Bobby Bones gets irritated when people try and say what does and doesn’t count as country music. He also doesn’t like it when people make a country record or song to try and make money but truly don’t care about the genre as a whole. Or when their career isn’t going well in another place, they try country music.
In an interview with Lance Armstrong on his podcast, Chris Stapleton talked about what real country music in 2024 is to him. He said, “There’s always a pop side to country music. And there’s always something a little grittier, and then some of it meets in the middle. I don’t ever get caught up in like, ‘Oh no, I hate that because that’s not country.’ I do what I like to do and a lot of what we do is not necessarily country. If you put me next to Alan Jackson or Merle Haggard or George Jones or Randy Travis or any of these guys who are kind of Mount Rushmore's of guys that sound like what we think are country music through and through, I don’t fit.”
Bones loved that Stapleton said if they were going to use those rules then he’s not country. Country music started to change sonically when they realized they needed to market it to a younger audience to make money, but that does not make it any less country!
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