Country music group Alabama's contribution to country music in the 1980s was one of the most significant milestones on the road to country music's extraordinary rise to prominence in the pop music scene of the 1990s. While various threads of artistic influence ran through country in the 1980s, the most important commercial innovations were the ones that brought it closer to rock and roll—following three decades in which country had often positioned itself as the antithesis of rock and roll, either by holding to traditional instrumentation (fiddles and banjoes, de-emphasis on drums) or by moving toward night-club, Las Vegas-style pop music (the Muzak-smooth Nashville sound, the Urban Cowboy fad). Alabama was one of the first major country acts to get its start playing for a college crowd. Most significantly, Alabama was the first pop-styled country "group": the first self-contained unit of singers/musicians/songwriters—along the lines...