Country music has become commercially successful both in the US and worldwide. It is perceived as a genre that values authenticity, which may be reflected in the choice of linguistic fea-tures, with (White) Southern American English (SAE) serving as a “default” variety. Given the recent diversification of the genre, the question arises whether the use of SAE features is still considered obligatory as a kind of “supralocal norm”. This study compares the lyrics of 600 highly successful songs by male and female artists from White Southern, Black Southern, and White non-Southern backgrounds. The aim is to test (i) whether morphosyntactic SAE features are used to index authenticity in the sense of having become enregistered for this music genre and (ii) whether non-Southerners engage in styling of relevant markers. It emerges that non-Southerners use more of these features than their Southern counterparts, providing prelim-inary evidence for “genre-fitting” as a means of indexing authenticity. However, there is only one marker, negative concord, which qualifies as a core Country feature used across all artist groups. As this item arguably is better categorized as vernacular universal, SAE morphosyntax appears to have largely lost its indexical function in Country, while accent features are still vital to establish cultural authenticity.
