Country's mainstream at a modern crossroads: Who (or what) represents the next best steps?

In 2024, country music's rose-colored perceptions of itself pale versus the genre's realities.

Despite a push for age, gender and racial diversity around the turn of the last decade, 2023 saw the number of artists with country radio chart-topping hits cut in half from just three years prior.

What remains is a genre, more than ever, servicing a male-driven youth movement.

For the first six decades of country music's history, its sensibilities were borne in rural, blue-collar labor, stereotypical gender roles and nuclear family traditions.

To be sure, there is still plenty in country music for fans raised on singing cowboys, husbands being threatened with a trip to "Fist City," and the legacies associated with the Grand Ole Opry and "Hee Haw."

However, those notions are no longer central to the genre's pop-cultural growth.

In a series of articles, The Tennessean will examine the careers of artists once deeply represented in country music who are now at the fringes of stardom in the genre's future. Clear lanes to commercial success seem elusive for Warner Music-signed, rural Georgian-born sister trio The Castellows, Poplarville, Mississippi-born family trio Chapel Hart and 49-year-old, former MTV "Real World" reality TV star and still Nashville success-aspiring country artist Jon Brennan.

In other eras of country music's history, these artists' talents, combined with the archetypes they represent, would be a recipe for stardom.

However, country music's turn, coupled with economic and social data regarding America at present, highlights that success is possible, but perhaps much less inevitable than ever.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Country music: Fewer hits, new genre trends explain stardom fringes