yeah i know but i dont buy it cos everything else changes around it
I don't buy it because country really does change, and did change quite rapidly throughout its history. Something like (and I'm summarizing 2 intertwined lineages here: "country" and "bluegrass", not to even mention "western", which is its own lineage):
1920s-30s: Jimmie Rodgers, swing bands, other early figures, the foundations emerge for all country
30s-40s: Western Swing ascends, bluegrass develops, Merle Travis invents Travis Picking
40s-50s: proto-Honky Tonk emerges as a stripped down western swing, Scruggs revolutionizes bluegrass banjo playing forever. Elvis emerges from Western Swing and blues.
50s-late 60s: Nashville sound (Chet Atkins, studio string orchestras) ascend, Bakersfield sound (what most people think of as "Honky Tonk", Johnny Cash etc) develops as a response, explicitly pulling from Rock & Roll.
60s-70s: Big Rock Music discovers country, esp in '69-'70. Bob Dylan makes a country album. The Byrds make a country album. The Dead show up. Bluegrass musicians start doing psychedelics.
80s onward is where things get weird. It seems like the "rock" side of things captured a series piece of the energy that used to be within older country music, leaving only this sort of post-Nashville sound with guys like George Strait and Dwight Yoakam being the only vaguely listenable ones, and metal starting to take over as the "folk music of the American south".
This is effectively the same trajectory as jazz, where the music becomes stagnant around/after the 1980s, its energy displaced into an entirely different genre (in jazz's case, hiphop). Post 1980s is also where you start seeing self-consciously "retro"-styled acts (well, okay, you had Bob Wills revival groups every decade after the 1950s, but that doesn't really count... right?).
The final result seems to be that country was left with all the stuff that "wouldn't fit" into other styles of music, mostly Christian and suburban bullshit, hence its decline and subsequent hatred. But there's a lot of great old stuff out there between like... the beginnings of recorded music, and 1990.
