From the beginning, Strait was marketed—and celebrated—as an avatar of “real” country, at a time of anxiety about country’s identity. The genre was getting popular and, not coincidentally, going pop, growing a bit more glamorous and a lot harder to define. In 1981, the year Strait emerged, Mandrell topped the chart with “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” a charming ode to country authenticity (flannel shirts, the Grand Ole Opry, “puttin’ peanuts in my Coke”) that seemed both defiant and defensive—its piano-driven arrangement was practically soft rock. Strait, whose music was sometimes described as “hard country,” espoused a more uncompromising aesthetic. News accounts invariably mentioned that he was “a real, live cowboy,” and headline writers rarely resisted the urge to connect his name to his style (“SOME REAL STRAIT-FORWARD COUNTRY”; “PLAYING IT STRAIT”; “COUNTRY MUSIC SERVED STRAIT UP”). After a string of hits, Strait parted with his original producer, Blake Mevis, telling one reporter that Mevis “was looking for more mass appeal, middle-of-the-road stuff,” while he wanted to record “basic country music.”

Many of Strait’s early records were produced by Jimmy Bowen, who was smart enough not to interfere too much. “I once told George Strait he might try to liven up his stage act just a touch,” Bowen has recalled. (Strait says that he does not remember the conversation.) “He did: he waved his cowboy hat a few times during the show. But George could get away with just standing there looking and sounding terrific.” Strait’s popularity was driven by his status as a sex symbol. Women deluged the stage with flowers, so many that disposal became a serious problem. At first, the bus would stop by a dumpster on the way out of town; later, the crew devised a system for donating them to local hospitals. Reba McEntire, who was also conquering country music at the time, once recalled a show that she played with Strait in Oklahoma. “The girls was gettin’ after him so bad,” she said, “that the club had to stack bales of hay in front of the stage.” (She added her own honest appraisal: “He’s a sexy little rascal.”) When Strait toured in the mid-eighties, he brought along, as his opening act, Kathy Mattea, who was then a rising star. Onstage, she made a habit of calling Strait “the Mark Harmon of country music,” by way of acknowledging his appeal. “He was handsome, and he was low-key, and he was charming,” Mattea says now. For her, the Mark Harmon line was an act of professional self-defense, a way of winning over his female fans by endorsing their fandom. “I had to relate to those women,” she says. “I had to show them that I could feel what they felt.”

Strait didn’t brag about his heartthrob status. (“I don’t know what it is, but I hope it doesn’t stop,” he told one reporter.) He did, however, find canny ways to capitalize on it. One of his most popular songs is “The Fireman,” the sly chronicle of a ladies’ man who serves as a kind of first responder in local bars, “making my rounds all over town, puttin’ out old flames.” And, in 1992, he starred in a feature film, “Pure Country,” playing a moodier, more reckless version of himself: a country singer named Dusty, who grows disillusioned with the music business and its compromises. Strait was reluctant to make a movie, but he was persuaded by the producer Jerry Weintraub, and by Colonel Tom Parker, the former manager of Elvis Presley, who was a friend of Weintraub’s. After a concert in Las Vegas, Parker told Strait how important Hollywood had been to Presley. “Elvis hated making those movies,” he said—but they transformed him from a pop star to an icon. Strait read a script and agreed to make the film, with some caveats. In the part where Dusty, having absconded from his own tour, takes refuge at a ranch, Strait wanted to do his own roping. And although the script had him falling in love with a humble woman from his home town, he thought that a proposed kissing scene was unnecessary (and potentially embarrassing), so he and his co-star, Isabel Glasser, made do with meaningful looks.

“Pure Country” was released in 1992, and attracted middling reviews—“Fans of the star will enjoy it more than dispassionate observers,” Roger Ebert said—and worse than middling returns, earning only fifteen million dollars at the box office. But the movie, which borrowed its plot from an old Presley vehicle, had an easygoing charm that encouraged repeat viewing. (Strait wears a white hat, and on two separate occasions he vanquishes a bad guy wearing a black hat.) “Pure Country” became one of the biggest home-video hits of the nineteen-nineties, and it has been a cable-television staple ever since. Near the end of the film, Dusty rejects sinful pyrotechnics, and recommits himself to the path of musical righteousness. “I’m going to play the guitar and sing,” he tells his manager. “No more smoke, no volcano blasts, and no more light shows.” In other words, Dusty finally sees the wisdom of conducting himself like George Strait. The film’s soundtrack inverted this process. “Heartland,” the movie’s energetic, rock-influenced opening song, marked a modest departure for Strait. “It’s about as rocked up and popped up as you can get and still pass it along to the country market,” he said at the time. At first, he hesitated to record it, until he realized that he could sing it in character, as Dusty. The song went to No. 1, and the soundtrack sold more than six million copies—it is the best-selling album of Strait’s career.

George Strait might be “pure country,” but country music has always been a mixed-up genre. As it happens, Hawaii, where Strait learned to sing, is one of the genre’s many wellsprings: it was there, in the late nineteenth century, that a guitarist named Joseph Kekuku figured out that he could bend pitches by laying the guitar on his lap and sliding a steel bar along the strings. In the early twentieth century, mainland musicians adopted the steel guitar, including Leon McAuliffe, a Texas virtuoso who played with one of the region’s most popular acts: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Wills was a fiddler, and in the nineteen-thirties and forties his group pioneered a style known as Western swing. This was dance music, fusing the lively rhythms of jazz to the lonesome sound of Western ballads, and Wills liked to call his group “the most versatile band in America.” (Among his big hits was “San Antonio Rose,” which was later recorded by Bing Crosby and Patsy Cline.) Wills had begun his career as a blackface minstrel, and most of his musical heroes were black jazz musicians, although his band was all white. His biographer, Charles R. Townsend, reported that Wills once, on a bender in Tulsa, asked a black trumpeter to join the group. “When Bob sobered up,” Townsend wrote, “he decided Oklahoma was not ready for an integrated band.”

By the time Wills died, in 1975, he was esteemed as a founding father of country music, even though he never thought of himself as “country,” in style or in sensibility. The term, as it is now used, is an abbreviation of “country and Western,” a category generally associated with rural white communities and meant to corral a wide range of styles that flourished from Appalachia to the Southwest. These styles were jammed together by a transformative technology: radio, and the “barn dance” variety shows that flourished on the airwaves. The most influential of these was the Grand Ole Opry, a Nashville show that began to be broadcast nationwide in 1939; it was so popular that it altered America’s musical economy, pulling in enough musicians and entrepreneurs to make Nashville the unquestioned home of country music. (Nowadays, hardly anyone stops to wonder why a city not known for ranching is synonymous with cowboy hats.) But a certain amount of tension between Nashville country and Texas country is built into the relationship, dating back at least as far as 1944, when Wills came to town to play the Opry and was nearly thrown out. The organizers were accustomed to string bands, and Wills insisted on performing with a drummer.

In an odd way, the rise of rock and roll strengthened country music’s sense of identity—after Presley, young people who chose to be country fans were also choosing to resist the hegemony of rock and pop. Strait was born in 1952, and by the time he got to high school he and his friends were listening to the Beatles and other rock-and-roll bands. Although the old country songs were part of the local environment, Strait didn’t start paying close attention until after college, when he encountered some albums by a brilliant and mercurial singer-songwriter from California: Merle Haggard, a country “outlaw” who was also obsessed with the genre’s history. In 1970, the same year as his anti-antiwar hit “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” Haggard released “A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills),” which helped Strait discover the Texas classics that became the foundation of his first live sets. Strait, like many of his peers and most of his successors, is in some sense a convert to the genre: he is country by birth, but also by choice.

The early Ace in the Hole Band recordings featured some songs written by Strait, including a wonderfully mopey lament, “I Just Can’t Go on Dying Like This.” But after Strait got his record deal he decided that he had neither the time nor the inclination to compose. “I was finding what I thought were better songs than what I was writing,” he says now. “Maybe I was intimidated, a little bit.” As Strait grew more successful, he became especially popular among Nashville songwriters, who like nothing better than a reliable hitmaker who always needs material. When Strait came to town to record, songwriters would lie in wait outside the studio, carrying demo tapes with the most stereotypically George Strait songs they had: songs about cowboys, songs about Texas, songs about the Alamo. What Strait really wanted, though, was memorable and interesting melodies. His string of hits is in large part a result of his ability to identify a great tune. He would review hundreds of demos himself, often deciding within thirty seconds whether a song sounded like something he might want to cut. Occasionally, he asked to alter a word or two; in “All My Ex’s,” a reference to the Brazos River became a reference to the Frio River, which flows closer to his home town. Often, though, Strait learned each song quickly and sang it much the same way it sounded on the demo.