This is the first book to analyze the phenomenon of country music outside the USA in a global and transnational way.

Country music, as a commercially recorded popular music form, and has been around for 100 years. Despite its long history and its claims to tradition and classicism, it is in fact growing in popularity as a genre and shifting and morphing as it does so. Not just through the stylings of major artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, but also in the development of smaller localized artists and scenes around the world. Country music is a transnational and transcultural phenomenon that has outgrown its American roots and continues to grow and flourish. Wherever country music has been taken up, it has taken on fascinating new forms and styles. From Indigenous artists in the Western Australia, to Iranian cowboy singers to Czech bluegrass, artists have used country sounds and themes to express political ideas and cultural commentary.

Demonstrating the breadth, diversity and depth of country music as a cultural phenomenon, this collection delves into which popular cultures becomes globalized and the types of stories we can tell through looking at them - about colonialism, about Indigenous cultures, about cultural adaptation, about commodification and about the co-opting of musical genres for political aims. As well as representing country music outside America in a geographic sense, these chapters also reveal country music 'outside' America in a conceptual sense.
Uniting scholars of popular music, history, Indigenous studies and gender studies, this book shows the ways in which country music is a thoroughly transnational and transcultural phenomenon and can no longer be considered purely 'American music.'