What most people regard as Western was phased-out of Country Music at least 40 years ago. Performers like Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart and Buck Owens may have been the product of California, the most Western of all states, but they pioneered a 'hard' sound based around electric guitars. The subject matter was 'relationships' and 'honky tonks' just as with today's Country Music.

Chet Atkins, whom I greatly respect as a person, was the most important force behind the conversion of Country & Western, an assortment of 'people's music' variants, into what it is today: a carefully-crafted and quality-controlled form of Popular Music aimed almost exclusively at White rural people and White Southerners.

Western, in it's own right, has enjoyed a comeback in the last twenty years. Mostly a 'cult item' since Western performers like Ian Tyson seldom get played on commercial Country stations. While in California a few years back, I stopped into the biggest record store in the San Francisco Bay Area thinking that it would have a monster choice of Western CDs. There was nothing by Ian Tyson. I looked up the manager and she (a lady over 40) had never heard of Tyson and would not even order a CD of his had I wanted her to.

Some other names in the Western Revival are Michael Martin Murphey, "Red" Steagall, Don Edwards The Sons of the San Joaquin.