The Rhinestone Cowboy Generation Urban Cowboy (1980)
Urban Cowboy is the visible face of a country-pop crossover that had been building since the mid-1970s. The picture did not invent the moment; it crystallized it. Five years of country radio creep, Western-wear retail growth, and Nashville-pop production decisions converged in 1980 around the picture, the soundtrack, and Gilley's, and the resulting cultural form — the early-1980s "urban cowboy" boom — defined country radio's commercial frame for the rest of the decade.
The lineage starts in 1975
The country-pop crossover begins, by most accounts, with Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" (1975) — number one on both the country and pop charts, a Nashville-produced single about a Western-wear performer in New York. The song named the contradiction the genre would spend the next decade working through: the cowboy as a costume worn for an audience that had no functional connection to ranching or rodeo. From Campbell forward, the country-pop crossover is in motion.
"Rhinestone Cowboy was the song that taught country radio it could be both Nashville and Top 40 at the same time. It was a country song with a pop arrangement and a pop chorus. After that, the gates were open." — Robert K. Oermann, Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain (2008) (book, not available online)
Crystal Gayle's "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" (1977) followed; Kenny Rogers's "Lucille" (1977) and "The Gambler" (1978); Dolly Parton's "Here You Come Again" (1977); Mickey Gilley's run of crossover hits including "City Lights" and "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time"; Eddie Rabbitt; Crystal Gayle; the Eagles, who were Nashville-adjacent in arrangement if not in radio format. By 1979, Nashville production was routinely making records that could be played on either format.
The films before Urban Cowboy
The film lineage runs in parallel. Smokey and the Bandit (1977), with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed; Every Which Way But Loose (1978), with Clint Eastwood; Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), with Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn — all picture the country-and-Western world for a mass audience and all underline the crossover the soundtracks were already executing. Honeysuckle Rose (1980) with Willie Nelson, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), and Urban Cowboy (1980) were the three country-and-Western pictures of 1980; Urban Cowboy was the highest grossing of the three.
Urban Cowboy was the inflection point
The picture released the moment outward. Western wear sales spiked. Country radio's market share grew measurably. Mechanical bulls were installed in suburban bars from Cincinnati to Long Island. The double-LP soundtrack — produced by Irving Azoff in parallel with the film — sold more than three million copies and produced two number-one country singles, Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love" and Mickey Gilley's cover of "Stand By Me." The album was the country-pop crossover commercial peak of the era (see The Soundtrack).
"Urban Cowboy and its soundtrack changed country radio for ten years. Before Urban Cowboy, country was a regional format. After Urban Cowboy, country was a national mass format. The picture is more responsible for the modern country radio business than any single document." — Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (3rd ed., 2010) (book, not available online)
What followed: the 1980s "urban cowboy" boom and bust
The boom peaked in 1981–82. Mechanical bulls fell out of fashion by 1983. Country radio market share retreated somewhat, though never to pre-1980 levels. Nashville production diversified — the "neo-traditionalist" countermovement (George Strait, Reba McEntire, Randy Travis) emerged in 1982–84 explicitly as a reaction against the country-pop excess the Urban Cowboy boom had named. By the mid-1980s the urban-cowboy moment was over and the next phase had begun.
"Country music had to invent neo-traditionalism in 1983 because the urban-cowboy thing had gone cartoonish. Strait and Reba and Travis were the cure for what Urban Cowboy had created. The cure was a return to the costume's actual referent — actual cowboys, actual two-step rhythms, actual fiddles." — Robert K. Oermann, Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain (2008) (book, not available online)
The picture's place in the lineage
Urban Cowboy is unusual in its lineage because it is the picture that is most ambivalent about the moment it commercializes. The film's structural argument (see The Decoy Climax) is that the cowboy-as-costume reading is what fails Bud and the cowboy-as-character reading is what saves him. The picture is, on its surface, the apotheosis of cowboy-as-costume — Travolta in the hat, the bull, Gilley's, the mechanical-bull fad it launched — and, on its structure, an argument against that reading. The film both is the urban-cowboy moment and is critical of the urban-cowboy moment, simultaneously, and the audience that bought the soundtrack and the boots was mostly unaware of the second register.
"Most viewers in 1980 saw Urban Cowboy as a celebration of the moment Latham named. A few viewers saw it as a critique. The picture is both. That ambivalence is the picture's most interesting feature." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1980)
The country-pop crossover continued without the picture, but the picture is the artifact that the moment is most often remembered through, and it remains the cultural shorthand for the entire urban-cowboy boom.