At least some of the increased interest in the Mumford & Sons type stuff may be related to this as well - I know a lot of the audience is young people well outside the normal audience for country, but I also see that it can appeal strongly to people in the country base - thinking of my younger half-sis from OK who (along w/ friends) is clearly a big fan. Anecdotal, so not good for generalizing, but I see some of that. Some overlap between what might have at one time been more disparate groups.

I also feel like it's kind of hard to be completely "rural" anymore, either, the kind of culture that contributed to country music in the first place. There are poor people in less-densely populated areas, but they aren't culturally isolated in the same way so that the musical blending isn't a self-conscious thing as much as what young people in areas like mine are often like - grew up exposed to as much mainstream music as country, so that their music often sounds like that: pop but w/ some of the traditional conservative tropes mixed in.

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