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You don’t have to be Willie Nelson to be a country outlaw. For any Nashville cat or kitten with a broad musical palette, the current rules of the genre are just begging to be broken. They may have burnt their bridges to country radio in the process, but Shelby Lynne and Suzy Bogguss are two of the artists proving what can be achieved.

The latterday country scene, suffering the same commercial constraints as other formats, favours a risk-free, cookie-cutter approach that often sounds suspiciously like pop music in disguise. Attending the Country Music Awards in November, I heard as many axe solos as mellifluous mandolins, and, much as one shouldn’t get precious about tradition, you can’t fail to spot Nashville’s peculiar ambivalence to its own history. You can read extensively about the contribution of genre giants from Rose Maddox to Johnny Cash at the admirable Country Music Hall of Fame, then fail to find them anywhere in a research-obsessed radio mainstream governed by image.

The singer-writer Gretchen Peters, who won a CMA for Song of the Year in 1995 with Independence Day, says: “When I was writing songs like that, the bar was pretty high. Now it’s more, ‘Let’s not offend anyone or do anything that could have the stink of political or social commentary’, which country music has traditionally been great at. Radio has become more squeamish about that content, which adds to its disposability. Are we turning this into pop music lite?”

In such a climate, some artists who have been through the country wringer have emerged to make a sound of their own. Bogguss, from Illinois, won the CMA’s Horizon award for best newcomer in 1992, in a period when she filed six Top 10 country hits in two years. One of the most clear-voiced songbirds of that decade, she opted to expand that horizon by making the 1994 album Simpatico with the veteran guitarist Chet Atkins, then started a family, only to find her return path paved over, her place taken by a younger generation. Summoning the courage of her convictions, Bogguss has continued to make music unfettered by pro-gramming expectations. She arrives back in the UK next week to perform her hits, such as Drive South and Letting Go, alongside excerpts from Sweet Danger, a self-released album that stretches way beyond country into jazz inflections and sophisticated easy listening.

“There’ve always been the classic examples of people who’ve walked the edge of country,” Bogguss says, “like Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris. But people haven’t realised there are those of us who came out of the 1990s country scene doing exactly the same thing. I was making records that were getting on the air easily, [but when] I had the opportunity to make a record with Chet, I pretty much slammed the brakes on. It was important to me, much more so than staying on the radio. Then I had a child and my record label fell apart. But I don’t look back and think my life was ruined. At a certain point, I started thinking, ‘I just have to do whatever I have to do, and some people will stick with me, and some people will discover me. At least I’ll be doing what I want to do, and not feel I’m part of a corporate machine.’”

Bogguss’s move into DIY territory naturally necessitates tighter reins on her finances, but she and other artist friends who have downscaled are used to it. “Kathy Mattea and Kim Carnes and I talk to each other and say [with a mock wail], ‘It’s-not-the-same, I want my big tour bus.’ But those of us who are not prima donnas can laugh about it.”

The more overtly maverick Lynne proved long ago that she was never going to sit serenely in the shackles of country’s format requirements. Arriving in Nashville as a teenager from Virginia, she played the game for a while on a number of country albums, but spoke her mind rather too often. She once sounded off to me about the genre: “To get a hit, it has to be crap. You used to have to have talent to get a record deal. Now, if you’ve a good-looking mug and a great ass, you can get one.”

Still fiercely independent, but perhaps a little more serene, Lynne laughs at the memory. “I’m the same, except I’m older, and I don’t take myself as seriously, and I have a ball,” she says. “But I feel sorry for people getting into it these days.”

When she burst out of the straitjacket in 1999, the result was I Am Shelby Lynne, a dream marriage of the traditions of Americana and Atlantic. If subsequent albums did not fully capitalise on its momentum, Lynne is now set to seize our attention again with a set of Dusty Springfield songs, Just a Little Lovin’. She has carefully harvested some of the hallowed singer’s deepest, and often saddest, material, investing it with captivating sparsity. “What good song is happy?” she asks with a smile. “If my heart’s not breaking, it’s not worth a damn. But it’s a responsibility doing a record like this. I was sweating bullets, because it’s in honour of one of the greatest.”

Lynne hopes to tour the record in the UK and internationally, and is still writing new songs, to which she will return. Like Bogguss, she’s enjoying the sweet freedom of following her nose.

Suzy Bogguss plays the Round, Newcastle (January 26); Memorial Hall, Sheffield (27); Purcell Room, SE1 (28); and the ABC, Glasgow (29); her album Sweet Danger is out now on Loyal Duchess. Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’ is released by Lost Highway on February 4

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