Ella Langley’s song “Choosin’ Texas” has spent 21 weeks atop the Billboard charts, outpacing songs such as Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” In the first week of August, for the first time ever, the top five songs on the Hot 100 were country singles. Even Taylor Swift’s latest release, a generically poppy tune tied to the movie “Toy Story 5,” has been marketed as a country song — an apparent acknowledgment that there are advantages to identifying with the genre she left behind in 2014. According to Nielsen’s multi-platform ratings, four of the top 10 TV shows this season are westerns or neo-westerns such as “Landman” and “Dutton Ranch.” And Gen Z, though more diverse than any previous generation, has been conspicuously participating in this rural revival, embracing line dancing, Shania Twain and Coors beer.

These apparently opposed trends may in fact be related. When America was overwhelmingly white and more closely tied to its rural past, country and western motifs could be seen as conventional and confining. But today, with much of the population concentrated in cities and on the coasts, and as white non-Hispanic Americans inch closer to becoming a minority, the mores and manners of the country’s rural working-class increasingly offer a source of authenticity.

How things have changed. In 1971, television executives canceled several popular but unfashionable country-fried TV shows, including “Green Acres,” “Hee Haw” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” in what came to be known as the rural purge. Though the purge had a commercial justification in the desire of television programmers to appeal to younger, more affluent and urban viewers, it also reflected a cultural judgment: Rural entertainment was déclassé, as were the people who liked it. (Fred Silverman, the CBS executive who spearheaded the programming change, denounced “mindless rural pap” in a speech to broadcasters.) Decades after the rural purge, we are seeing the opposite — a rural surge.

Down-home genres have gained new salience even outside red-state redoubts, sometimes as they are flipped and remixed by artists of all stripes. Beyoncé participated in this shift by donning long blond hair and putting out a country album, “Cowboy Carter,” in 2024. And witness the success of “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Shaboozey’s hip-hop inflected country single, or of “The Giver,” Chappell Roan’s queer take on Shania-style country pop.

Country music and other forms of rural culture were long associated with a kind of white conventionality (a reputation that developed even though these genres were shaped in significant ways by Black artists). By contrast, the modes and manners of a Black art form like hip-hop — or, in an earlier era, bebop — could offer consumers a nonconformist thrill. Social marginalization gave Black-coded cultural forms a coveted distance from mainstream society.

But today social marginalization means something different. After trading for decades on its countercultural identity, hip-hop, for example, has become thoroughly conventional. It reached a peak market share of nearly 30 percent in 2020 — a year in which one in five Fortune 500 companies pledged to support racial justice in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Today, it’s country music that — for all its commercial success — represents the underdog. As diversity, equi...