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Traditional Country is a Link in a Long Chain

June 30, 2009 Guest Contributor 23

The following is a guest contribution from Scott O’Brien.

“But someone killed tradition. And for that someone should hang.” –Larry Cordle & Larry Shell, “Murder on Music Row”

Dan Milliken’s recent post got me thinking: The country music I grew up with is nothing like the music on country radio today. If I turned on today’s country radio in 1988, I might not realize it was a country station and keep right on flipping. Back then, Randy Travis and Keith Whitley’s traditional twang ruled the airwaves. Today, they are dominated by the giggly teeny-bopper ditties of Taylor Swift and the boy band sounds of Rascal Flatts. Did they get away with murder on music row? Well, let’s start by briefly uncovering country’s traditional roots.

What is traditional country music? Is it simply anything from the past? That seems too broad; Shania Twain wasn’t traditional. Anything before 1990? Maybe, but that is still a rather wide net. To me, traditional country music is honky-tonk music. It heavily employs steel guitars, fiddles, and forlorn vocals. It moves at a slow pace. There are no drums or electric guitars. The songs typically deal with heavy topics such as heartbreak, cheating, or drinking, with a ballad here and there. In most cases, the goal is to induce pain. Not bad pain, but the therapeutic empathy that tugs your heart and helps you through your personal struggles. The patron saint of traditional country is Hank Williams. Hank’s first disciple is George Jones. Jones’ first disciple is Alan Jackson. The traditional template is supposed to help us decipher what is country and what is not. After all, what makes country music country if not fiddles and cheatin’ songs?

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Celebrating the King of Pop: 1958-2009

June 29, 2009 Tara Seetharam 30

No words, printed or spoken, seem to do justice to the life and career of the late Michael Jackson, the brilliantly talented, irreplaceable entertainer who united the world with his music and spirit. The only fitting way to pay tribute to this musical icon is to celebrate his music – because his is the rare, exquisite kind that transcends the boundaries of genre, color, gender and time, and will continue to impact lives for generations to come.

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George Strait Goes Platinum…Again

June 10, 2009 Kevin John Coyne 18

George Strait’s Troubadour has been certified platinum, his 33rd album to reach that sales mark.

How rare is this accomplishment? He trails only Elvis Presley (45) and The Beatles (39) among all recording artists.

Strait’s nearest country competitors are Alabama (20), Reba McEntire (19), Kenny Rogers (19) and Garth Brooks (16).

George Strait is one of those artists that I buy every album of. I remember being amazed how many albums he already had released when I became a fan in the nineties. It’s good to see him still going strong.

How many Strait albums do you own? What other artists do you buy every release from?

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Playing Catch-Up

June 10, 2009 Dan Milliken 7

It’s one of those life/blog paradoxes: we dedicate a lot of words to the new – new releases, new issues, new news – and yet, when it comes down to it, our personal, non-internet selves spend just as much time trying to get up to speed on things we’ve missed. History is fat, full of great stuff that happened while you were preoccupied with playing on jungle gyms or raising babies. There’s always something to catch up on if you set your mind to it!

Like right now, for instance, I’m discovering the music of the 90’s. I was under 10 and on a Pacific island for most of those years, and was honestly only marginally aware of the “country” classification for most of them. So I’ve been diving in.

Although the 90’s are regarded by many as a very strong period for mainstream country, my current catch-up squeeze is the alt-country group Old 97’s, and one song in particular: “The Other Shoe”, from their ’96 set Wreck Your Life. It’s a catchy, clunky little tune about a creepy husband who tells his wife he’s leaving for Phoenix (the specific phrasing is an apparent nod to Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” – cute), only to hide under their bed and await the appearance of her lover, whom he promptly guns down along with his adulterous wife.

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Tradition: Chain of Strength or Chain of Restraint?

May 27, 2009 Dan Milliken 21

This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the 2009 International Country Music Conference, conveniently held at a building on my college campus. The three-day event made for quite a mind-feast – so much so, actually, that it’s taking me longer than I had hoped to sort through all my notes and compose a post to do the thing justice. So that’ll be coming through the pipeline sometime within the next few days.

In the meantime, though, one issue raised during the event has really stuck out in my mind, and I thought I’d give it a spin and maybe throw out a taste of what’s to come in the full coverage.

So here’s what happened: in a discussion on Waylon Jennings’ career attitude during his peak Outlaw years, someone mentioned that his label disliked the way he seemed to view himself as a musical descendant of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams (see “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way”), as if his only role as a recording artist was to serve as a link in those artists’ musical “chain.” The speaker speculated that this sort of “big picture” attitude toward one’s art would probably worry many labels, simply because it directs the public’s focus away from an artist’s individual “star.”

That struck me as eerily relevant to today’s scene, where it’s become much less simple to hypothesize about which artists the big stars have “descended” from – and heck, which genres, in many cases. Today, more than I’ve yet witnessed in my young life, there seems to be much greater emphasis on building up an artist’s individual importance, rather than carrying a certain “flag.” Concerts are getting bigger and more histrionic; the CMA telecast books any act who might help ratings and basically snubs Hall of Fame inductees; and of course, most shout-outs to country legends of yore by today’s artists are usually just shallow attempts to build cred. The mainstream seems to have spoken its bit loud and clear: it has some progress it needs to carry out without any real help from the past, thank you very much.

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Concert Season: Who Are You Going to See?

May 24, 2009 Guest Contributor 31

I blame Adam Lambert for what I am about to reveal to you all: I’m headed to a Taylor Swift concert tonight. That’s right, Taylor Swift. Insidious curiosity got the better of me.

But why do I blame Lambert, you ask? Because I haven’t been listening to a whole lot of country music recently. Instead, thanks to my new, bizarre obsession with Lambert, in the past month I’ve pulled out old Queen, Bowie, Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin. And I’ve listened to more My Chemical Romance, Pink and even Def Leppard than anything resembling country. So, of course I thought of Swift. Because, when you think of hard rock, isn’t Swift the first person who comes to mind?

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Needle in A Haystack

May 21, 2009 Leeann Ward 14

Sometimes, finding music outside the mainstream is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There’s just so much music out there that it can often seem overwhelming to find something new, or at least new to me. However, as a constant and compulsive music consumer, it’s a task in which I eagerly indulge.

There are, of course, a myriad of ways to discover music, including the simplest way these days, the internet. But a process, a place to start, is still necessary in order to avoid overload.

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Greatest <em>Greatest Hits</em>

May 13, 2009 Dan Milliken 12

Okey doke, here’s my thinking: we’ll just do Country Quizzin’ every other week for the time being. I look at the blogger/bloggee relationship like an ADD-culture marriage: you gotta change it up sometimes to keep things interesting for both parties!

With that in mind, a discussion:

I’ve gotten on a dangerous roll lately in building up my music collection. It’s probably a little silly of me; they say owning music is kind of on the way out (the kids these days are all about that newfangled “streaming” thing), and I don’t have a great deal of disposable income to begin with.

But I so love to discover great music, to hold it in my hands. Especially older stuff, which just doesn’t feel right to own exclusively in MP3 form. And when Amazon, eBay and my local record stores keep offering incredible deals on used items, I find their mating calls very hard to resist indeed.

And so I find myself now knee-deep in a pool of that most spurned of media: the CD. Most of mine are proper albums, but I’m starting to lean more toward compilation packages (e.g. “greatest hits”, “essential”, etc.), particularly box sets, which you can sometimes get for astonishingly good rates if you keep your eyes peeled.

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Perfect 10

April 29, 2009 Dan Milliken 43

As April is one of the odd months that has five Wednesdays, I thought I’d take a break from Country Quizzin’ for this week and try out a new discussion-thing.

Given the current mainstream climate, it’s been a while since I’ve felt able to heap unfettered praise on a piece of country music here, and that frankly bums me out a bit. So in the spirit of un-bumming, I’m going to share ten country songs that I find absolutely flawless – my “Perfect 10” – and I invite you to do the same. It’s a simple enough concept – you could just think of it as Recommend a Track times 10 plus a punny name.

Still, I suspect the outcome could be really interesting if everybody puts in the effort to pick ten songs that they consider the absolute cream of the crop. We’re talking all-time best material here, whatever “all-time” happens to mean to you. You don’t have to rank them, and they don’t have to be your definitive top ten; I sure wouldn’t be able to produce that list without a lot more thought. They just have to be up there – the kind of songs that you love fully and deeply, that still engage and surprise you after countless listens.

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YouTube Great Discoveries Contest

April 26, 2009 Kevin John Coyne 35

To our readers, I present a challenge.

To the winner, a $10 Amazon Gift Card.

YouTube is home to countless country music clips, including some very rare live performances. Your challenge is to find the most surprising and unexpected live performance by a country artist.

24 hours from now, I’ll post a poll on the front page and allow readers to vote for the clip that they deem the greatest discovery. The commenter who posts the winning clip will receive the gift card!
Here’s all you need to do:

1. Find the clip on YouTube and copy its url into the comment box.

2. Add a “v” after the http, so the beginning of the link now reads httpv://

3. Write a brief description of the find and why you think it’s a great discovery.

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