Country Star Tim McGraw Uses Rapper In 2004 Tour

Hip-Hop music has been meshed with almost every musical genre. Country music star Tim McGraw is breaking ground and incorporating the art form into his live stage show. McGraw’s 2004 tour is being hailed as a milestone event due to the inclusion of an African-American rapper named Cowboy Troy, who rhymes during McGraw’s set. Troy, […]

Hip-Hop music has

been meshed with almost every musical genre. Country music star Tim McGraw is

breaking ground and incorporating the art form into his live stage show.

McGraw’s

2004 tour is being hailed as a milestone event due to the inclusion of an African-American

rapper named Cowboy Troy, who rhymes during McGraw’s set.

Troy, who is 6’5

and 260 pounds, performs with McGraw on the song “She’s My Kind

of Rain” complete in cowboy hat, boots jeans and a large belt buckle.

“CTB”

is no stranger to rapping. He started his career in 1989 and honed his rhyming

skills in bars around the Dallas, Texas area before heading for the bright lights

of Country music capital, Nashville, Tennessee.

He has released

three independent albums, Hick-Hop Hysteria (2001), Beginner’s

Luck (2002) and Vintage (2003).

“One day

in the future, people might point to the current Tim McGraw tour as the start

of something big,” music critic Jim Harrington wrote. “I’m not talking

about McGraw’s career. That’s already plenty big enough. I mean the mainstreaming

of a new musical trend: hip-hop country. In five years, if not sooner, when

rap mingles as easily with country as it now does with rock, scholars will see

McGraw’s 2004 tour as a milestone event.”

And despite purists’

objections to the mixing of the two art forms, the crowd that attended McGraw’s

show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California embraced the

concept.

“I’m a country

girl and my husband is more rap and rock,” Brianne Critchley told the

Alameda Times Star. “But I really liked it.”