The first song on the “Ray Lawrence Jr.” track from Hank3’s Ghost to a Ghost is “When You Lose All You Have.” They say to write it, you have to live it, and Ray wrote the song while living in a Phoenix homeless shelter. A truck driver and a divorcee, Ray had reached the end of his rope in 2008, and penned the song as a self-portrait.
Now that mainstream country music has been seen as just another version of pop music by so many people for so long, my concern is that talented musicians are being turned off by the mere mention of the term ‘country’, seeing it as a genre without gravitas, obsessed with money and image, making it even more likely for the one-in-a-million music talent to stay away.
Since the beginning of Saving Country Music over 3 1/2 years ago, nothing but respect has been shown to The Country Music Hall of Fame. It is the last major country music institution that considers the preservation and promotion of the traditions and history of country music above commercial concerns, as other institutions bend and sway with the current popular trends in country music.
So I guess the founder of Apple Steve Jobs died or something? I don’t know. But it reminded me of a very strange but interesting piece of Hank3 T-shirt art that he debuted sometime in 2009, an all black shirt that simply showed the well-recognized Apple symbol with the bite out of the right side, an equals sign, and then a pentagram.
With Working in Tennessee, Merle Haggard adds yet another solid volume to his already legendary arsenal of albums. Mainstream radio’s love affair with Merle may be over, but it doesn’t mean the fountain isn’t still flowing. When that vintage voice comes cracking out of that sideways cowboy smile, it still hits you like a precious memory.
It usually takes 6-9 months for the bloated machine of Music Row to realize and catch up on trends, but no doubt that within the next few months, we will begin to see more and more hip-hop infiltration into mainstream country. The next question will be, will the one artist that sits at the very top of the totem pole decide to lead ahead of that trend, or follow it?
That’s the real problem, not Jr.’s statements or ESPN’s whiplash decision, it is the fact that mass pop media is perpetually letting us all down, and giving in to the least common denominator. Hank should be happy. His career had been reduced to a weekly punch line. And ESPN should be happy they’re lighter a 200-pound blowhard who hasn’t had anything substantive to offer for 20 years.
The fire quickly spread out of control, with residents forced to evacuate with little or no time to grab personal effects. The whole area between Austin and Bastrop became like a war zone. Lucky Tubb was . . . well . . . Lucky, and his home was not effected. However his brother and road manager Brian Kelly was.
Country and folk music have a long history of joining forces to create infrastructure to help support music, principally in festival gatherings. And as the corporate music world continues to crumble and is able to support fewer artists, while capital and infrastructure to develop upcoming acts continues to contract, hip-hop and indie rock bands have been flocking to traditional roots festivals for support.
Listen to me, and listen good. There is nothing more important, and no bigger challenge in music right now that the ability for artists and their fans to communicate. This takes effort on everybody’s part. Lessons must be learned from the death of MySpace on how to navigate the destruction of a social network without losing the network itself.
This is a questions I get here at Saving Country Music quite often. The mythology and legacy of the Hank Williams name is so robust, some folks just can’t imagine it ever coming to an end. The requirement is simple though. For someone to be a true Hank Williams, they would need to be a son of Hank Williams III, and that son would need to be named Hank, at least in some way.
Late last week, Willie Nelson released a new song “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die”. It’s a good, catchy song, just like his recent collaboration with Snoop Dogg called “Superman”, that starts out, “Too many pain pills, too much pot. Trying to be something that I’m not.” And we can’t forget (though many of us have tried) the Toby Keith joke song “I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again.”
Well hello there American Idol winner Scotty McCreery, my name’s The Triggerman, and I want to formally welcome you to country music. Don’t worry, just because I’m a hardliner, doesn’t mean I’m gonna rip into you just because you’re an Idol alum. Teeming masses of 14-year-old glitter-faced girls high on Spree and voting en masse on cell phones seem to be a better judge of talent than boardrooms full of business and marketing majors.
By sea, by plane, by land (or as Pickathon would prefer it, by carpool or public transportation) if you can make it to the Pendarvis Farm just outside of Portland, OR, you should make being a participant in this year’s Pickathon Festival a priority this weekend. But if you can’t, you can still participate, and still be insipred by the sustainable model Pickathon has created for it’s patrons, performers, and community.
One of the standouts in 2011 so far has been Bloomington, Indiana-based singer/songwriter Austin Lucas, and his album A New Home in the Old World. He sat down with me for about a hour to discuss his experience on the Country Throwdown and touring with Willie Nelson, how he got into country, and how his goals are measured and focused on the art of songwriting first, above his own popularity.
I don’t proclaim to know where country music will go from here, but what I do know is that Justin Moore and Outlaws Like Me has solidified its place in country music history as one of the big bullet points on the timeline that denotes a major event. And that the event it denotes is not a positive one. And that’s not just my opinion.
After a one year hiatus, the legendary Deep Blues Festival will be re-emerging this year on July 16th in Cleveland, OH. This year the torch has been picked up by Jim Chilson of the blues band the Ten Foot Polecats. Chilson was kind enough to give me some of his time to talk about why he decided to rekindle the Deep Blues flame, and about the difficulty some blues-based bands find being accepted in the traditional blues music circles.
Country rap is here ladies and gentlemen. It is a full-blown chart-topping mainstream-acceptable sub-genre of country, like it or not. So what is a country purist to do? Well I have assembled a survivor’s guide to help you rebuke some of the ridiculous claims being made by country rap apologists.
We sit at the crossroads of the great technology paradigm. For all the music problems technology solved for artists and fans, it is now creating new ones, principally an astronomical glut in the sheer volume of music being produced, and then marketed specifically for commercial consumption on a global scale. The enjoyability of music depends on its place as a minority in the collective talents of human society.
With Kid Rock hosting the CMT Awards, with country rapper Colt Ford performing, and with Jason Aldean and Ludacris closing the show out with a rap song, you can make the case that 15%-20% of the 2011 CMT Awards was either rap or rap inspired. I expect those percentages to increase until the number gets to 50%. Then the mono-genre will be fully realized, and the death of contrast will be complete.
This week the music world was agog that Lady Gaga topped the charts with her latest album Born This Way selling over 1 million copies. But I was neither shocked nor appalled that Lady Gaga made #1. What blew my mind was to see the post-contract Hank III release from Curb Records called Hillbilly Joker crest #10 of the Billboard country charts last week.
When you look at the Arab Spring going on right now in the Middle East, it’s hard not to trivialize problems such as the current financial state of the American music industry or the creative freedom of its artists. However it’s not hard to draw parallels between the two as well: repressive regimes unwilling to contemporize continue or escalate the same heavy-handed oligarchical systems…
We all like free stuff, right? Beats paying for it. Unless taking something for free is silently eroding something we’re perfectly willing to pay for. The amount of music out there right now that’s being either given away, or offered for unlimited free listens, is astonishing when you consider what normal was only a few years ago. If it is not expected of artists to at some point make their albums or songs completely available to fans for free, then it will be within months, if not days.
Charles Darwin once said, it’s not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change. It goes without saying that the music industry was not quick enough to adapt to the digitization of music, and has paid dearly by revenues being halved over the last decade. And now even burgeoning digital sales have flattened, and in some sectors, tapered off…