To get a sense of how wide the country music landscape — and the divides within it — are in 2025, consider the varied reactions to an announcement the Recording Academy made in June: The best country album trophy was being retired and replaced with a pair of more precise honors, for best contemporary and best traditional country album.

Some casual observers immediately thought of Beyoncé, the last artist (for now at least, last as in final) to claim that prize. Any news that involves her has the potential to mobilize an online army. And when Andrea Williams — who chronicles the experiences of Black talent in the country music industry — noticed some online commenters interpreting the Grammy change as a backlash to Cowboy Carter's best country album win in February, she offered a rebuttal with a pointed column for Nashville's Tennessean newspaper.

"We got this narrative of people saying, 'Now the regular country category is not good enough anymore, because this Black woman won it,' " Williams said in an interview later. She disagreed with the notion that any sort of avenue had been cleared for other Black country artists to repeat Beyoncé's triumph: "It is, to me, so clear that this is just an opportunity to give white people more awards, because the white people themselves have had a hard time fitting into that single country category."

But Williams is hardly the only one who thought country music has ballooned to the point that a single Grammy award category couldn't accommodate the genre's stylistic extremes. That same point has long been made in independent and predominately white outlaw country circles positioned in opposition to the industry.

Texas-based Kyle Coroneos knows them well. On his long-established blog Saving Country Music, he's attentively, and sometimes argumentatively, critiqued the quality and authenticity of country output from Nashville, sure, but especially from the performers and scenes that operate well outside it. "For years, a lot of the traditional community felt disenfranchised from that process," says Coroneos, "and not just from the Grammys, but really from all of commercial country."

Country music's explosion in mainstream popularity has only deepened those tensions. Blockbuster country releases have dominated the pop charts, holding their own against the biggest hits from other genres. And lately, the superstar country crossover efforts haven't been limited to Beyoncé. Both Post Malone and BigXthaPlug shaped head-turning albums around collaborations with Nashville hitmakers; Lana del Rey's got her own in the can. In other words, country's become one of the leading forms of pop music, and it's been profoundly altered by that close proximity.

It's not unusual for the Grammys to tweak categories. There's a precedent, even, for dividing genre categories when competing imperatives (faithful preservation vs pop-savvy evolution or cutting edge innovation) no longer reconcile neatly into one category. Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, points out that the jazz, blues and R&B fields have already seen similar tailoring of their categories.

The Grammys reached this juncture via a standardized process. "I don't sit there and decide, 'I think we should do this,' or, 'I think we should call it that,'" Mason clarifies. "We hear from the community of people that make those genres of music. They give us their recommendations, they draft proposals and those proposals go into the trustee room for a vote. This was a proposal that's been in the works for some time and I'm pleased that it got done this year."

But for country music, this move has the potential to not only bring into focus a side of the country landscape that's been overshadowed, but draw tensions over country music's identity to the surface.

"Do you want some help with that?"

Coroneos has been stumping for a traditional country album category since 2019. Then, he says, the Grammy staffers who look after the categories advised him that collecting specific stats could help make the case. So he did a comprehensive audit of albums that might be best classified as traditional, but were entered in other categories, like best Americana album, in 2024, and one of such albums that weren't submitted to the Grammys at all. "That was actually the most convincing list," says Coroneos of the latter. "There was over a hundred albums. And on that were artists like Cody Jinks, Reba McEntire, Scotty McCreery — big artists. That, to me, was the most convincing piece of evidence."

Plenty surprising, too. McEntire and McCreery are both well-respected industry franchises, she an enduringly bankable icon and he a warm, modest and consistent hitmaker, not unlike Randy Travis before him. But mainstream country labels with stacked rosters, Coroneos explains, "will only submit a few albums from their roster because they don't want one album to compete with the other."

Certain elements of this process may seem obvious but are still worth spelling out: Entries need to appeal to the Grammy votership, a body of music industry professionals that spans classical, popular and many niche sectors. Along with quality, artistic credibility and familiarity both help. The country music industry's own awards shows don't necessarily choose the same winners as the Grammys. Wallen, for instance, has won CMA Awards both before and after his various public censures — including that show's biggie, entertainer of the year — but has only been nominated for Grammys as a collaborator alongside recent country convert Post Malone. Wallen and his team made it known that they didn't submit this year's undisputed smash I'm the Problem to the Grammys. The newly designated contemporary country album category is likely to look much the same as the country album category has in non-Cowboy Carter years.

Which means that the traditional field is wide open to those who haven't been represented until now. A musician like Cody Jinks represents the proudly unaffiliated artist contingent. His independent career model shares a certain kinship with Americana, a field that's sometimes functioned as a catchall for earthy, rooted twang, but it's not a perfect fit for his outlaw country sensibilities. "One of the ideas behind this new category," says Coroneos, "was to pull from that Americana stuff that's really country music at its heart, but was being categorized as Americana."

He ran an informal outreach campaign to persuade artists previously convinced there was no place for them at the Grammys to participate in this newly opened lane. "It has been beyond rewarding," he says, "to reach out to independent country artists that don't have managers and labels and say, 'Hey, I think that your album is good enough to submit to the Grammys. Do you want some help with that?'"

That help went as far as the nuts and bolts of the submission process — Coroneos paired artists who didn't have a way to access the submission portal themselves with a Grammy member who hadn't yet used their allotted submissions and could be convinced to help out a newcomer.

"Too country for country"

Coroneos wasn't the only person who reached out to Sunny Sweeney back in June. "I got about 7,000 text messages within 10 minutes," she recalls. "I'm not joking. I thought someone was dead." But those dispatches from her fans and fellow artists had a jubilant tone: Finally there was a Grammy category for her music.

A modern honky-tonk singer-songwriter with a vinegary, resolute twang to her vocal attack, she'd briefly caught the attention of the Nashville industry. After an independent album brought her record label interest, she signed a deal and made her album Concrete on Music Row, dabbing her salty, sharply crafted tales of drinking and divorce with a bit of studio polish. "I did put out a record that I'm very proud of," she says, "but then I got dropped because I was too country for country."

Feeling discarded, she returned to the Red Dirt club circuit, while cultivating camaraderie with her hard-touring peers and the country elders with whom she occasionally shares the Grand Ole Opry stage. "If those people die off and then the next generation after me never knew who those people were," she worries aloud, "they're not gonna have them as influences to make music from."

Sweeney already had an album — the first she's co-produced — in the can when she learned about the addition of the traditional category to the Grammys. Called Rhinestone Requiem, it's her toast to time-tested country forms: cheeky western waltzes and shuffles, weary road songs, barroom boogies and ballads for those nursing the wounds of domestic betrayal. It even contains a bit of self-mythologizing — another great country tradition — of her perseverance in the honky-tonk life despite the lack of regard from the industry that popularized it.

Rhinestone Requiem came out in August, just before the eligibility cutoff for the 2026 Grammys. If it were to snag one of those traditional country noms, Sweeney says, "It would validate everything that I've ever done." But she's also pleased for the vast community she's part of, which includes predecessors whose country radio heydays are long past. So even if her album doesn't get a nod, she knows "there's going to be artists that are in that category that are representing what I love."

No viral hits needed 

On Music Row — Nashville's name for the centralized infrastructure and influence of the country music business — the news about the traditional category was received with slightly less urgency. But even executives in the heart of it recognized the implications for an already rising star named Zach Top, a top-flight new-gen neotraditionalist competing well with the sullen swagger of the post-Wallen era.

"I honestly hadn't given [the need for a traditional category] much thought," says Katie Dean, the head of Top's label, Leo33, "but I appreciate that we are now recognizing how wide the format has become. Obviously, it was not a category designed for Zach, but it felt like such an acknowledgement of what he has meant to this format and the impact that he has made."

Holding up '90s country stars, themselves drivers of aesthetic change in their day, as heroes has become a popular gesture among current hitmakers. Top connects those dots more thoroughly and artfully than most. An easeful, elastic singer who has a feel for plaintive melancholy and winking mischief alike, he's recaptured the decorum and understated range of hat-wearing greats from George Strait on. He doesn't just wear his influences on his sleeve — he counts some of the Nashville pros who helped shape their sounds as his collaborators.

Top came up in a family bluegrass band, was scouted by a country biz veteran and got signed for his longterm career promise, no longer a given in country music. "This was not a guy that was discovered by having a viral hit pop off," Dean notes. Leo33, the independent label she launched with other industry veterans who wanted to escape what they saw as the assembly line approach of the majors, signed Top as its flagship artist.

He won over Nashville with his 2024 debut album Cold Beer & Country Music, and two successful singles. Soon after, Dean and the rest of the Leo33 staff realized that Top's 2025 follow-up, Ain't In It For My Health, would arrive just in time to be eligible for the first traditional country album Grammy. Top is simultaneously making it in the mainstream: Just after the album came out, he was nominated for five CMAs. It's a clear indication that he's becoming a heavyweight in his own industry community, and Grammy recognition would further broaden the exposure.

Though the industry system does work for some artists, it still, in Andrea Williams' words, "kicks Black people out at every turn." Despite the doubling of opportunities for Grammy recognition, in order to enter their work in either of the Grammys country album categories, they would first have to be in a position to make, release and promote albums. But even the small number of contemporary-leaning Black artists who Nashville labels signed to deals a few years back — some of whom were featured on Cowboy Carter — have, for the most part, been quietly and unceremoniously dropped. Their trad-minded counterparts face heightened scrutiny and have to work overtime to prove their country authenticity. Williams' hypothetical question rings in the air: "Who are the Black people that are even eligible?"

It's understandable that different artists relate to the business, and its mechanisms for celebrating artistic and professional achievement, differently. According to Dean, Top's been perfectly content to focus on touring and leave the awards strategizing to his team. But Texan Charley Crockett, who directs every aspect of his own career, has found it to be a test of his personal moral compass.

The way Crockett tells his musical origin story — with its lore of busking, scrounging and running from the law — surely gets his self-sufficient ethic across. "Yes, I was discovered by a major element of the pop machine in New York City playing on public transit," he says of his first contact with the music industry when he was in a loose collective of street performers. "The record shows that I walked away from it, because I could not subject myself to the moldability they were forthright in asking for."

Crockett has made sure the record also shows he's been the one fashioning his artistic identity over years of relentless grinding in the studio and on the road. Establishing a pace of multiple releases a year, he built a catalog containing album-length dives into classic musical themes and influences and, eventually, projects that corral the various sides of his repertoire — cowboy ballads, working-class blues, knowing honky-tonk and down-home R&B — into a sturdy and savvy package.

What really ties it together is Crockett's delivery; the clipped jabs of his phrasing lend his whole musical universe a sense of cool stoicism and restlessness. It's another indication of how much he's inspired by the outlaw stance struck by Waylon and Willie, not only a template for treating business dealings as defiance of the establishment but for performing with an unconstrained affect.

"When the visibility hits, it's never anything like what you think it's going to be"

Crockett has begun to draw industry attention, but remains a bit distrusting of it. Since 2021, he's been a multi-time contender for awards given by the Americana music industry, and he's grateful for that unexpected recognition, despite not regarding himself as an Americana artist. But he claims the Americana album of the year nomination he received from the Grammys last year was downright bewildering. "I was totally surprised, just completely shocked," he says.

He was on the fence about attending the awards ceremony, but decided to go out of respect for his then-new deal with Island Records — a major label not known for country music — with whom he'd signed on the condition that he could keep ownership of his recordings. (The nominated album, $10 Cowboy, was the product of a previous arrangement with the indie distributor Thirty Tigers.) Then, this summer, he recalls, "All these people were like, 'Hey, there's this [traditional country] category and you're the guy.'"

He finds the growth of his profile disorienting. Around the same time that his name was coming up in relation to the Grammys this summer, he also found himself in a small-scale celebrity feud. In a social media post, he made the case that complaints about Cowboy Carter's country incursion should, instead, be directed at the white, male country stars who've long borrowed from rap and R&B. And one of them came for him.

"I have been in obscurity for so long," Crockett marvels. "How do I make sense of what's happening? The pressure I'm feeling is coming from a much bigger place now. When the visibility hits, it's never anything like what you think it's going to be."

During our interview, he struggled openly with the prospect of ceding the classification of "contemporary." ("Am I not as contemporary country as anybody in the field?") And with being viewed as any sort of genre figurehead. ("I don't think I'm the one to carry it.") And yielding any autonomy to a system for selecting winners. ("I just don't like playing those games.")

When we signed off, Crockett was still wrestling with whether the pair of albums he's released this year, March's Lonesome Drift and August's Dollar a Day, fit into the two available Grammy country categories. "I can reject it, I can embrace it, I can choose to ignore it," he mused. Later on, his publicist informed me that he ultimately decided to see how Dollar will fare as a traditional entry.

When the first five traditional country album Grammy nominees are announced, it seems inevitable that they'll be placed alongside their contemporary counterparts to see what sort of picture they paint of the country music landscape in 2025. The trad-country crowd is often presumed to be a territorial bunch with a profound, and loud, distaste for blockbuster country-pop. People have tried to lure Sweeney into that type of trash talk, too, but she's uninterested.

"The big conversation that I've had over the last year with my artist friends is, 'Yes, there is room for everyone,'" she says. "And I want any artist to be able to put out into the world what they perceive to be country music, because it does bring an entirely new group of people into what we do. I'm all about people evolving and things changing and all that, but erasure is not what I'm into."

"I have been fighting for 20 years to be recognized," Sweeney says. "And it's not just that I want to be recognized. I want my type of country music to be recognized."

Copyright 2025, NPR