For some country fans, the rise of the Nashville Sound in the mid-1950s signaled the end of country music's first golden age. With its sweet choruses and string sections sanding off all the rough edges in an effort to reach a crossover pop audience, the Nashville Sound can also be seen as country music's first acknowledgement of the existence of a world outside of their own. The attempts to fuse pop music sensibilities to a country lilt — sometimes only the most tenuous connection to its roots was present — brought the music for the first time to audiences who had previously viewed the genre as little more than a joke. While it's commonplace nowadays to see a Garth Brooks album on top of the pop charts, this separation of marketplaces was no more in evidence than in the early 1950s.

At this stage of the game, there was no such thing as crossover music; if a pop audience was going to hear Hank Williams' latest hit (which had already sold thousands of copies in the country market), they were going to hear a crooner like Tony Bennett or Frankie Laine sing it. You didn't hear "Sixteen Tons" by Merle Travis on pop radio, you heard Tennessee Ernie Ford's pop version of it. Not unlike the rhythm and blues field, country music was denied access to the big national audience; conversely its traditionalism became even more trenchant as it continued preaching to the converted.

But by the mid-1950s, country music was in a bit of a tailspin. The undeniable influence of rock 'n' roll — led by Elvis Presley — had made several inroads into its core audience. Suddenly the younger generation country audience wanted something newer and more uptown. Some artists like Marty Robbins and Webb Pierce took a stab at the new music while others waited for it all to blow over. But something happened in the meantime which changed the course of country music forever in how it was presented and how it was played: crossover, handed over to country music via the success of Presley, had arrived.

Although this broader basing of the audience had its seeds in the work of Eddy Arnold, 1957 and 1958 were banner years in the roots of country-pop fusion. Johnny Cash's "Ballad of a Teenage Queen", Ferlin Husky's "Gone", and Marty Robbins' "A White Sport Coat" all catered to the teenage market and met with far more success than the hardcore honky tonk sounds that were still topping the country charts. By the late 1950s, the sound of a fiddle sawing away or the keening wail of a steel guitar could barely be heard on mainstream country records. If an "authentic" country record was going to crash the upper regions of the pop charts, it would be more on the order of novelty tunes like Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans" or Stonewall Jackson's "Waterloo". In the meantime, the sound of country records was becoming more and more homogeneous.

This pasteurization of the music had a lot to do with Nashville's emergence as the center the country music universe. All of the major labels had offices there, all of the important studios, producers, and song publishers were there, and the Grand Ole Opry was still an omnipresent figure in dictating the pecking order in the genre's star system. It was also the rise to prominence of the Nashville session player, musicians who neither toured with regular bands or seldom recorded under their own name. By the middle 1950s there was a solid core of reliable players who were used on almost every session, regardless of label affiliation or stylistic diversions. A great many of these players possessed talents that were far beyond the scope of what they were laying down behind country artists and several of them indeed had inclinations toward jazz and smoother sounds. If Nashville was going to become a part of the big mainstream music picture, somebody was going to have to do something.

One person that was in a position to do something was guitarist Chet Atkins. A guitarist with wide range of musical tastes running from the Carter Family to jazz to classical, Chet had risen to prominence both as a session player and as a solo recording artist. By 1957, his profile as a link to these musicians and as a forward-thinking individual led to his installation as chief of RCA Victor's country division in Nashville. Atkins set out to create a style that would still preserve some elements of country music while simultaneously removing all lyrical references to rural life and any hard twang still present in the sound. He worked with a group of players whom he would often jam with in Printer's Alley — Floyd Cramer on piano, Buddy Harman on drums, Bob Moore on bass, and Boots Randolph on tenor saxophone. Also moving things along in a similar direction was the work of producer-studio owner Owen Bradley.

Both Atkins and Bradley found that this new synthesis was just the ticket in reaping a bigger market share for the music. But the Nashville Sound was only accessible to singers who could adapt to the sound; Atkins brought pop success to singers like Don Gibson ("Oh Lonesome Me" and "I Can't Stop Loving You"), Skeeter Davis ("The End Of The World"), The Browns ("Three Bells"), and most significantly Jim Reeves, who managed to hit the inside corner of the plate with every release and simultaneously appealing to both pop and country audiences. Owen Bradley was making similar inroads with his recasting of big-voiced honky tonk singer Patsy Cline into a pop hit-making machine, changing the role of women in country music forever. Another artist eminently qualified to take on the new music was Marty Robbins, whose countrypolitan stylings served him in good stead right until his death in 1983.

But not everyone in Nashville approved of these stylistic changes. There was a backlash in the country community — both with its core audience and the older performers — and the battle lines were drawn. While a former honky tonker like Ray Price was now standing in front of an orchestra with a string section, older artists like Porter Wagoner made only marginal concessions to the style, seeing the Nashville Sound as an artistic compromise necessary for making records. Meanwhile, the Texas-California contingent — who had moved the music forward in the previous decade with the birth of Western Swing — was developing its own strain of honky tonk music that would soon signal the line where hard country started and Countrypolitan ended.

But in the end, country will evolve once again and, in an odd way, the genre has the rise of the Nashville Sound to thank for it. Its success, while alternately broadening and dividing its fan base, has provided the music with its essential stylistic yin and yang. There couldn't have been any radical movements in the music (60s honky tonk, Outlaw music, neo-traditonalism) or conservative bastions clinging to older styles if the Nashville Sound had not created the center from which to provide these alternatives.