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For me, though, every time I listened to those vocal harmonies I heard the sound of a steel guitar. If you were to write a harmony for those chords on a steel guitar, that’s exactly what you would play. Instrumentation has so much to do with the way a music form evolves: to my ears beatboxing sounds like a drumkit played through a tiny set of speakers that are being overworked, to take an example from another genre.

As to why these sounds evolved, well, again, it’s a difficult question. In Daniel Kingman’s book “American Music: A Panorama”, he suggests that country music is usually “played on those stringed instruments that are easily portable”. Which sort of makes sense, but he goes on to say that “the dominant instrument in country music is unquestionably the fiddle”. So he’s talking about something much less evolved than the modern, Nashville-styled sounds of “Raising Sand”.

I find myself asking similar questions whenever I listen to Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball”. What is it about this album that is so Country? It’s produced by Daniel Lanois, and sounds, in many ways, exactly like other albums he’s produced – notably Bob Dylan’s “Oh Mercy” and “Time Out of Mind”. Yet there’s something else to it, that makes it definitively a country album, though a fairly progressive one.

I think a large part of it is simply that, as a performer or producer or whatever, you try to sound like other people a lot of the time. Even when you want to push the envelope, you still generally want to have some reference point. To take a cynical-sounding perspective, country music (and every other genre) sounds like it does because everyone makes music that sounds like stuff that’s come before. Of course, that’s not a bad thing. Every musician must skirt the line between giving listeners the confronting/exciting New, and the comforting/evocative Familiar. Working within genre boundaries is a particularly useful way of doing that.

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