This is the next part of the story of “Austin City Limits” The new “Outlaw Country,” or “Progressive Country” as its performers had come to prefer as its moniker, by the early 1970s had begun to find an audience in the live music halls around Central Texas and some play on Texas country radio stations. The fresh approach and melding of different genres had also attracted the attention of some recording executives who presciently saw that such a sound had the potential to sell records. However, it needed a bigger push to take it more “national” and to draw in the mass appeal of a broader audience.
What it needed was a medium that drew potential fans to its style, and in the 1970s the most direct way to accomplish such a feat was through television. While the “outlaw” sound was making its mark, there were changes afoot in some of the delivery of the nation’s broadcast channels. For decades the United States’ concept of free-market conveyance of public television signals had relied on private enterprises using those airwaves to deliver content.
It was a system that worked in a broad sense, but also limited that content to whatever appealed to a very broad, very diverse market. Critics pointed out that such an approach resulted in an often bland and at times intellectually limited product that—in the minds of the most extreme detractors of the industry—had a deleterious affect on the nation as a whole. For that and other reasons, Congress passed and Pr.
