COVER STORY : Born-Again Country: After years of trying to sound like pop, Nashville is putting faith in its honky-tonk roots. And it’s paying off. : Country’s New Crop : A new wave of young tradition-minded singers is helping country music escape from its mid-’80s tailspin

It’s been 10 years since the movie “Urban Cowboy” gave country music its greatest commercial boom and, ultimately, its biggest nightmare.

Initially, the film did for country what “Saturday Night Fever” did for disco. Millions of Americans were soon sporting cowboy hats, riding those silly mechanical bulls and buying country albums.

Then the bottom fell out.

Tired of the Western craze, people threw their hats into the closet, pulled the plugs on the mechanical bulls and, crucially, decided they’d had enough of those country records.

The result: The number of platinum (1 million sales) or gold (500,000 sales) country albums listed on Billboard magazine’s year-end sales chart dropped from 18 in 1980 to 12 in 1983--to just seven in 1984.

“Nashville was shell-shocked,” said Jimmy Bowen, head of Capitol Records in Nashville. “People predicted doom. Everyone went around asking, ‘What do we do now? What do we do now?’ ”

Today, the good times are back in country music.

Thanks to an unprecedented number of new young stars, led by Garth Brooks and Clint Black, country is enjoying a commercial run that may even dwarf the “Urban Cowboy” days. It is also producing the best records since Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were leading the Outlaw movement more than a decade ago.

These artists have yet to show an original vision that stretches the boundaries of country the way Nelson or Merle Haggard did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But they represent a welcome return to classic country values after the deluge of characterless, pop-accented recordings of the “Urban Cowboy” period.

Without compromising hard-core country emotion or arrangements, they are selling phenomenally well--not only to the traditional, over-35 country audience, but also to a younger, pop-oriented crowd. The number of platinum and gold country albums listed on Billboard’s year-end charts last week: an astonishing 33.

“There’s a fire in the belly of Nashville again now, more than I’ve seen in almost 20 years,” said David Conrad, who oversees the local office of the Almo-Irving music publishing company.

“This isn’t just ‘Urban Cowboy II.’ This is the real stuff. There’s more raw country excitement than at any time since Willie and Waylon started the whole Outlaw thing in the ‘70s. We’ve got some honest-to-God good country singers and songwriters again.”

You get an idea of how fast things are changing in country music when you realize that today’s two biggest sellers--Brooks and Black--released their first albums only last year.

They are just the most prominent in a rush of artists who have risen to commercial and/or critical acclaim in recent months. Among the others: the Kentucky Headhunters, Alan Jackson, Mark Chesnutt, Travis Tritt, Joe Diffie, Patty Loveless, Doug Stone, Shelby Lynne and Mark Collie.

This new energy isn’t just being felt in the country field, which is expected to generate an estimated $500 million in sales this year. The lastest albums by Black and Brooks are also in the Top 20 in the pop field.

Nashville’s bounty of new talent was dramatized in September when so many newcomers performed on the normally veteran-dominated Country Music Awards television show. Host Randy Travis--who is just 31 and has been a star in country music for only five years--seemed like an elder statesman.

The domination of the show by new artists was an eye-opener, even for the country Establishment here.

“That show brought it home to me because you had one outstanding performance after another from essentially newcomers with a substantial level of artistic quality and integrity,” said Bill Ivey, executive director of the Country Music Foundation.

If Nashville was impressed, so was the viewing audience.

The program, which registered a higher rating for CBS that night than ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” was widely credited with stimulating record sales of the featured artists, especially Black and Brooks.

Brooks’ “No Fences” album, for instance, sold an estimated 300,000 copies the week after the TV show. Total sales since its release in September: an estimated 2.5 million.

“To outsiders, it must seem like someone just backed a truck up to Music City Row and dumped all these great singers off,” said Almo-Irving’s Conrad.

“But to me, all this started five or so years ago, when the record companies finally woke up and decided they had to find some good new people or country music was just going to fade away. The artists were getting up in years and the audience was getting there, too.”

For most of Nashville, waking up wasn’t easy.

The man whose success is widely credited with re-energizing country music was turned down by every record company in town--in some cases twice--before being signed by Warner Bros. Records in 1985. The knock against Randy Travis: He was too country.

Travis was a revolutionary throwback to the fiddle-’n’-steel, honky-tonk style of such post-World War II country giants as Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, whose music stood as expressions of blue-collar heartache and aspiration.

Frequently described as “the white man’s blues,” the best country songs of the ‘40s and into the ‘50s were simple yet passionate tales that had the absolute feel of real life. The pop world frequently adopted the best of the songs, such as Hank Williams’ aching “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” but only after they had been re-recorded by pop artists and given arrangements that smoothed out most of the original country rawness.

Beginning in the ‘50s, the country music hierarchy began trying to eliminate the middle man and make records aimed directly at the pop audience--records that downplayed the rural accents of the singers and highlighted syrupy backing vocals and lush strings rather than old steel guitars and fiddles. Outsiders with even a touch of country were embraced as part of the family.

The reason the “Urban Cowboy” era is now considered such a dark period for country music is that even the songs came to have a heartless, synthetic feel as the Nashville Establishment encouraged all of its artists, from Conway Twitty and Ronnie Milsap to T.G. Sheppard and Eddie Rabbit, to soft-pedal their country roots.

When Travis arrived in Nashville in the early ‘80s, he was definitely a man out of time. The soft-spoken young man got a job singing in a country-music nightclub, where he doubled as catfish cook and dishwasher.

His manager, Lib Hatcher, lured dozens of record company executives to the club, which was in walking distance of the Grand Ole Opry. He represented everything they had been trying to forget about country music. Except to Warner Bros.’ Martha Sharp.

Sitting in her office recently, Sharp, senior vice president of the label’s Nashville artists-and-repertoire department, smiled as she was told about the current consensus in Nashville that Travis’ success was the turning point in the revitalization of country.

“Everyone around town had been down on pure country music for so long that they still didn’t trust it after the first album,” she said. “They thought he was a hillbilly, and they just didn’t think there was a place for someone to just stand up there and sing great country music.

“It was only after Randy’s second album went platinum that people started looking around and thinking, ‘Well, maybe something is happening here.’ ”

Travis’ first single, “On the Other Hand,” is now considered a country classic. The subject is romantic temptation, and Travis crooned its clever wordplay with such deft sentimentality that Haggard must have been awed.

Sample lines from the song, written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz:

On one hand, I count the reasons

I could stay with you

And hold you close to me

All night long . . .

On that hand, there’s

No reason why it’s wrong.

But . . . on the other hand

There’s a golden band

To remind me of someone

Who would not understand.

If the record--with its soulful, steel-accented arrangement--were released in today’s country climate, it would shoot straight to No. 1.

In the summer of 1985, however, two forces worked against it. First, country radio was “artist-driven,” meaning that the stations tended to stick with the proven stars rather than unknowns, even if the veterans delivered weak records. Second, stations avoided anything with a traditional, hard-core-country sound.

Despite some support from disc jockeys around the country, “On the Other Hand” got only enough airplay to reach No. 67 on the Billboard country charts. After “On the Other Hand” was re-released eight months later, following the success of a second Travis single, it broke into the Top 10.

“Listener response to Travis was amazing,” recalls Larry Daniels, general program manager of KNIX-FM and KCW-AM in Phoenix. “They couldn’t get enough of him.”

Sensing the groundswell, Warner Bros. rushed Travis into the studio to record an album. It sold almost 2 million copies, making it one of only three debut albums in the history of country music at the time to go platinum.

(To illustrate the surge of country at the moment: Three debuts--by Black, Brooks and the Kentucky Headhunters--have gone platinum in the last 12 months.)

Jerry Crutchfield, a veteran Nashville producer, recalls the singer’s impact.

“We thought we were doing great when we sold 500,000 copies on an artist at the time,” he said, during a break from a recording session with Lee Greenwood. “So, it amazed all of us when we looked over and saw Warners was selling all these albums with him--and a lot of them to young buyers, who don’t normally show an interest in country music.

“I asked young people about Travis and they said they liked him because he was closer to their age and he was so believable . . . his voice and his songs.”

In earlier decades, country occasionally attracted a young audience. Certainly that happened in the ‘50s, when Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis brought a country feel to rock ‘n’ roll, and again in the ‘70s, when the Outlaw sound offered a restless, rebellious spirit that updated original country-rock instincts.

For the most part, however, country was aimed at the over-35 crowd. Young people related more easily to rock. But some young country fans--especially in regions where country music has been traditionally strong--find the music of the new country stars more meaningful than the heavy metal that dominates commercial rock or the rap and dance styles that represent the pulse of modern pop.

Before Travis, there had been evidence of a return to basics in the work of Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs, George Strait and the Judds. But Travis was like a lighting bolt.

Recalls Crutchfield, “That’s when everyone realized that the best way to compete with pop wasn’t to try to make pop records, but to go back to what we did best: Make great country records.”

Travis’ success sent out a message to songwriters as well. As a music publisher, Almo-Irving’s Conrad saw the impact.

“The records were all the same after ‘Urban Cowboy,’ real contrived,” he said. “When the Travis thing happened, it was like all the writers rolled up their sleeves and said, ‘I can write from my heart again and there is someone who’ll sing it.’ The day of the ditty was over.”

At the same time, Travis’ success inspired hundreds of honky-tonk singers around the country--who had felt alienated by the country sounds of the early ‘80s--to think there might be a place for them at last in Nashville.

So, they started heading to Music City from all over--places like Tulsa (Brooks) and Houston (Black).

They brought with them not only authentic country vocal styles, but a love for the type of songs that conveyed genuine emotion--songs that spoke with humor and poignancy about everyday yearnings and disappointments.

One reason Brooks and Black are considered the most promising lights in country music these days (see story on Page 9) is that their music deals so effectively with country’s traditional themes.

In a song on his new album, Black speaks about the economic troubles frequently addressed in country music. Sample lines from “One More Payment”:

Break my back to make those bank notes

Payin’ on an almost always broken down

Fix that car nine ways to Sunday

And it won’t start again when Monday rolls around.

But Brooks may be the new artist who best taps the sociology of his audience.

He’s an inconsistent writer and turns to others for his best material, but he can be wonderfully light when writing about heartbreak (“Not Counting You”) or disarmingly tender in expressing love.

In “Unanswered Prayers,” from his second album, Brooks speaks about a married man running into an old high-school flame and remembering that he once spent all his time wishing--even praying--that she would be his.

But, the song’s chorus tells us, he now realizes:

She wasn’t quite the angel

That I remembered in my dreams

We tried to talk about the old days

There wasn’t much we could recall

I guess the Lord knows

What he’s doin’ after all.

And as she walked away and I looked at my wife . . .

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers.

The final piece of the puzzle: A new generation of executives and producers was moving into place in Nashville--people eager to find new artists and put their stamp on country music. The signings during the period ranged from such independent artists as rock-tinged Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle to folk-edged Nanci Griffith and wry Lyle Lovett.

Capitol’s Jimmy Bowen--whose credits as a producer range from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Hank Williams Jr. and Reba McEntire--is one of the few industry leaders here who has anything good to say about the “Urban Cowboy” era.

“What happened here during the period was funny in a way and sad in a way because it showed how non-creative things were here,” Bowen said.

“I’m talking about the idea that anyone could think the ‘Urban Cowboy’ sound was going to be their guru. What that (period) did was drop us down so far that it forced the record companies to start removing some people who had been making decisions, and it led to an influx of people with new ideas.”

The most significant breakthrough, however, may have been the changes in radio programming.

“Country radio still prefers to stick with established artists to some extent, but that’s getting less and less,” said Bruce Hinton, president of MCA Records in Nashville. “With all the emphasis today on listener research and stronger playlists, they are more interested in a good song and a good record than who sang it.”

What’s ahead in the ‘90s?

Tony Brown, named the most successful country producer of 1990 by Billboard magazine, offers a note of caution.

“The danger is that Nashville may be climbing on a new bandwagon because of the success of all these ‘hat’ singers that sound like Merle Haggard,” Brown said in his office at MCA Records. “A lot of guys may start signing people because they sound right without taking into consideration whether they are really artists.

“It reminds me of the time in the ‘60s and ‘70s when you had some artists who had one big hit, bought big buses, filled arenas and then they were gone. That may be happening again.”

Connie Bradley, who heads the Nashville office of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, also worries about the rapid turnover in country music.

“When you look at that CMA Awards show and see all the new talent, you realize that you are going to rise to fame quicker and fall out quicker, and I’m not sure that’s best in the long run for the health of country music.”

But Capitol’s Bowen summarizes the general optimism sweeping Nashville.

“The ‘90s is going to be the biggest era for country-music sales and growth. You’ve got a dozen (record executives and producers) in town who are trying to kick each other’s butts with good records--Jim Ed Norman, Tony Brown, Josh Leo, Barry Beckett.

“We used to be looking for gold, maybe a few platinum. Now we’re all going after multiplatinum, and we’ve got the artists to get it. We used to always rely on two or three superstars, and now we’ve got a dozen who are contenders. A lot of these kids have a chance to be great.”