The border-busting birth of Punjabi country music

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Five or so years ago, Amrit Singh kept catching glimpses of something that looked like home. He was doing customer phone support in Quebec, for a Canadian company that makes trail cameras, helping hunters, farmers and ranchers across rural North America troubleshoot their equipment.

In the camera images from the Texas or Tennessee countryside, he saw lush green expanses that reminded him of the wheat fields in his native Punjab, India. Chatting to fill the intermittent silences, the customers would ask Singh about himself and what he liked to do in his free time.

Outside his tech support job, Singh had been working for years as a producer in Canada’s thriving Punjabi music scene, blending traditional folk sounds with hip-hop beats and trap melodies. For all the cultural cross-pollination, though, he felt that his own music was lacking something.

So on his calls with the US, he would tell the customers that he hoped to make it as a musician, and would ask them what they were listening to. Not infrequently, they would tell him about country music.

When he started exploring the artists the customers mentioned, he said, something clicked.

“I got the sense that my story, what I want to say, the characters I wanted to create in different stories, resonated well with country music,” Singh, 31, said. “It felt like my lifestyle was always country.”

These days, Singh, under the stage name Assassyn, and the Canadian Punjabi singer Jaggseer are pioneering a new genre they call Punjabi country, racking up six-figure views on their music videos on YouTube and Instagram.

The fertile plains of Punjab are a world apart from the Appalachian Mountains, to which country music traces its roots. But as Singh discovered in those long customer service calls, though he wears the Sikh turban and has a different mother tongue, the two cultures aren’t so different.

“We’ve also been singing on tractors and in the fields,” he said. “The work of the farmer is the same in Punjab as it is in America as it is in Canada.”

Learning the landscape

For his first foray into country, Singh wrote a song about a woman who left him and moved to Tennessee — he had never been to the state, but a conversation with a customer there had embedded the name in his head. A Montreal-based singer-songwriter named Bobby John, his partner on the track, taught him the basics of country guitar strumming patterns and chord progressions and sang the English verses. Singh sang in Punjabi. He titled it “Country Song” — “so I would remember that this was the first one.”

“Country Song,” released last September, is sonically reminiscent of the modern, country pop ballads that appear on top 40 charts, with electric guitars over a hip-hop beat. On its face, it’s a typical break-up song: The hook, “Oh chad ke yaara nu chali oh Tennessee,” translates as “She left me and went to Tennessee.”

But “Country Song” might also be understood as a love letter to the US. The song is written from the perspective of a Punjabi trucker who knows the country’s landscape more intimately than most any native-born citizen. The lyrics take the listener on a cross-country journey, name-checking states and cities where Singh’s customers called from: The narrator can’t bear to drive through Dallas where he proposed, his ex has changed like the weather in Seattle, and the experience has hardened him like the Statue of Liberty. His old flame might have fled for Tennessee, but by the song’s end, he’s picked up a load and headed to Kentucky. Maybe, he sings in the final line, they’ll see each other eventually.

“Country Song” was an experiment, Singh said. It wasn’t until he followed it up with the song “North America” that he felt he achieved a true Punjabi country fusion. “North America,” with its banjo licks and fiddle interludes, is a breezy celebration of Punjabi presence on the continent. “Sikka chal da gabru da puray North America,” Jaggseer sings on the hook, which roughly translates as “Punjabi guys run North America.”

In the music video, shot on a friend’s farm in Canada, Jaggseer sports a cowboy hat and denim while Singh wears a black chest pack. The vibe is pure joy: The two perch on bales of hay, pet horses and ride around on tractors. In between the swaggering pronouncements, Jaggseer waxes poetic about dusty roads and Chevy trucks and reflects on humble beginnings and hard work. One line nods to Punjabi migrants who never made it across the border.

“North America” attracted wider attention online, particularly among second-generation Punjabi Americans and Canadians but also people outside of the diaspora. “@morganwallen shakin in his boots,” one user wrote on Instagram. “hook em!” said another.

Who counts as country?

Sprinkled within all the fire and cowboy emojis, though, were racist comments invoking US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or stereotypes about Indians. And in keeping with country music’s well-worn tradition of gatekeeping, some commenters decried that this music didn’t qualify as country.

What makes country music country? Is it the string instrumentation? A vocal twang? A down-home, working-class sensibility? Is it music made by white people born below the Mason–Dixon line, as some in the industry would seem to suggest? Or, as the prolific songwriter Harlan Howard once put it, is it simply “three chords and the truth”?

Singh and Jaggseer, like Beyoncé and Lil Nas X before them, highlight an identity crisis afflicting modern country music. As Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, queer and now non-American, non-English-language artists lay claim to the genre, the country music industry signals covertly and overtly that they don’t belong.

Mainstream country has long been a bastion of conservative culture. Today, some of Nashville’s biggest stars have aligned themselves with (or shrewdly eschewed criticism of) a political movement that has denigrated countless demographic groups, including Punjabi immigrants. Recently, the US Department of Homeland Security posted an AI-generated image on X depicting Optimus Prime from “Transformers” facing off against a Sikh truck driver. “America for Americans,” the graphic read. “Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive, Mr. Singh.” The post, which referenced a Punjabi truck driver charged last year in a fatal crash that killed three people, was removed after swift backlash.

Singh and Jaggseer — who works as a commercial truck driver himself — sometimes experience this kind of bigotry in the comments of their videos, though they try not to put too much stock in it. Their affinity for country music stems from the genre’s storytelling ethos and working-class roots, and they don’t feel they need permission to invoke its traditions.

“Punjabi music was already country,” Singh said. “But as soon as we start using Western rhythms and electric guitars, people say this music belongs only to them. We live here now. We’re one with the soil.” At one point in the conversation, as if to prove his point, he flipped the camera around to show a wide open field.

In it for the long haul

For Singh, Punjabi country opened avenues to tell simple stories about faith, love and heartbreak, specific to the experiences of Punjabi immigrants in North America. His ballad “A Turban In the Church” is sung from the perspective of a Sikh man grieving his white wife. After meeting at a gas station in Bakersfield, California, the two fell in love and moved to Texas. But when their tender relationship is cut tragically short, the man can’t seem to escape the rumors that he married for papers. Another ballad, “Mother of a Prisoner,” is from the perspective of a mother who longs to see her incarcerated son again before she dies.

Singh is serious about his craft, thinking long and hard about how to create a sound that feels recognizably country while retaining a Punjabi folk soul. Blending the two genres presents daunting technical challenges — for instance, transposing Punjabi lyrics, often sung in a moody, minor scale (known as Bhairavi thaat in North Indian classical music), to the upbeat, major scales predominant in country music. “Goat Slaughters,” a boisterous, blues-inflected anthem that declares Punjabis as a force to be reckoned with in country music, is one attempt at striking that balance. “Yeehaa,” a cheerful meditation on countryside life, is another.

“Whenever something new is beginning, you never know where it’s going to go,” Jaggseer said. “I personally don’t know. But one thing’s for sure, my sound is fresh.”

For now, Singh and Jaggseer are having fun experimenting and digging deeper into country music. Earlier this year, Singh posted an interpretation of Ella Langley’s No. 1 hit “Choosin’ Texas,” using the title to riff about leaving his village in Punjab to plant roots in Dallas. Lately, he’s also been drawn to Johnny Cash and his raw depictions of working-class struggles. Jaggseer said he plays country all day long on his trucking routes, though he doesn’t know all the names of artists or songs. “I’m still discovering it,” he added. “That’s the best thing.”

What’s next for Punjabi country? Singh and Jaggseer said they’re focused on building their audience and continuing to tell Punjabi stories, with several new songs planned for release in the upcoming months. And while he would welcome the opportunity to tour one day, Singh said his greater hope is that Punjabi country might open up doors for future generations of Punjabi artists: “I’ll be happy if from five to 10 years from now, some young guy can express himself through this music.”

Jaggseer said his goal is simply to make “good, high-quality music.” The ultimate dream, though? “A big, big ranch,” he said. “Forty, 50,000 acres. No neighbors.”

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