Cody Johnson is bridging the Texas-Nashville musical gap

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Ever since Willie Nelson left Nashville in the early 1970s to return to Texas, there's been a large chasm between the "red dirt" country artists working primarily in Texas and Oklahoma and the polished, radio friendly music being produced in Nashville.

Even today, there's a separate country radio chart for Texas stations and the independent country acts that are popular there often get labeled in Nashville as just "regional artists."

East Texas-raised Cody Johnson spent more than a decade in that musical scene and heard the distrust that many Texas country artists had for Nashville record labels.

"There were a lot of artists from that era who were probably a bit arrogant in the fact that 'I'm from Texas and I've got this and you're not going to tell me what to do,'" Johnson said. "I think there has been something lost on some guys from Texas that maybe thought they were Willie or Waylon."

Johnson, a former rodeo cowboy turned country singer, wants to bridge that gap by straddling the traditional and the modern, Texas and Nashville, and he's finding an audience his own way.

Warner Music Nashville's executive vice president for A&R Cris Lacy tried to sign Johnson for years, but he kept rejecting their offers. Lacy knew that major labels often got stereotyped as being heavy handed with new artists by changing their sound or forcing they work with certain producers. But she was also trying to overcome a cultural challenge.

"There's so much pride in the Texas music scene because it is so special," Lacy said. "They are very protective of it. And each Texas artist has to think about when they move on to the next step, are they going to alienate the people that believed in them?"

As an independent artist, Johnson released two albums that reached the top 10 without major label support or...