Country and Western music have had a love-hate relationship for years. They used to be nominally joined, but what is now called country was until 1962 referred to as “Country+Western” in the trade magazine Billboard. Many still use the linked title, with the exception being the superb George Strait. It almost never applies to modern country radio.

The Capitol Nashville star Trace Adkins is one of the few bright spots in a radio medium now dominated by Kenny Chesney’s Jimmy Buffett-tinged beach ditties or by the endless countrified soft-rock mush which some computer apparently decided passes for country music nowadays.

In Adkins’s typically tell-it-like-it-is style, the former Louisiana oil platform roughneck early in his career grew frustrated when that type of radio programmer would give Adkins reams of market-research data to explain to him why that station couldn’t play his singles. “Radio guys will give me lots of reasons why they can’t play one of my songs,” Trace said. “Instead, they should just tell me it [expletive deleted].”

Happily for both Adkins and radio, in recent years his singles have found a happy home there. “Honky Tonk Badonk Adonk” and “Songs About Me,” among others, have been huge radio and dancehall hits. But Adkins, a tall drink of water who played football for Louisiana Tech, remains the strong, silent type who cares more about helping folks in the military than boosting his own ego. In June he said, “I drive a small truck. I don’t have to have the big jacked-up truck. I’m a practical guy.”

Fellow country star Brad Paisley, a West Virginian who is as talented a guitarist as there is working in any musical style today, is likewise coming into his creative and commercial peak both as a singer and a songwriter. Growing up, he was a fan of cowboy singers like Bob Wills, Asleep at the Wheel, and others.

“I’m good friends with Ray Benson. I really respect the jazz swing side of country music. On several of my albums, I have done what you would consider Western swing on some songs and truly relate to that style of music. As a guitar player and fan of some of the great Texas and Western artists there is nothing more fun to play than great driving cow jazz, as I call it.” But other influences on Paisley’s music have come into play as well. “Ticks” is a classic summer song and a Brad Paisley- Kelley Lovelace-Tim Owens cowrite.

“ ‘Ticks’ has been a lot of fun for us out on the road as a band, singer, and songwriter. There is nothing like taking a risk, knowing that this song was either going to be thoroughly enjoyed for what it was or totally misunderstood. But that is a typical example of a song that shouldn’t be taken too seriously and shows the effect a song can have on a career and in a live performance setting.

“I wrote this with Kelley Lovelace and Tim Owens, and I write a lot with both. Kelley and I go way back to college where we didn’t write a whole lot but we definitely became good friends. And that friendship became the basis of the songwriting team that creates some of these songs. We have a similar outlook on things. Between Kelley Lovelace, Frank Rogers, Chris Dubois, Tim Owens—and the list goes on—I don’t so much work with these people as I am friends and practically family with these people. That friendship allows the creative process to spawn things like the “Fishin’ Song” or “Ticks” or “Online”—these strange, left-field ideas that I really think only people who are close to one another and trust can create. You get a glimpse into the fun dynamic between us when you hear these songs. I know when I listen to one of my albums I see it as a complete collaboration with these people, the producer, the musicians, etc.”

Paisley became a daddy for the first time this year. Huckleberry Paisley arrived shortly before Father’s Day. Paisley’s breakthrough hit, 1999’s surprise No. 1 “He Didn’t Have To Be,” was ironically about the relationship between a young son and the boy’s new stepfather. Yet that classic story song almost didn’t make Brad’s debut album. “The song was so new that we hadn’t even demoed it, and the album was supposedly already finished,” Paisley says, “but I played it for a group of radio guys and they loved it. So we added it to the album.” The split between country and Western is hardly new.

Traditional Western and cowboy music have been operating generally outside the country mainstream for half a century at least. “Cool Water,” the last Top 10 country radio single by Roy Rogers’s legendary band, the Sons of the Pioneers, came in 1948. Billboard chart authority Joel Whitburn refers to Gene Autry as “Hollywood’s first singing cowboy,” and Autry’s 8-million selling “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” debuted in December 1949.

“Bluesy cowboy singer” Trent Willmon supports keeping the cowboy in country radio.

Thankfully, as with everything else about the West, the tradition of cowboy music is being kept alive and well by a hearty bunch of rugged individualists who simply refuse to let it die. And as artists like Red Steagall, R.W. Hampton, Brenn Hill, Michael Martin Murphey, Ken Overcast, Trent Willmon, Dan Roberts, and Don Edwards ply their musical and lyrical trade around the West and around the world, this marvelous legacy continues to grow and prosper.

Steagall, the Texan who charted more than 20 country hits in the 1970s, including “Lone Star Beer and Bob Wills Music,” faced the harsh realities in the early 1980s. “Radio was not going to play my honky-tonk anymore, and I had to figure out what I wanted to be,” he said between shows this summer. “I had always idolized the cowboy way of life, but until then, I had never allowed myself to write it. For five years, I didn’t write songs at all.”

He turned to cowboy poetry instead, beginning with works like “Ride for the Brand” and “The Wagon Tongue.” The songs then flowed out like water, all in a cowboy vein, and Steagall’s second career was soon in full swing. This year he came full circle, doing an album with top Nashville stars including Toby Keith, Reba McEntire, and Charley Pride of his old songs called Here We Go Again (Wildcatter Records).

Trent Willmon grew up on a ranch in the West Texas town of Afton. He is bluesy cowboy singer whose early hits included “Beer Man” on Columbia. Like many top artists these days, he has exited a major label to sign with an independent (Compadre). Willmon considers himself a songwriter most of all. Among his heroes is his fellow Texan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, a blues guitar genius and singer who perished in a 1990 helicopter crash at 35. “I put a couple of cowboy songs on my last album,” Willmon says. “In West Texas, I started rodeoing and I found out about Chris LeDoux.

Hill has found a faithful audience in young people

He was such a bright, shining star. I thought Chris could walk on water. Keeping the tradition of Chris and of cowboy music going is real important to me. There’s such a lack of cowboys and the cowboy lifestyle on country radio these days.” Utah’s Brenn Hill, whose idols also included LeDoux as well as John Denver, says that Denver “was one of the few mainstream artists who contemporized the West in his music. I think John embellished upon the harsh beauty of the West and the environment here.”

Hill has lived in the Beehive State all his life, except for a few months here in Nashville in 1996. “I learned to be a songwriter on Music Row. There’s an unwritten rule for commerciality in songwriting,” he said. “For a time I thought I’d commute between Utah and Nashville, but then I realized that the music publishers and the label executives on the Row really didn’t get me.”

He’s now touring to support his new album, What A Man’s Got To Do. He generally works in the intermountain region of the West, and Hill is thrilled that he constantly sees young fans at his shows. “I think the kids love this music because it’s real,” he says. “A lot of them are looking for something in their lives with a little more substance.”

Another substantial talent is the mustached, working cowboy R.W. Hampton, who ranches in the tiny town of Miami, N.M., between his showbiz gigs. Like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Hampton is a singing cowboy who doubles as a movie actor. This Western polymath even does a one-man dramatic presentation.

Hampton, who possesses a rich baritone voice, grew up in Richardson, Texas, listening to all kinds of music: Johnny Cash, Sarah Vaughan, and many more were early influences. He got a guitar in high school “as an outlet for teenage energy,” and during the summers he worked as a ranchhand. “I took the guitar with me,” he said. “A lot of the ranches where I worked didn’t have electricity.”

Today his electric bill covers the cost of the only kind of radio he truly loves: satellite radio (XM and Sirius) broadcasters, which have been a godsend for lovers of countless types of music—as well as for long-haul truckers.

Montgomery and Gentry, both native Kentuckians, debuted in 1999.

In the 1960s, Hampton also idolized the heroes of B Westerns. He studied the earlier work of Will Rogers. “Will was in the Ziegfield Follies back in the 1920s, and he made about 80 pictures,” Hampton says. “The music and the acting Americancowboy.com 2007 September-October 47 kind of goes together.”

Hampton hooked up with Kenny Rogers and began a successful movie career in Westerns. Hampton’s been cutting records since 1984; one of his most recent was a 2005 Christmas album. His one-man theatrical show is called The Last Cowboy. It poses the haunting question, “What would we do if we lost the cowboy?”

Montana’s Ken Overcast, who hails from the aptly named Paradise Valley, is helping make sure that never happens. “This is the best year we’ve ever had with our music,” he said from his 2,500-acre ranch in June. “For me, the Western lifestyle is my passion, and music is a reflection of that. I grew up in this country. It was a wonderful, idyllic life, but we worked like dogs. I grew up in the same place as my parents and grandparents. I’ve been married to the same gal for 40 years, and I live within 15 miles of where three generations of my family has lived.

“Some people,” Overcast continues, “can’t fathom that. I went to a country school with two rooms and just three classmates.”

A champion yodeler, Overcast combines cowboy songs with Western swing in concert and on his records. And what of today’s country radio? “I hate it,” he says. “Mainstream country all sounds the same, and to me it’s a vain attempt at regurgitated 1970s rock’n’roll.”

A notable exception among country stars is the blue-collar Kentucky duo Montgomery Gentry, which consists of Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry. Their hits have included Jeffrey Steele’s Western epic “My Town.” Montgomery, who lives on 250 acres of horse country in the Bluegrass State, grew up adoring cowboys and still does. “Cowboys lived off the earth,” he said. “That’s what I loved about ’em. They’d get out and they’d write those beautiful songs underneath the stars. And they work for a living. Besides, cowboys came up with the first truly American sports—rodeo and shooting.”

B Westerns inspired Montgomery as well. His movie hero was always the 5-foot-5 Texan Audie Murphy, who was the most decorated American combat soldier in World War II and then made 49 movies before perishing in a 1971 airplane crash. Sadly, the last one was called A Time For Dying (1969), in which Murphy played Jesse James.

It was another James—the author Will James—whose books like The Lone Cowboy helped inspire the native Easterner Don Edwards to pick up the guitar at age 10. Edwards moved to Texas at 16 to experience life in oil fields and on ranches himself. By 1961, he had been hired by the original Six Flags Over Texas. Few artists have done as many cowboy classics, such as “Little Joe The Wrangler” and “The Master’s Call.”

Overcast's music reflects his connection to his Montana home and the Western lifestyle he's lived there.

“I got to know Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Marty Robbins personally,” he says. “I also made a record with Rex Allen.” Unlike many of his peers, Edwards insists that country and Western can and should live and work together and that lines between styles of music are unnecessary. “Why can’t you play Chris LeDoux or Michael Martin Murphey on country radio?” he asks. “Lots of Western music was not country anyway. It was jazz. Here’s another example: Western and bluegrass music. Some say never the twain shall meet. Yet from a historical standpoint, Bob Wills and Bill Monroe both often used twin fiddles in their bands. And Bob Wills considered himself a blues singer.

“Marty Robbins was very successful. He sang country and he sang cowboy,” Edwards says. “When I was starting out, I felt that I had a calling to revive these great, old cowboy songs. People just weren’t learning those songs.”

Thanks to Edwards and his fellow singing cowboys and cowgirls, now a whole new generation of fans are learning and loving this music. And thanks to the handful of gifted country stars that radio still plays, like Paisley, Adkins, Strait, and Montgomery Gentry, hope springs eternal along Music Row as well.