Rolling Country 2006 Thread

though lots of times it just settle for just choogling somewhat lazily (which is fine, too.) and i won't absolutely swear they do anything as funky as the gator song on shooter's CD, or the jerry reed song where amos moses becomes gator bait. that'd be a close contest.

switching gears, i just noticed that in my second book i attribute "up against the wall redneck mothers" to bobby bare. amazing song, but i forgot that he'd done it, and i don't remember it being mentioned in all the bare talk in the past year. is he the one who had the biggest hit with it, or was that somebody else? was it an outlaw move for him, or what?

I enjoyed reading the posts and I am looking forward to perusing the archives. I try to listen to as much different music as possible and I'm hoping you guys mention some great stuff I missed.

Thanks for the nice words about my blog. I want to clarify the Mattea comment I made because I think I didn't explain it clearly in the original post. From my point of view, Mattea took two classic songs that aren't easily covered, and I wanted to make the point that the songs are consistent with her musical identity and not just a cheap ploy to sell more records. With the attitude toward the war souring, and never having been very positive to begin with, there have been an avalanche of posturing music stars singing peace songs old and new. Mattea has been recording songs in that vein for a long time and I wanted to make the point that she has the moral authority to sing a song like "Gimme Shelter" because she's always had that worldview and incorporated it into her music; she's not like, say, Madonna suddenly adding "Imagine" to her set list last year.

With "Down On The Corner", which celebrates singing music for pure pleasure, there are few contemporary country artists who can truly claim to be doing that. I think with Mattea walking away from a major label deal (it's a little-known fact that Mercury prez Luke Lewis didn't want her to go) and now recording self-produced albums with her road band that are crafted while playing small venues across the country, she seems to be as close to the spirit of that song as reasonably possible.

I still don't know if that explains things any better, but "moral authority" just meant, to me, that she has the credibility to sing both songs with conviction and not seem like she's just doing a trendy cover or glorified karaoke.

I might or might not have more to say on this subject. I think it's possible Himes has read Robert Warshow's excellent essay "The Gangster as Tragic Hero." Himes is raising interesting issues; he's just not willing to turn the searchlight onto the voters or onto himself.

I surprised myself with how much I ended up liking the Jamie O'Neal album, which I'd badmouthed a lot during the year. I'd say that Gary Allan has generally stronger songs, and he's a beautiful singer, but what works for him is to figure out how to approach a song and then to just follow that approach, consistently. I finally rated O'Neal higher because her music breathes more freely. In the midst of her dramatic story of the stripper - "Devil on the Left," best song on the album - she breaks into scat singing for no particular reason, but this works, as if the dance in her singing correlates to the striptease. And this is important because it's the music and not the lyrics that makes the case for the stripper's dance.

It's a cliché but accurate to say that country & western is split emotionally between a desire for home and family on the one hand and the urge to range wild and free on the other. This can either be a profound paradox or a lazy inconsistency depending on the artistry involved. Shannon Brown's "Corn Fed" is very catchy but appalling in its stupidity: on the one hand she says that in her happy heartland they leave doors unlocked so as not to keep anybody out, on the other she brags that there ain't nothin' but country on the radio. The average eight year old can see the hypocrisy in that one, and for an adult to write such a song and not notice its bullshit requires a deliberate deadening of the intellect. (Gawd, if there were an actual community that said this about itself, how would its teenagers avoid growing up insane? By listening to Young Jeezy records, perhaps, and dreaming of being gangstas.)

But it's the emotional split asserting itself, the gap between one ideal (wild and free, everybody welcome) and another (everybody united in values). Jamie O'Neal's got the split too, which she avoids confronting directly. Her mom-is-a-hero-in-the-home lecture is in one song, her girls'-night blowout is in another. In "Devil On the Left" - where the two ideals co-exist - the words sidestep just what is supposed to count as the angel's dominion and what the devil's: you assume that the strip show belongs to the devil, but does this mean dancing and pleasure belongs to the devil as well? There's a hint in the song that the preacher who prays for her is the one who eventually marries her and takes her to the corn-fed picket-fence land of the happy ending. But in marrying her he gets the carnal dance she'd previously sold to everyone. (The most touching of the many touching moments on Deana Carter's album is where she in effect asks the angels for permission to have a love affair.)

In general I like music that overspills its container, though for this to work well there has to be a good container in the first place. So that's my version of the split (Nietzsche's melding of Dionysius and Apollo, I suppose, though I haven't read Birth of Tragedy in thirty years so don't really know). Anyway, alt-country - alt anything, actually, including the Nashville Scene and New Times and the Village Voice - has its own version of this paradox/inconsistency: it claims to ride free - to be alternative, to overspill its container - and at the same time it turns "we overspill our container" into a container itself, a niche for the likeminded, and without a lot of motion in the niche. Really, Jamie O'Neal's music has way more splish and splash than Mary Gauthier's does, even if the latter claims to be an emotional cascade.

I'm pretty sure Jerry Jeff Walker had the biggest hit with "Up Against the Wall (Redneck Mother" -- written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, who is still underrated outside of Texas. xhuxk and others might prefer Ray's uber-substance-abused outlaw stuff from the late '70s and early '80s, though I think it's all out of print. He's become a friend, so I won't plug his post-substance Rounder albums too much (they're probably too singer/songwritery for this thread, though would it were more country-folkies had his humor and guitar chops). He's got a new record coming out in the spring. And he's become kind of a godfather to the Cory Morrows and Pat Greens of Austin. Oh, his "Conversation With the Devil" says Satan won the fiddle duel in Georgia. When Ray does "Redneck Mother" live he turns it into a frickin hilarious song-effacing genesis tale of outlaw country itself. I can YSI that if folks want to hear it.

Two Nietzche and country connections in less than a week. We need to get Greil over to this thread.

Frank's basically right about Geoff Himes's essay, I think. Even though I listen to way more Nasvhille country than a few years ago, and to my ears I *do* believe it's improved, I definitely don't think it's improved, as I think he implies, by moving toward alt or "getting back on track" (not a direct quote, but the gist of his argument); I'm not so sure I buy that it ever really got off track in the first place. And if it did, that stupidly smug and typically dull Alan Jackson kvetch he mentioned about not-quite-country two-minute love songs was probably more a SYMPTOM of its getting-off-trackness than a solution or answer to it (same with whoever did the dumb murder on music row one -- that was Alan and George, right? Compared to those two guys, most country was *right* to head more popward.)

I guess I should note that Mattea drops the "rape, murder" part of "Gimme Shelter" and by doing so, the song works perfectly as a metaphor for a country on the brink of war. It's not so much a peacemaking song as a stark warning that peace is about to be broken and bad things will come because of it, I suppose.

Regarding country music's quality, I've posted a few times on my blog that I think the genre has suddenly had an artistic resurgence in the past two years, with 2005 being the first truly great year since 1996 or 1997. I suspect, however, that this is just a perception in my head, because access to a lot of different music suddenly opened up through iTunes (for me) and it's so much easier for me to go hear an album that's getting great reviews. For example, "Begonias." I never heard of that album until it started popping up on Best of 2005 lists, but I went and sampled it, bought it, and it popped up on my own list in the end.

This easy access reminds me of the golden era of CMT, when they used to play solid videos 24/7 and everybody had close to equal rotation. So many albums I bought and artists I discovered because of CMT. Remember the first Lari White, Sara Evans, Shania Twain, Martina McBride & Mavericks albums that flopped? I bought them because of CMT. I discovered Bruce Robison, Bobbie Cryner, Joy Lynn White, Mandy Barnett, Johnny Cash's "American Recordings", Willie Nelson's "Spirit" and "Teatro", Emmylou Harris' "Cowgirl's Prayer", Carlene Carter, Matraca Berg, Pirates of the Mississippi, Radney Foster, and even Todd Snider on CMT. I never cared much for radio. I got my music fix from the videos. The new digital delivery methods have opened up the doors again for me to hear a lot of great new music, much like CMT did a decade ago. I worry that maybe 1998-2003 weren't bad years for country music, but rather I just happened to miss a lot of great music that came out.

Last year or longer, from:

Let's all write the same thing at once! Gretchen Wilson provokes wistful nostalgia for Hee-Haw Nation

Today's Sunday LA Times FEATURE, again fit for THEY PHONED IT IN: on Gretchen Wilson -- genuine redneck woman, putting 'redneck' back in country, setting the stage for a new breed of do-it-yourself redneck stars. Hoo-boy, do we love rednecks like this one in el_Lay media, just not our local rednecks, of which there are thousands.

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Dateline Nashville -- "When Gretchen Wilson reached for a paper cup during an interview on her tour bus, I assumed she was going to pour some coffee. Instead, she brought the empty cup to her mouth and casually spit into it -- brown tobacco juice."

Proof she's a redneck woman? Or maybe she's just crass, chaw spitters being a dime-a-dozen from east coast to west.

"No wonder record executives in this country music capital all but ducked under their desks when the former Illinois bartender and bouncer (and 'bouncer' is gold-plated intelligence-insulting bullshit) came calling time after time only a few years ago looking for a countract..."

"Now, here was someone who'd remind all those pop fans that country music is the land of Hee-Haw and trailer parks..."

"Eager to find Wilsons of their own, execs may now even be ordering spittons.

"A songwriter who collaborates with Wilson says/claims/spouts: "...the country audience related to her right away. She was drinking a beer in her videos and belching. Now everyone is trying to sign a redneck..."

Wilson's mother worked at "a bare-knuckle bar" where "a 12-gauge shotgun was kept."
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I'd include more but it is really too phoned in.

i think that gretchen wilson is better then her personae lets on.

>Alligator Stew studio album *A First Taste of Alligator Stew* from 1991 sounds tougher, tighter, meaner, and brawnier than the live one I talk about above, with more gunslinger ballads, more cowbell (in "four winds"), more comprehensible words about actual alligator rassling (in "shiner," where the singer keeps saying he's a shiner, a job which, though i've never heard the phrase before, seems to have something to do with bagging large carnivorous reptiles); also, turns out that "blood money" (here in both electric and acoustic versions) is about an offer of $7000 to get off your feet but you have to kill your brother to get it, wow; i'd thought it was about robbing a bank, but apparently i was wrong. also, with the clearer fidelity, it's now obvious the singer grunts or groans more like meat loaf or billy ray cyrus (i.e., aiming for springsteen, probably) than like jim dandy mangrum, which i do not mean as an insult. the fellow can really sing.

mixing cover tunes,
original psych rock and
covering hank I

(1) It's one of maybe about 12 "best" songs on that album, which doesn't have a bad one and would have made my Pazz & Jop ballot if I'd listened to it a couple of days earlier (it's the Burmese album I shoehorned onto my Nashville Scene reissues list).

(2) I just listened to 30-second streamed clips of Brownsville Stations', Hanoi Rocks', and Commander Cody's versions of "Lightnin' Bar Blues," and damned if I don't think you're right, Chuck (though "Lightnin' Bar Blues" may possibly be a knockoff of some earlier rockabilly track). The way Saing Saing Maw sings it reminds me of Ricky Nelson: Relaxed. As Dylan says, not rootin' the mountain down.

(3) Chuck, did the Robyn CD arrive?

Oops, the waltz is "Heart Over Head Over Heels." "That's the Way" is more like a zigzag (at leat that's what Samantha says: "gotta zig gotta zag gotta travel my jagged road." To Mexico with Romeo, maybe. But she also says she changes direction like a pendulum, and this song doesn't, and nor does it swing like England and a pendulum do.)

I did get Robyn, Frank, thanks! I like it, especially "Konichiwa Bitches," though I doubt I like that anywhere near as much as "Jam On It" or "Attack of the Name Game." Enjoy the rest; not sure yet how much. (CD-Rs are always hard for to motivate myself to listen to!)

Shawn Camp *Fireball* on now; he wrote "Two Pina Coladas" for Garth and "How Long Gone" (which I don't remember off the top of my head) for Brooks and Dunn. He sounds like Ricky Skaggs with (sometimes, when he's good) John Anderson's or Blake Shelton's self-effacingly cornball sense of humor (though Skaggs himself could be self-effacingly humorous too, come to think of it). He's got as much bluegrass in him as Dierks Bentley, I guess; i.e., not enough to make him seem like a priss, but enough to make things interesting. Not a purist, in other words, and plenty of fast catchy songs. Leaning toward liking "Fireball" (about a gal), "The Way It Is" (is the way it was is the way it's gonna be, or something like that) "Hotwired" (multifaceted title metaphor), "Beagle Hound" (about his dawg), and "Drank" (about drinking) most, at least so far. Seems like he's not so good with the dark deathbound stuff, but I could be wrong.

Second song ("You Can Have Me") they're doing pretty much the same, the melody is almost as good, though the arrangement is more ordinary and less garage; and oddly enough I hate this track - falls into the category of "some guy trying to sing soul." I hear all the weaknesses that didn't bother me on track one, the singer not quite hitting the notes (the rough-hewn delivery masking the misses), out-of-tune backup singing. New Jersey white soul? They're a Chicago band, but they feel like Jersey.

I may report further when I listen more. Probably my liking for track one will diminish somewhat, and my tolerance for track two will increase.

(You know, Jagger and Sinatra were never quite hitting the notes, either, but despite this they hit thought and emotion on the noggin - when they were at their best, anyway. I wonder why something works in one situation and not another.)

I wonder if fewer people voted for singles than albums in the Scene poll. This could explain why singles I like did better than albums I like; people with my taste have more of an impact.

(But I also usually prefer the singles to the albums that place in Pazz & Jop, and though there are fewer singles voters there, this is not enough to give people like me a special impact. Rather, people's taste gets better when they go for singles, and maybe the best singles artists clutter up their albums with ballads and stuff that drive away the album voters.)

Also, they seem to have truncated the section overall this year, used fewer comments, though I haven't compared the column inches.

Maybe the alt-country types are less likely to vote for singles? That would be my guess. (Also, wasn't there one guy who said he voted for alt-country albums, but let his 19 year old daughter pick her favorite pop country singles? Or did I just dream that one up?)

(But I don't see that preferences based on power-rotation airplay disallow critical latitude as to what counts as country.)

got several things to assess here, I've been playing catchup for the past week, just can't shake this flu. including the new Hank III, which came today, and the new Rhett Akins. but tonight, excited to be seeing Bettye LaVette!!

Hmmm...heard their new album a month or two ago and didn't think it was that good. Are these the same guys who put out an all bluegrass album of AC/DC covers a few years ago? Or was that somebody else? Either way, seems like a way too obvious shtick that wasn't funny in the first place, being the same kind of joke indie bands have worn into the ground since the Replacements two decades ago, plus like all joke-metal it's completely redundant, somehow missing the fact that you don't need to *make* hard rock funny, because it was funny on purpose in the first place. Anyway, grumpiness over with, I actually thought the two least annoying songs on the new Hayseed Dixie album were their version of Green Day's "Holiday" and an original called "Kirby Hill," mainly because their energy was better when I can't remember a version of the song that's way more energetic, and it's been a long time since I played that Green Day album. "Black Dog," "War Pigs," "Ace of Spades," and a couple other originals ("Mountain Man," "Marijuana") seemed tolerable (once), but the shtick wore out its welcome way too quick. On the other hand, I *can* kind of see how they'd be fun to be in a room with while drinking beer, especially if they cracked wise about *Deliverance* between songs.