Ian Munsick was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, and he seemed satisfied with what he saw in the dressing-room mirror: a shirt embroidered with roses, jeans secured by a belt buckle the size of a compact disk, long dark hair, a black cowboy hat with an eagle feather tucked into the band. Caroline Munsick, who is both his wife and his manager, provided some extra scrutiny. “Normally it’s, like, five hundred dollars for a makeup girl to come in here,” she said, corralling a few fugitive strands of his hair. “He gets it for free.” She handed him a bolo tie with a black clasp, to replace the turquoise one he had on.

“This is the bolo I gave you,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But it looks good with your outfit.”

Munsick cinched the black bolo, gathered his band members for a brief prayer, and then headed out to the stage, where four thousand people were waiting. In some sense he was in his element: Munsick is a country singer, and the Grand Ole Opry is a country institution, bringing together stars of varying magnitudes to join in its long-running revue. But part of Munsick’s considerable appeal is that he doesn’t quite fit in. He has a growing fan base to match his growing catalogue of great songs about being lovesick or homesick or some combination of both. Yet he sings not in a sturdy Southern baritone but in a high, transfixing tenor, which grows even higher when, from time to time, he upshifts into a mournful howl. His cowboy hat, the ultimate country accessory, actually marks him as a Nashville outsider: he grew up in Wyoming, on a ranch, and is preoccupied by the sounds and images of the wild, open West. “A lot of my music is about mountains, horses, ranchers, cowboys, coyotes,” he says, and he recently wrote a semi-autobiographical song called “Too Many Trees,” about a man who just can’t get used to the leafy landscape of Tennessee.

“I hope you like a little Western in your country,” Munsick told the crowd at the Grand Ole Opry, and evidently they did like it. Munsick was there to promote his second album, “White Buffalo,” which arrived last year and will be reissued, with four new songs, next month. The title song, which uses pastoral language to describe a breakup, has plenty of reverb and scarcely any percussion, and it transforms a romantic complaint into something resembling a spiritual quest. “I need help fixing what she broke / I got a better chance, I know / Of finding a white buffalo,” he sings, adding one of his howls, which audience members have been known to try to emulate. At the Opry, the audience wasn’t quite howling, but there was a big cheer when Munsick brought out the evening’s headliner, a brawny Texas cowboy named Cody Johnson, who has strung together enough hits to become a bona-fide star. Johnson had taken Munsick on the road as his opening act, and had been so impressed by one of Munsick’s songs, “Leather,” that he recorded it, and named his most recent album after it. In return, Johnson appears on Munsick’s current single, “Long Live Cowgirls,” which is not (as the title might suggest) a frolicsome celebration but a stately waltz; it has been streamed more than a hundred million times, though it hasn’t yet found an audience on country radio, where it has peaked at No. 54. At the Opry, Munsick and Johnson sang it together, after which Munsick submitted to a brief interview with the evening’s m.c., who asked him if there was anything to be found in Wyoming that couldn’t be found in Texas. This was a mischievous question—and maybe, in a room stocked with Cody Johnson fans, a perilous one. Munsick paused, and then smiled. “I’ll tell you what Texas has, that Wyoming does not,” he said. “City folk.”

There is a moment halfway through “The Blues Brothers,” the 1980 comedy blockbuster, when our heroes happen onto a roadhouse and look around. They are in Kokomo, Indiana, which is only a few hours’ drive from their beloved Chicago but seems much farther. When they ask the bartender what kind of music is typically on offer, she delivers a cheerful reply that became one of the film’s most quoted lines. “Oh, we got both kinds,” she says, brightly, “country and Western!” The joke was that those two kinds of music were really the same kind, and sometimes they have been. Starting in 1949, Billboard magazine has published a list of the nation’s most popular “country and western” records, and the hybrid term partly reflected the popularity and influence of cowboy culture. In that “Blues Brothers” scene, the jukebox is playing a song written by Hank Williams, an Alabama native who loved Western culture enough to call his band the Drifting Cowboys.

By the time “The Blues Brothers” was released, “country and western” was already something of an anachronism. Billboard had shortened the chart’s name to “country” in 1962, as Nashville was growing more central to the genre and its identity was growing more Southern—the cowboy endured, but mainly as a character and as a costume. Munsick is thirty, and when he was a boy he found this tradition annoying, and maybe even offensive. “I would see country-music acts wearing cowboy hats,” he told me. “Like, dude, you have never been on a horse before. Why are you wearing a cowboy hat?” His father, Dave Munsick, was the manager of a big cattle ranch before buying his own spread—a smaller alfalfa ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming—and Munsick grew up as part of two different family businesses: in addition to being a rancher, Dave Munsick is a fiddler and the leader of the Munsick Boys, a group devoted to proudly old-fashioned story songs about cowboy life. Compared with his country-music peers, Munsick is the Wyoming guy, but compared with his brothers and his father, who still work as full-time ranchers and part-time singers, he is the Nashville guy: the one who left home to join the music industry and sing songs that could be—and may yet become—big hits. “The kind of music that my brothers and my dad were playing, and are playing, is too raw for Nashville,” Munsick told me, but he sometimes takes the Munsick Boys with him on the road, as his opening act.

Munsick got to Nashville by enrolling at Belmont University, whose campus is there. He wrote songs while also getting work as a bass player. (At one point, he was performing with both a jovial hip-hop band, Tribal Hoose, and a country-rock group, Blackjack Billy.) In 2013, he recorded a sorrowful love song called “Horses Are Faster” and uploaded it to YouTube; as the song began to find an audience, people in Nashville took note. One of them was Caroline, an old acquaintance, who became his manager and, a few months later, his girlfriend, and then his wife. Munsick’s début album, from 2021, was called “Coyote Cry,” and during the past few years he has tried to lean in to Western identity without turning it into shtick. “He’s an anomaly,” Cody Johnson says, fondly, of Munsick. “Not a lot of people can get up there and yodel and wear a bolo.”

Munsick is a warm and thoughtful presence, with a bright smile and a tendency to pause, from time to time, when he talks—evidence of a lifelong speech impediment that comes and goes, he says, but that vanishes when he sings. “That emotion of longing always yields the best music, whether it’s longing for a girl, or for the old days, or for home,” he told me one afternoon, in a rehearsal studio west of Nashville. “I think that it actually helps me write music about Wyoming, not living there anymore. Because I miss it.” He was wearing a baseball cap advertising King Ropes, which is both a traditional Western tack store, serving northern Wyoming for more than seventy years, and a life-style brand, selling hats and other merchandise that might appeal to customers who are unlikely ever to be in the market for, say, forty-five feet of calf rope.

Western imagery is always cycling in and out of style. Since 2018, the television drama “Yellowstone,” which is set in Montana, has been updating the image of TV cowboys. And earlier this year, in Paris, Pharrell Williams, the creative director of Louis Vuitton, showed a boots-and-denim collection meant to celebrate “the iconography of American Western dress.” Munsick wants his listeners to understand that a cowboy need not be a caricature; he recently released a documentary, “Voice of the West,” which profiles a handful of Native American cowboys, including his boyhood friend Stephen Yellowtail, a rancher from the Crow Nation who worked as a stunt double in “1883,” a “Yellowstone” spinoff. Munsick calls Yellowtail an inspiration, and cast him as the lead actor in his first proper video, “Long Haul,” in which Yellowtail plays the cowboy—and Munsick is merely the singer.

Like most aspiring country stars, Munsick is hoping to get his music onto country radio, while trying not to get distracted by this quest; he says he checks his chart positions and other metrics no more than once a week. There are other ways to succeed, of course. In the past couple of years, the country-influenced singer-songwriter Zach Bryan, from Oklahoma, has packed arenas with scarcely any help from country radio stations, which have generally declined to play his music. And, even without a radio hit, Munsick is drawing growing crowds on the road; he will spend much of this summer and fall as the opening act for Lainey Wilson, one of the biggest new stars in the genre. After the Opry concert, Munsick headed out to the parking lot, where he said goodbye to his band—they would reunite a week later, for a gig in Florida. When Cody Johnson went to Nashville, he already had a following in Texas, and if necessary he might have been able to return there and make a decent living on the regional touring circuit. But Munsick doesn’t have a similar option. “Yeah,” he said. “We can’t really do that in Wyoming.” ♦