“They send out a letter that says you know, ‘We are kind of demanding that you must be here so many times a year to continue your membership.’ Because it’s just not fair,” Lorrie Morgan explains. “People want to say, ‘Hey I’m a member of the Opry,’ and not want to come back. The Opry takes dedication and it takes love. It takes love.”
The feature film American Saturday Night: Live From The Grand Ole Opry has just announced that after a limited run of shows at select theaters in December, it is expanding to various Carmike Cinemas and North American theaters across the United States on February 12th. However the film’s top three stars are Opry members who regularly don’t pay their proper dues.
On Tuesday (12-15) it was officially revealed that Blake Shelton would no longer be co-hosting the ACM Awards with Luke Bryan. The ACM’s are scheduled to occur again next in April of 2016. It’s a position Shelton has held for many years. Blake will be replaced by the pilot of the drunken skies, Dierks Bentley. But the decision has left many wondering why Blake would pull out of such a prominent position.
the quality of the music of these do-good artists can sometimes be an entirely different story than the quality of their character. Such an assessment is subjective mind you, both on the musical and personal side. But generally speaking, the generosity of a given celebrity and the standards of their music doesn’t always go hand in hand.
Like so many of these contestants, not much has come of Jake Worthington in regards to industry success after his finale appearance in May of 2014, but he has just released a new EP. Settling somewhere between John Anderson and George Strait, this five-song offering is a straight-laced true country testament from start to finish that leaves little to no doubt where the heart of the young Jake Worthington lies.
On Wednesday morning (9-9), the nominees for the 49th Annual Country Music Association Awards were announced on ABC’s Good Morning America, with decidedly non-country personalities of Steven Tyler and Kelsea Ballerini helping to make the announcements. The 2014 CMA Awards will happen on Wednesday November 4th on ABC, and will be hosted once again by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood.
While tabloids continue to seize on every last speculative detail of the divorce between A-list country stars Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert, serious new concerns about the legalities of how the divorce was handled by the State of Oklahoma have been raised, and if the celebrity couple benefited from preferential treatment from the judge who filed the paperwork.
In some respects, broaching a discussion on this album seems nearly futile. Or maybe not futile, but at least frustrating. It’s almost fait accompli that it will fail to achieve the commercial feats and radio success the quality of the material warrants, but that’s just the way it is for women in this particular era of country music. We should be basking in the enjoyment of a new generation of inspiring country music females…
Blake Shelton proposed to Miranda Lambert in the woods near their home in Tishomingo, Oklahoma in 2010 after the country music power couple had been dating for some time before. Since then there hasn’t been one single winner of either the CMA’s Male Vocalist of the Year award or Female Vocalist of the Year award not named Blake Shelton or Miranda Lambert.
Dear Luke Bryan, Thanks for taking the time to read my letter, if in fact you do so. I can only imagine the time constraints a man of your success has, and you’ve already been taking of your time over the last few days to help clear up a mess that I guess I had some part in creating.
Gone are the days of Loretta Lynn singing “One’s On The Way.” Gone are the days of adult issues like divorce, resonating with mature audiences. Gone are the days of originality, not only in style but in songwriting. In that classic era you could tell the difference between Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Artists were easily discernible and legends arose because of their unique qualities…
If you’re going to release a country music song that is likely to completely alienate the core of your fan base and cut against the grain of all of the long-standing principles of your career, it better be commercially successful. Otherwise you’ve angered the constituency that helped create your success in the first place, and you haven’t even added any new members to your fandom.
We hypothesize often that the lyrics of popular country songs and other popular hits are slowly becoming more simplified and dumbed down, but now there is a study that puts data behind this hypothesis. Andrew Powell-Morse of Seat Smart recently took 225 different songs compiled in 4 separate genre datasets from 2005 to 2014, and analyzed them according to Readability Score.
The reason why these reality TV singing competitions, dancing competitions, and talent shows have worked so well over the last 15 years is because they tap into the innate desire of every human to be plucked out of the morass of obscurity and get the chance to become a superstar. The children of America and beyond are ingrained with a rock & roll fantasy that some day they can become famous.
This weekend in sunny Southern California, Sturgill Simpson will be taking the stage at the annual Stagecoach Festival in Indio—the country music cousin of the massive 2-weekend Coachella gathering. Sturgill Simpson is one of the few to ever play both the Coachella and Stagecoach weekends. Even more surprising is where Sturgill Simpson is ranked as far as popularity when it comes to Stagecoach attendees.
Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard are pairing up once again. This was the one nugget of important information squeezed between pot jokes when Willie Nelson made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Friday evening (3-21) as part of South by Southwest (SXSW) festivities in Austin, TX. It won’t be the first time the two country music legends have released an album together, and it may not be the last.
Chris Ferrell shot country music artist Wayne Mills at the Pit and Barrel bar Ferrell owned in Nashville on November 23rd., 2013. Wayne Mills was attending an after hours party at the Pit and Barrel when a dispute about smoking inside caused the two friends to get into a verbal argument. The argument escalated until Wayne Mills verbally threatened Chris Ferrell, and out of fear, the bar owner pulled a .22 pistol…
What should have been a mostly routine procedural event turned into a marathon court session as the prosecution and defense in the Wayne Mills murder trial tried to fill 12 juror slots and two alternates to hear the 2nd Degree Murder charges against bar owner Christopher Ferrell in a trial set to start the evidence phase Tuesday morning.
Though Monday is to be primarily focused on jury selection, in pretrial motions before jury selection, some previously-unknown details about the case were revealed to the public, along with some of the stances the defense is likely to take in attempting to prove Chris Ferrell acted in self-defense. We also learned about some of the witnesses likely to be called in the trial.
Country music artist Wayne Mills was shot in the back of the head at a far range by Chris Ferrell on the morning of November 23rd, 2013 at the Pit & Barrel bar in Nashville, TN. The shooting happened near 5:00 AM. Both men were at the Pit & Barrel attending an after hours party held after the memorial ceremony and concert held for George Jones at the Bridgestone Arena in downtown Nashville.
Ashley Monroe has all the assets that it takes to be a top tier female country music star, and in an environment where the industry seems to be desperately looking to anoint them. A beautiful, astounding singer, excellent songwriter, yet three years into her major label deal and she still feels like the consummate critical darling/commercial outsider.
We complain all the time about how today’s popular country music pretty much all sounds the same, but is this really true from a technical standpoint? That is what one enterprising Audiophile and songwriter set out to illustrate by making a mashup of some of Bro-Country’s biggest singles over the last couple of years in a pretty mind-blowing and revealing video.
Out of the 67 current members of the Opry, only 25 of them fulfilled their 10 appearance obligation, and three of those died during the year. 11 members didn’t make any appearances at all. But what may be more interesting is who is appearing on the Opry to take up the slack. Of the Top 11 performing members at the Grand Ole Opry in 2014, the average age was 79-years-old.
Boyd’s “My Baby’s Got A Smile On Her Face” became only the second single to debut at #1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart ever. The other #1 debut was Garth Brooks’ “More Than A Memory” from 2007. This development had the media going crazy, ready to annoint Craig as the genre’s next superstar. this week it has completely dropped out of the Top 25. Poof, it’s gone. Sales of the song dropped a whopping 94%.