John Travolta is responsible for the decline of both disco and country music (Urban Cowboy). Neither were the same after his movies came out.
I wonder about what sort of impact “Grease” had, lol?
“John Travolta is responsible for the decline of both disco and country music (Urban Cowboy).”
He may have very well been the cherry on the sundae regarding country’s decline during that time. What happened to country music had a lot to do with ones like Chet Atkins and others in Nashville during the late 1950s developing a more adult oriented pop sound to counter the raw edged country and blues and black influenced music that Elvis personified. Therefore, the “Nashville Sound” with the strings and the horns and the background singers and also featured that less country twangy sound came about for better or for worse for all of those years up to and past 1980.
That’s why Randy Travis or Dwight Yoakam or Keith Whitley (RIP), George Strait or The Judds and others who personified the more rootsy, new traditionalist music of the later 1980s initially got turned down by Nashville music executives as sounding “too country”. I can even recall comments from Buck Owens saying his distinctive Bakersfield sound was meant for the dance clubs in California and Texas as opposed to the marketing people in Nashville. And, IIRC, Hank Williams Jr in his book “Living Proof” did not have a lot of nice things to say about what Atkins and others like him did to country during that time and that his (Bocephus’) own music did not conform to what the Nashville people wanted out of him.
Are you kidding?
Urban Cowboy made country go through the roof. It was on the REGULAR charts big time for a few years AFTER that. Even in the country surge in the ‘90s, which I loved, country did not make it on the pop 40.
SNF OTOH was in the middle of the disco craze so it more punctuated it rather than driving it.
Travolta brought country music and western fashion to the Northeast, where it flourished for a few years. There was neither before Urban Cowboy.
“John Travolta is responsible for the decline of both disco and country music (Urban Cowboy). Neither were the same after his movies came out.”
I used to go to Gilleys in Stinkadena before Urban Cowboy came out. After the movie, the whole atmosphere changed and the place got absolutely packed. It never was the same after.