Country Music Bracket Primer

As the @dnc led Rap Battle Royale winds itself down, the next bracket to hit the fabulous Record Shoppe ran by @YellowSnow will be a 32 act Country Music bracket. I'd like to thank both @YellowSnow and my favorite savage @Swaye for assisting in putting together the bracket.

On one hand, taking the history of Country Music and breaking it down to a Top 32 is daunting given the number of top acts throughout time. On the other, we largely found consensus fairly early in the process with the balance of the field and the hard parts came down to arranging the bracket and the ultimate seeding.

The criteria that we largely relied upon were as follows:

• Significance on the overall genre - in other words, if the act was excluded from the field would that have been a significant omission
  
• Trying to maintain balance between eras to ensure representation and acknowledging the evolution of the genre
  
• How dominant were you as an act during your era in terms of awards, album sales, tour $, etc.
  
• Can a reasonable argument be made for being able to win at least a round in the field - if not, there was no room for you in the bracket
  

In many respects, it's the last point that we really harped on when it came down to looking at acts. To single out a particular that didn't make the cut, both Swaye and YellowSnow were fairly adamant about Buck Owens. His legacy, contributions, and influence are tremendous. However, in ultimately listening to the relative acts, trying to find where to insert, who to remove, and the ability to actually win a match ended up excluding him from the field. Another example was someone like Vince Gill. In terms of awards, etc. few have ever been more decorated. However, trying to find the standout sound, finding where to insert, who to exclude, and making an argument for being able to reasonably win a matchup all added up to being excluded.

If I have one regret through the bracket it's that in a 32 bracket field you end up with only the heavy hitters and have to exclude some acts that probably would be more of a niche basis and perhaps be relatively new music to many on this board. In particular, this extends largely to the Texas/Oklahoma local scene. Acts I'd love to have found a way to get into a bracket would be acts like Robert Earl Keen, Pat Green, Randy Rogers, Wade Bowen, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Reckless Kelly, and the Eli Young Band.

In the end, as this bracket starts up, I think most will find choosing winners to be challenging. I'll likely be linking up 2-3 songs per artist as part of entry point as well as a brief narrative as to why they made the field. I'd encourage individuals to do a deeper dive on the acts if you're not particularly familiar with any of their catalogs as most of them are very, very deep. There are going to be few pushovers. It wouldn't shock me to see high seeds have challenges in the Round of 32. And without completely speaking for Yellow and Swaye, in our discussions I think the consensus is that we're very interested in seeing where this ends up as while we have our projections of where it will go, we also recognize it could go anywhere fairly quickly.

Looking forward to bringing this to the board and having a good time debating the battles, those that were included, and those excluded.