The Year Country Went Everywhere, and Everyone Went Country

Charleston, W.Va.

Country Outsiders At the Core

For a clear glimpse into the evolving soul of modern country music, you could have done far worse than to travel to Charleston, W.Va., this fall to catch a stop on Jelly Roll’s headlining arena tour.

Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed former gangster rapper remade as a country-rock preacher, delivers bombastic, melodic songs about the desperation of addiction and the power of faith. His latest album, “Beautifully Broken,” debuted atop the Billboard album chart in October.

His show is secular ministry — “church for people that don’t know they need church,” he said earlier in the evening, picking at some hash browns with bacon in a green room backstage. The concert was also, in some stretches, a hip-hop show, nodding to the decade-long rap career that preceded his breakout, and the ways in which that fact is no longer the obstacle to mainstream country success than it once might have been.

In fact, the tour’s whole lineup reflected that suddenly un-tense tension: The opening acts were Ernest, a writer of hit songs and an emerging star in his own right, who had an early career stretch as a rapper; and Shaboozey, perhaps the year’s most striking country music breakout star, whose “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — a seamless and savvy hybrid of country and hip-hop, built around the structure of the 2004 hip-hop hit “Tipsy” by J-Kwon — was rewarded with a record-tying 19 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

A common-man rock star, a classicist with an edgy past and an easeful genre hybridizer — even a few years ago, one or more of these performers would have found country music’s doors closed to them. In subtle but not insignificant ways, though, the genre is accepting the inevitability of evolution — be it via performers who boldly engage with other genres, or via listeners whose consumption is more catholic than ever.