My slow (then, fast) conversion to country music in the 80s has been one of the pivotal passages of my nearly 70 years. Having said that, I rarely listened to contemporary country as available on radio. Merle Haggard, Emmylou and Cash were my gateway drugs. The Big Exceptions were Ricky Skaggs and John Anderson.
I have been listening to Anderson (his latest, YEARS, is *****) a bit lately and have fallen in love all over again. So much to love. The most seductive smart ass country voice ever invented. The cool covers not just of country greats but The Stones, Dylan and Bruce as well. Ability to rock. Ability to make you laugh. Ability to make you cry buckets of tears. And his uncanny ability to sound old and modern at the same time.
Not only did he have, like Emmylou, impeccable taste when it came to choosing material but his own efforts with the pen were always compelling.
C90 Lounge 
Thank you very much! I guess some of my “gateway drugs” were different from yours, but (circa 1980 or so) John Anderson was most definitely one of my Big Exceptions, too!
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Hmm. Since there’s a “circa,” please feel free to overlook the “or so.”
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good to know! Let me guess who your gatekeepers were: Maddox Brothers and Rose?
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The Maddox Brothers and Rose were definitely among the gatekeepers, but there were lots of “tour guides” as well.
Thinking back now, I remember as a kid enjoying the kinds of folk songs that surely played a foundational role in the development of country music as such. I also remember listening to collections of 1950s-era hits that included people like Marty Robbins, who in a sense straddled the two categories of rock ‘n’ roll and country (especially of the more pop-oriented variety). And, soon enough, I started becoming familiar with blues and traditional, old-time American music. So it’s possible that Jimmie Rodgers and also the Carter Family may have been the artists who paved the way for my eventually paying attention to contemporary country. I started listening to Hank Williams as well, and my fondness for 50s and early 60s rock ‘n’ roll, including Bill Haley and the Comets, made for a straightforward transition into liking (for example) Western Swing, and rockabilly, and all the rest of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_-StDp5tM
But I also recall a moment that was something of a turning point for me. By my mid-teens, after I’d moved from England to Southern California, I was listening to all sorts of music, and I was particularly enthusiastic about the punk explosion or revolution of the later 1970s. It didn’t hurt that some of the bands emerging at the time — and here I’m thinking of the Cramps and the Blasters — were essentially combining or blending several types of music that I already liked. So I, along with many of my friends, would tune in religiously to the Rodney on the ROQ show to find out all about the new releases and the upcoming gigs and whatever else was involved in “the scene.” On one occasion, Rodney had the band X over as guests. Billy Zoom (who at that time was himself a kind of bridge between the rockabilly and punk subcultures in LA) chose to spin the George Jones single of “Life To Go.” This was actually the 1960 version of a song which Jones had written in the 1950s and which had been a hit as performed by Stonewall Jackson. In any case, I was left stunned. I’m now pretty sure that this experience was what made me realize I liked country music IN GENERAL, so that from then on I started keeping an ear out for the more modern or contemporary country artists as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVr8vV8rNs
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