The radio format specializes in hits from the 1950s through the 1980s, and focus primarily on innovators and artists from country music's Golden Age, including Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Kitty Wells, Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck, Kenny Rogers, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Merle Haggard, along with English and Spanglish language songs from 1960s to 2000s Tejano and New Mexico music artists like Freddy Fender, Johnny Rodriguez, Little Joe, Freddie Brown, and Al Hurricane.
It can also include recurrent 1980s to 2000s hits from neotraditional country and honky-tonk artists such as George Strait, Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, and Randy Travis.
Before 1990, it had operated under a variant of the methods used to produce the Hot 100; singles sales were combined with radio airplay to rank songs on the chart.
In 1990, through an affiliation with Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, Billboard dropped record sales from the formula, basing a song's ranking solely on spins on country radio, weighted by a station's listenership.
Other artists from the era that did not continue to receive wider radio airplay after their heyday maintained strong cult followings from fans of all ages; an example of this is Johnny Cash, who remains in high regard many years after his 2003 death.
This is not universal, as a limited number of AM radio stations still emphasize the earlier, pre-1980s country cuts; WRVK in Mount Vernon, Kentucky and KWMT in Fort Dodge, Iowa being prominent examples.