classic rock" radio and is probably as popular today as when it was first released. It tells the story of John Lee Pettimore III, a descendant of Tennessee moonshiners who came back from his service in the Vietnam war with "a brand new plan."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMO9azmKNU"The Devil's Right Hand" tells the story of a young man whose enthusiasm for pistols lands him in a whole heap of trouble. The lyrics of the song-- the references to the cap-and-ball Colt and the Peacemaker-- suggest it starts in the 1860s, and ends somewhere around 1880. "when daddy left to fight the big war" refers to the American Civil War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqW2x1knqq0 -k