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A while ago, I bought Doll Parton's The Grass is Blue, which is a collection of her original bluegrass songs. I'm not a country music fan, I find the current country music to be bland, boring and musically simplistic. The songs I've heard of a few decades ago are much more interesting, but I've never really got into them.
Dolly Parton's cheerful disposition is always attractive. I heard a song from her The Grass is Blue album in some public place, and asked about it. I then went and bought it.
I take back "I find the current country music to be bland, boring and musically simplistic." Jeff Bridges acted in the great film Crazy Heart, where he does much of the singing. Yes, the songs are a little repetitive, but the melodies are very good, and Bridges gives the songs energy and rhythm.
I heard Gillian Welch for the first time on some talk show, and was taken aback again at the strength of her melodies, which are clearly country influenced. As she says about her experience hearing a bluegrass band as a college student:
The first song [by the bluegrass band The Stanley Brothers] came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a tractor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs I'd grown up singing. All of a sudden I'd found my music.Although she's produced CDs since 1996, it is her recent albums that have made her more known.
Starbucks (yes, the coffee house) plays and promotes CDs of "non-mainstream" artists. After listening to a song, I asked the girl who were the vocalists. They are the Secret Sisters. Again, it's "contemporary" country, but with very distinct "old" country roots.
It's as though these singers do a lot of research on the old country songs, their styles and melodies, and reproduce them in their own idiosyncratic ways.
So I am a country music fan, after all!