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Try to imagine it. You're an established country musician. You've got a career. You're writing songs, recording songs, selling records. Everything is just humming along and then all of a sudden - there's this whole new style. You don't particularly like it. But people are starting to ask for it at your appearances. It's cutting into your record sales. What are you going to do?

You listen to it. You're starting to get pressure from your record label - maybe it's worth trying just for the hell of it. You're a little older than most of the kids who are doing this stuff, but so what? If you have a receding hairline nobody's gonna see it over the radio.

These crazy rock 'n' roll records are selling in the millions. That's a lot of money and a whole new audience. You don't want to miss out on that. You don't want this train to go by without you getting on board. You can always get off again if you don't like it.

Or try to imagine this. You're a young country musician and you hear some new sounds, perhaps on the radio, that grab your attention. They're exciting - maybe you can find some like-minded musicians out there and work some of these new sounds into your own style.

On two volumes of 'They Tried To Rock' you will hear music with these and other stories behind it. We have collected a variety of examples of country musicians making the transition into rock 'n' roll. Some were very successful; others were less so. The results are all fascinating: the story of a genre struggling to hold its own against enormous forces of change in the 1950s. Traditional American music battling against stylistic and economic pressures that threatened to engulf it. Country musicians wondered, ''Do we fight it or join it?'' They did both as the new music began to spread. Here's some of what happened.

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