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Cody Johnson Bridges Texas-Nashville Musical Gap

Associated Press

   NASHVILLE - Ever since Willie Nelson left Nashville in the early 1970s
   to return to Texas, there's been a large chasm between the "red dirt"
   country artists working primarily in Texas and Oklahoma and the
   polished, radio friendly music being produced in Nashville.
   Even today, there's a separate country radio chart for Texas stations
   and the independent country acts that are popular there often get
   labeled in Nashville as just "regional artists."
   East Texas-raised[1] Cody Johnson spent more than a decade in that
   musical scene and heard the distrust that many Texas country artists
   had for Nashville record labels.
   "There were a lot of artists from that era who were probably a bit
   arrogant in the fact that 'I'm from Texas and I've got this and you're
   not going to tell me what to do,'" Johnson said. "I think there has
   been something lost on some guys from Texas that maybe thought they
   were Willie or Waylon."
   Johnson, a former rodeo cowboy turned country singer, wants to bridge
   that gap by straddling the traditional and the modern, Texas and
   Nashville, and he's finding an audience his own way.
   Warner Music Nashville's executive vice president for A&R Cris Lacy
   tried to sign Johnson for years, but he kept rejecting their offers.
   Lacy knew that major labels often got stereotyped as being heavy handed
   with new artists by changing their sound or forcing they work with
   certain producers. But she was also trying to overcome a cultural
   challenge.
   "There's so much pride in the Texas music scene because it is so
   special," Lacy said. "They are very protective of it. And each Texas
   artist has to think about when they move on to the next step, are they
   going to alienate the people that believed in them?"

   As an independent artist, Johnson released two albums that reached the
   top 10 without major label support or distribution and sold out the
   Houston Rodeo with 74,000 tickets. But Johnson knew that he couldn't
   make the next leap without the support of a label and commercial
   country radio.

References

   1. file://localhost/tmp/lynxXXXX-4apqa/www.codyjohnsonmusic.com

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