Randy Travis has come a long way by respecting country music's traditions. Other acts out there, though, are raising a ruckus by tangling up those roots with all sorts of other music. Six signposts for this new country mile: Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, the O'Kanes, Nanci Griffith, K.T. Oslin and Lyle Lovett.
Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, both Texas-bred, are the new country's hell raisers. Crowell's CBS album, Diamonds and Dirt, is a benchmark for country, a seamless blend of strong beat, gritty humor and surprising tenderness. Crowell, 37, who is married to another gifted performer, Johnny Cash's daughter Rosanne, is a Renaissance man in a bolo tie. He is an adept guitar player, a deft producer and a wondrous songwriter whose major problem is letting his head get in the way of his heart. "If I can keep my brain out of my music, everything will be great," he says. "But whenever anybody asks, I say 'I play country music, and I play a little rock 'n' roll.' When I'm finally pinned down, I have to say I'm country."
It is no struggle to pin down Steve Earle, however. "Stylistically, I'm a country singer, and I will always be a country singer because I talk like this," he says in a striking Panhandle rasp. "What I'm doing is country and rock, and I don't think they are mutually exclusive terms." It is no easy matter to convince everyone, though. Guitar Town, his seminal 1986 MCA album, was full of great tunes -- Springsteen on a two-lane blacktop -- and should have settled all conflicts of style. But, he reports, "I'm at war with the record company on the West Coast about using steel guitar and mandolin, and I'm at war with Nashville over drums being too loud. But I think everyone is starting to become more comfortable with what I am."
At 33, four times married, Earle seems occasionally to be dedicating himself to Faron Young's country credo: "Live fast, love hard and die young." A fracas with a trouble-oriented Dallas cop last New Year's Eve will bring him to trial on an assault charge July 25, after finishing his new UNI album, Copperhead Road. He could be referring to both his legal exploits and his musical experiments when he predicts, "It's safe to say I'll never get on the Grand Ole Opry now." Copperhead Road mixes pertinent politics and a heavy beat and makes no apologies for either. Says Earle, neatly wrapping up and dismissing the deepest country conventions at once: "Anybody who is writing 150 positive love songs is lying about something."