Classic country is a music radio format that specializes in playing mainstream country and western music hits from past decades. Repertoire The radio format specializes in hits from the 1950s through the early 1980s, and focus primarily on innovators and artists from country music's Golden Age, including Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Kitty Wells, Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette, and Johnny Cash. Including some pre-1980s music, latter-day Golden Age stars and innovators Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck, Kenny Rogers, Emmylou Harris, and Merle Haggard, along with English and Spanglish language songs from 1960s to 2000s Tejano and New Mexico music artists like Freddy Fender, Johnny Rodriguez, Little Joe, Freddie Brown, and Al Hurricane. It can also include recurrent 1980s to 2000s hits from neotraditional country and honky-tonk artists such as George Strait, Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, and Randy Travis. History The format resulted largely from changes in the sound of country music in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, as it began moving to FM radio stations in and around major cities and absorbing some of the electric sound of rock music; similar pressures also were a factor in the development of the Americana format at around the same time. These new FM country stations excluded older "classic" country artists from their playlists, despite the fact that artists, such as Merle Haggard, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers and Emmylou Harris, were still actively performing and releasing new recordings, some of which were significant hits. When mainstream country radio began this practice in the mid-1990s, a large segment of older country fans felt alienated and turned away from mainstream country. Whereas modern country began moving to FM around this time, classic country remained (and still remains) one of the few formats that has proven ideal for AM radio, particularly in rural areas; prior to this transition, country was primarily an AM radio phenomenon and was most widely popular in rural areas. In 1998, Robert Unmacht, editor of the M Street Journal, said that thirty stations around the United States had switched to the format because many longtime country fans did not like what country radio was doing. The same practice has seemed to follow to television, where Country Music Television and Great American Country rarely play any music videos produced before 1996, leaving heritage and "classic" artists to networks such as RFD-TV, which features