Rolling Country 2006 Thread

People seem to use "trad country" to mean pre-80s now, a "break" not far from the time, actually, you get the supposedly defining rock/Modern rock break too. Of course, the country sounds of the sixties and seventies were considered by moldy fig types either urbanized sell-outs or bland mistakes then themselves. Even as honky tonk was rejected by lovers of "tradititonal" Acuff and earlier country as too urban, too willing to talk about nasty subjects, and a sell-out when IT came along.

The Womack record largely revives pre-80s sounds. Like Garth never happened. Her music, from the first, referenced and sometimes incorporated honky tonk sounds out of Texas, and much pre-80s twang production and approach, on the ballads especially, I'd say off hand. . The album before this one was simply considered a pop step too far by a lot of people--and that they attenpted to remake LeeAnn's image at the same timemade things worse.

And of course, country music is now and always has been pop music.

This year's record (which for my money, has a very high percentage of strong songs on it), string writing) was a return to the commitment to work in her OWN tradition, essentially. I saw her with a small, tasteful band preview the whole LP live at the Ryman, and the renewed seriousness of COUNTRY intent was unmistakable--at a musical base a lot more sreious than say, Faith Hill scurrying back to get her a "Look; I didn't go Hollywood; I'm just a Mississippi Girl at Heart" shuck. (Womack later did a similar live show on cable--CMT I think.)

At her best monents, I think she's a good a country ballad singer as this generation has; but then, I think Gretchen Wilson is working her way to a strong second in that regard.

No argumento, meanhwile, that the Bobby Bare rceord is generally wonderfu--and lives in a perfect spot between his music and his son's.

(I found this board because Roy Katsen says nice things about it, BTW.And apologize for any of my notorious fast-typing web typos left uncorrected--in advance.)

Faith Hill's most soul music moment is "One" (one of my favorite country singles of the decade.) I kind of hated "Mississippi Girl" until George Smith explained it's basically boogie-rock at heart.

And by the way, welcome, Barry! You should check out that '05 thread, too (and the '04 one, and the No Depression one, and many many more.)

Barry gives the best typos on the planet!

Plus I did not mean
that Earth Wind and Fire was the
soul ne plus ultra

It was just the truth!
And I hear rock but no soul
in Toby Keith's voice

Gary Allan, sure,
many others. (Plus Jessi
Alexander, wow!)

When I reviewed Toby I said that that in a better world "That's Not How It Is" would get play on the Urban AC stations. The song seems to split the difference between Isaac Hayes and Robert Cray. It's more an '80s sound than a '70s (though of course Hayes goes back farther than that).

Black-gospel-based r&b-pop not unlike Whitney, Mariah, Toni (which certainly is soul-related and certainly draws on Ray Charles), but actually I hear something countrypolitan in the tone, though I can't put my finger on it, just as there's something countrypolitan in Celine Dion's tone, though whatever it is it was probably derided as one of the things that made countrypolitan "not country."

To confuse matters, I'll point out that "One" has reggaeish touches in the rhythm.

And to confuse matters more, I think that the Whitney-Mariah-Celine-Faith (though not necessarily Toni) thing draws on Streisand and Garland as well as on Charles, not in the sense that some people find Streisand and Garland camp but rather in S-G's showbiz reaching-for-the-sky moments. Welding Charles and Streisand is intriguing to me since you have Charles' deliberately rough and "sincere" melisma and Streisand's shriek-with-the-birds operatics.

This post is written in what one reviewer called "the Chuck Eddy hyphenated style."

Yeah, but the Kingston Trio clobber the Tokens.

Also, has anyone seen Tanya Tucker lately? I saw her last summer (pre-reality show) and she totally blew my mind (mind you, this was at an outdoor country festival, 2nd day--so I was drunkx2 and had only a hour earlier been charmed by Mel Tellis). She's coming back on a soft-seat/arena tour (soft-seat in my town, arena in the next, go fig) in the spring, and I'm pretty jazzed.

I was reading from this book last night, *Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz* by Rich Kienzle. Horrifying chapter about Spade Cooley; I don't know if I'd ever heard the details before about *how* he killed his wife (in front of their 14 year old daughter, who he also threatened if she told anybody) -- totally gruesome, but it makes me curious to pull back out my Spade Cooley album. Which I never liked as much as, say, the Milton Brown and his Brownies or Roy Newman and his Boys or Smokey Wood albums I've got, maybe because (as Kienzle writes) Cooley's innovation was also working California "sweet" music and even classical parts into western swing's varying hillbilly/swing/bebop/blues/polka/Mex/pop
hybrid -- my guess is, that probably made Cooley less funky and frantic than these guys I like more, but I want to make sure. Jeez, though, what a creepy man. I doubt anybody in my record collection has ever done anything more evil...Anyway, what's really interested me so far in Kienzle's book was how, in the intro, he talks about how, inititally, country music in the 20s was a conscious attempt (idea from record company/radio barn dance execs) to fabricate rural nostalgia, so they at first insisted on keeping instruments that would make the music sound less "pure" (drums, horns, electric guitars) out of it, and that purity pretty much became the standard in the southeast, especially out of urban areas like Nashville and Atlanta -- that is, especially in fundamentalist puritan protestant backwaters throughout the region. But the Catholic Irish/German/ Polish populations in Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis insisted on mixing up country with polkas, hence making it more danceable, and the mix (see above) was even more open-ended in Texas, Oklahoma, and on to Hollywood. So keeping country undanceable, keeping it free of unsavory ethnic influences (including black ones and "urban" ones in general) was in some ways, seemingly, a puritan, even (probably) racist impulse (though I don't think Kienzle uses that word), but also a commercial impulse since the purity was country's inentionally fabricated selling point to begin with. (I.e., purity didn't arise naturally. How this connects to Emmett Miller and Jimmie Rodgers and all the subsequent white guys singing blues in the '20s and '30s I'm not sure - was that stuff *not* considered country then? Or just not saleable? Or was it just really marginal? Or what? Rodgers was obviously a huge star, right?) Anyway, I'm wondering whether one could trace the "pure country" vs. "eclectic country" dichotomy across decades, from then til now. I've always suspected insisting on keeping dance music or pop music out of c&w was a puritan impulse, and this says it was from the start. There's a big story in between.

Or maybe not. I'm hearing more of the swing every time I play this thing; it's just really subtle, is all. First song is called "W. Lee O'Daniel and the Light Crust Dough Boys," which band name is clearly a Western Swing reference in and of itself.

Not me, but Mazor gives her new concert DVD Tanya Tucker Live at Billy Bob's Texas (Smith Music Group) a thumbs up in the new ND.

I'll have to read the "Southwest Shuffle" book, because the diff between "country" in "protestant backwaters" and country in Cinci, St. Louis, Chicago, Texas/Oklahoma and out to California seems to explain, or open up, a lot of stuff that I think is really essential. and today, I think the tension between California-ized ideas of "country" and what Nashville thinks it is--it also seems really basic to me.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:ncex97qjkrjt

http://www.oldblues.net/music/yazoo/yazoorecord/10241-1.jpg

The latter is a great Yazoo comp called "Mr. Charlie's Blues."

On the other hand, were they considered "blues singers" when they actually existed, or only in retrospect? I honestly have no idea.

Another one: Tennessee Ernie Ford, whose proto-rock'n'roll (esp "Sixteen Tons") was huge in the years before Elvis. He was, along with Moon Mullican (who he worked with) one of the country-boogie missing links between western swing and rockabilly; tracks like "Shotgun Boogie" and "Blackberry Boogie" are totally raucous. But he also did really did blues stuff like "Dark as a Dungeon" (about coal-mining, and morbidly appropriate this week, sad to say.)

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/01/country_music_g_1.php

i am in the middle of reading deloria for the book, can you tell me more about his work in relation to pop culture, i only know him as (a radical, important and cogent) theologian.

Edd, I'm not making sense of this passage, especially the statement "blues was really underground before about 1960 or so when Fahey and Calt and those guys rousted Skip James and Son House out of their obscurity." Interestingly enough, a couple of months ago I read Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, and the impression I got was that "blues", not "jazz," was the basic name for nearly all black popular music between the wars that featured singers rather than instrumental soloists. So a lot that we might in retrospect be calling black pop or rhythm and blues or jazz was all lumped together under the name "blues"; and the reason so much of this stuff is no longer called blues is that starting with John Hammond, white people tended to narrow the definition of "blues." And (if I am remembering/understanding Wald correctly), the broad usage of the term "blues" by black people carried over into the forties and fifties, so if you were to ask a black person in those decades to name a blues musician, they'd name someone like Louis Jordan or Dinah Washington. Blues was not underground, even if Skip James and Son House (who'd never been stars in the first place) were underground. The people Don mentioned - B.B. King, Nat King Cole, Bobby Blue Bland, et al. - were all called blues singers and were all popular black entertainers, as of course were Big Boy Crudup, Junior Parker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner but also a whole bunch of West Coast guys with smoother styles who've therefore been written out of history. A gentle smooth number like Chuck Berry's "Wee Wee Hours" would have been considered blues every bit as much as something like "Hoochie Coochie Man." So your original question about the difference or nondifference between jazz and blues singing is on the mark, but from the other side, as it were.

As for Teagarden - yes, I've heard him referred to as a jazz guy, but who knows what he was referred to in his time? (And what about Louis Prima?) The fact that Elvis veered more towards Junior Parker and Big Boy Crudup and Kokomo Arnold than towards the Carter Family - whose material probably wasn't altogether different from those blues guys'; didn't they do their own equivalent to "Mystery Train"? - may be why someone may have called him blues, if anybody did.

According to AMG, neither "Strokin'" nor any other Clarence Carter song charted country.