"Country music is where old genres go to die—or live," English professor and record-guide author David Cantwell truth-bombed at the EMP Pop Music Conference in Seattle last month. He was mainly talking blues chords, but in the '00s, the old stuff could just as well have been old-school Sugarhill-style hip-hop, via Kid Rock or Cowboy Troy. So now it's the '10s, and we've got Colt Ford: a 40-year-old, 300-pound Athens, Georgia, ex-golf-pro who road-dawgs 200 shows a year, revitalizing the kind of greasy, mud-spinning, r-dropping flows heard on early-aughts Southern-rap records. Since December 2008, he's put out two studio albums, a live album, and a Wal-Mart-exclusive EP/DVD—all on his own grass-roots Average Joe's Entertainment label. Three of those are currently... More >>>