Discovering Country Funk

The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin has discovered a wonderful compilation from Light In The Attic Records called Country Funk 1969-1975, whose title may shock listeners. Over the years, country music has earned an unfortunate reputation as one of the whitest and unfunkiest of genres—or worse, as the official music of rednecks, xenophobes, conservatives, and truck-driving suburbanites.




The riotous good-time music of Country Funk 1969-1975 is a product of this curious, glorious moment in musical history when dirty, long-haired country-rockers reclaimed hillbilly music from the slicksters who dominated mainstream country, refashioning the music in their own defiant image. It is a product of the same outpouring of ideas and originality that birthed the outlaw-country movement and the honky-tonk revival of the early ’70s fueled by idiosyncratic geniuses like Gary Stewart and Merle Haggard. MORE HERE