Urban Cowboy

Urban cowboy was a movement in American country music of the late 1970s and early 1980s that fused country's singing and songwriting with the soft-pop, soft-rock and occasional disco production of Los Angeles studios. Named for the 1980 film "Urban Cowboy", set in the Houston honky-tonk #Gilley's#, it favored polished arrangements, synthesizers and pop song forms, sentimental ballads and mid-tempo material aimed simultaneously at country and adult-contemporary radio. Its leading performers, among them *Kenny Rogers*, *Crystal Gayle* and *Eddie Rabbitt*, scored repeated crossover hits before the neotraditional reaction of the mid-1980s displaced the style.