Few vocalists better illustrate the transition from the new traditionalist revival of the mid-eighties to the country boom in the early nineties than Paulette Carlson. As the lead singer of Highway 101, her bombastic vocals were wedded to an aggressive production that borrowed from rock without compromising its twang, heralding the arrival of the new sound that would make country the most popular music in the nation.
Before she was the feisty frontwoman of Highway 101, Carlson was already making a name for herself on Music Row. Her songwriting talent earned her a staff writing position at Silverline/Goldmine Publishing, and artists as prominent as Tammy Wynette recorded her material. With her expressive voice, it was no surprise that she landed a solo deal. But despite critical praise, her singles for RCA went nowhere.
She moved back to her home state of Minnesota, but when Chuck Morris, the manager of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, caught her act, he encouraged her to try Music City again. He came up with the idea of building an entire band around her, three men to back her up musically and vocally. He soon found the perfect backing players, and the new group was christened Highway 101.
Bobbie Gentry’s swampy vocals came straight out of the Mississippi Delta where she was born and raised. She was born in Chicksaw County, Mississippi, and spent most of her childhood there.
It must have been a culture shock when her family abruptly moved to California when she was thirteen, but she found quick success after high school playing the country club circuit. She had a big cheerleader in show business legend Bob Hope, who encouraged her to perform in Vegas.
Amazingly enough, she chose to go back to school after her time there, and majored in philosophy at UCLA. The music bug kicked in again, and a tranfer to the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music helped her develop her singing and songwriting crafts. Before long, she had put together a demo tape that landed her a deal with Capitol in 1967.
Opry member Holly Dunn had a solid five year run of hits that made her one of the more popular female country singers of the late eighties. That’s a group of women that’s been largely forgotten due to the impact that the women who followed would have, but her extensive gifts as a writer and a special Father’s Day gift she wrote for her Dad have ensured her place in country music history.
Dunn started out young, co-writing songs with her brother Chris Waters and touring the south with the Freedom Folk, a singing group that played for the White House during the Bicentennial Celebration. While attending Abilene Christian University, she joined up with the Hillside Singers, a gospel choir. While still in school, she wrote a song with her brother – “Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind” – that caught the attention of Cristy Lane, who recorded it. The success inspired her to move to Nashville.
She found work as a demo singer, but it was her songwriting talent that really got her noticed. She was hired as a staff writer at CBS, which also employed her brother. She began getting cuts, and when she penned a top ten hit for Louise Mandrell (“I’m Not Through Loving You Yet”), she found herself with a record deal of her own, signing with Mary Tyler Moore’s label MTM.
Some artists simply come along before their time. They lay out a path that other artists will follow, but they don’t reap the benefits of it. Gail Davies was one of those artists, a nineties woman who just happened to come along in the seventies.
Davies was born into a country music family, the daughter of country singer Tex Dickerson. She experimented with jazz music while married to a man who performed it, but she returned to country music quickly. In Los Angeles, she found work as a session singer, backing up A&M artists like Neil Young. She became friends with Joni Mitchell, which led to her engineer Henry Levy teaching Davies the intricacies of the recording studio.
When she saw her older brother Ron Davies have a song of his recorded by David Bowie and Three Dog Night, she was inspired. She bought a guitar, began writing songs, and discovered she had a talent for it. Soon, she was in Nashville, signed to EMI Publishing. Her first hit as a writer was “Bucket to the South”, which went to No. 14 for Ava Barber in 1978. This helped her land a recording deal of her own, and her self-titled debut was released that same year on Lifesong.
She may not have been part of the legendary Outlaws album, but long before the Outlaw movement was a media craze, Smith was the living embodiment of it. Her country was tougher-edged and more forward than anything that country music had seen before, and while today she is best known for one hit, it’s a classic that not only stands the test of time, but knocked down topical barriers at country radio.
Smith’s journey to Music City was hardly a fairytale. She dropped out of school at the age of eleven, and started singing in nightclubs the following year. She was married at fifteen, and had four kids in short order. She paid her dues in small joints for two decades, and when she finally moved to Nashville, she was a divorced mother of four, already in her mid-thirties.
Still, her talent couldn’t be denied. Her smoky vocals caught the attention of Columbia records, who signed her in 1968. A handful of singles went nowhere, and she was dropped. However, she found a new home at Mega Records, a small independent label. Nashville’s top songwriters weren’t exactly beating down her door to get a Sammi Smith cut, but she found a jewel of a Kris Kristofferson song to make all of her own.
Last year, the first Idols Give Back special found Carrie Underwood transforming the Pretenders classic “I’ll Stand By You” into an immaculate country ballad. This year, she reinvents the George Michael smash “Praying For Time.”
This charity single was performed live on the show, and it’s a tribute to Underwood’s vocal prowess that it sounds good enough to be a studio recording. Her ambitious reworking of the song differs so much from the original that it’s like hearing it for the first time all over again. She sings with clarity and conviction. It’s a refreshing contrast to most of the pap on country radio, and like “I’ll Stand By You” before it, shows that her talent is deeper than most of her conventional music suggests.
Nearly two decades after its initial release, “Praying For Time” is as timely and relevant as it’s ever been. Underwood’s rich reading of such powerful lyrics proves she can sing socially conscious music just as well as the power ballads and rave-ups that she’s been most known for so far.
It’s hard to imagine Dolly Parton having trouble filling anybody’s shoes, but when she replaced Norma Jean on The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967, she was stepping into very high heels, indeed. For seven years, Norma Jean had been a staple on the popular television show, and in a genre that was still running very low on female stars, Jean was one of the brightest ones out there.
A childhood friend of Wanda Jackson, Norma Jean caught the show biz bug early, even having her own radio show at the age of twelve. Heavily influenced by the sound of Kitty Wells, Norma Jean was already touring Oklahoma as a teenager in the fifties, and a stint on the Ozark Jubilee led to a deal with Columbia records. Her early singles fizzled, and when the show was canceled, she was able to reach out to an artist she had met on the set.
The eighties brought a mini-folk revival to Music Row, with coffeehouse artists scoring major label deals. Of this group, only Mary Chapin Carpenter went on to mainstream country success, but one of the earliest of the wave made inroads into the Americana scene before it even had that name.
Nanci Griffith called her unique fusion of country and folk music “folkabilly.” Even when she was still teaching kindergarten in the seventies, she was playing Texas honky-tonks at night. She often quipped that controlling a group of kindergarten students and drunken hillbillies required the same skills. Pure folkie that she was, she soon signed a record deal with a local label.
Ask most contemporary country fans about who George Jones sang all of those classic duets with, and they’ll say Tammy Wynette. Ask a fan with a deep love for traditional country music the same question, and they’ll answer just as quickly: Melba Montgomery.
In fact, until she got her hands on a heart-wrenching Harlan Howard song in the seventies, Montgomery was known primarily as a duet singer. It was way back in 1958 when Roy Acuff caught Melba’s act at a talent show in which he served as the judge. So impressed was the Opry legend that he asked her to replace his departing female vocalist on the road. With Acuff on her side, she signed a recording contract with United Artists in 1962.
She was only eighteen years old when she scored a major label record deal, but Shelby Lynne had already had enough life experience to be a convincing singer of harrowing, heartbreaking country songs.
Born Shelby Lynn Moorer in 1968, she grew up in a musical family. Her father was a bandleader and her mother often sang harmony with him on stage. On some nights, Shelby and her little sister Allison would join them on the stage. However, her dad struggled with alcoholism, and it fueled his explosive violence at home. When Shelby was only seventeen years old, her father demanded to speak to her mother in the driveway of their home. He then fatally shot her, then turned the gun on himself.
The shocking tragedy left Shelby alone to support herself and younger sister, so she turned to something she knew how to do well: music. The two sisters moved to Nashville, and Shelby started to play the local clubs. Through a lucky break, she scored a performance slot on the nightly cable variety show Nashville Now. Her impressive performance made such an immediate impact that she had four major labels offering to sign her the very next day.
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
Last year, the first Idols Give Back special found Carrie Underwood transforming the Pretenders classic “I’ll Stand By You” into an immaculate country ballad. This year, she reinvents the George Michael smash “Praying For Time.”
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
100 Greatest Women
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