At some point during the early ’80s, country singer George Strait was given a nudge by his then-producer, Jimmy Bowen, to try and liven up his stage act. Strait reportedly obliged not with banter or acrobatics, but by taking off his hat and waving it a few times. Born in 1952 and raised outside San Antonio (he helped his father on the ranch during weekends and summers), Strait started his career in the early ’80s as a stiff-jeaned, cowboy-booted ambassador of “real” country, a singer whose songs—warm, direct, bittersweet and funny—seemed to tap into the genre’s original mandate: Honest music for people getting by. He quickly became one of the steadiest and most enduring voices in country, building a body of work both astonishingly popular and consistent: In the first three decades of his career, for example, Strait placed more than 80 singles in the Top 10 of the Country charts, more than half of which went to No. 1. For as often as Strait has been defined as a traditionalist, his most definitive songs (“All My Ex’s Live in Texas”, “Ocean Front Property”, “Check Yes or No”) never seemed like they were trying to re-capture a lost past so much as evoke the timeless feelings always running underneath the present—a testament, perhaps, to why Strait has managed to stay relevant despite ignoring trends almost completely.