ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some important steps in the establishment of country music and the formation of a country-music culture in Sweden. It focuses on the formative years from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. In the light of an ongoing discussion among Swedish country fans during the last fifty years, the chapter presents an outline of the process and some of the discourses surrounding it. The chapter uses the fan magazine Kountry Korral (KK), which was started in 1968 by young enthusiasts central to the emerging scene. KK is without competition the oldest and one of the most important of the active Swedish country magazines. Apart from the quality of the Swedish music and musicians, there are also two other interconnected issues being debated when it comes to making country in a non-American context: language and lyrics.
