Eddy Arnold gets defaulted because he was a New Yorker that found a way to make money without the ability to be Frank Sinatra or a pop flavor of the time.
To his credit, some of the softer voices that followed (like Ray Price) were just doing what Eddy already had done.
The one country artist in my list that I omitted shamefully (and everyone else as well) is Elvis.
Conway followed what Elvis laid down, though his country appeal turned into something else, Elvis has been copied in country music as much as Jimmie, Hank, Lefty and Ernest.
I look at Top Ten strictly by who's copying who.
Some copied early, like George Jones (Hank Williams), but created their own unique style. Merle, as much as I like many of his songs, was basically Lefty Frizzell.
I'm a Johnny Cash fan, probably because you can go back to Jimmie and the Carter Family in Bristol, all the way up to the present and no one ever created a musical sound or sounded like Johnny Cash before or since. Willie is the same way. His voice is like a Telecaster, like it or not, and cuts through everything else.
Vern sounded like Jones, Haggard sounded like Lefty, Coe sounded like Haggard.
Loretta was basically Kitty Wells. There wasn't any voice like hers before Patsy.
Everyone has their favorites, but to me there's really only about 12 acts that make up what everyone else in country music have either refined with imitation or just plain copied.
Country music is simplistic, like heavy metal roots. Its either the Led Zepplin lane or the Black Sabbath lane....
