Though not a "modern" Country album, it is one I think some may find of interest.
After Creedence Clearwater Revival disbanded (unintentional ;-), John Fogerty recorded and released his first solo album. But you may not have heard it, or even OF it. The reason for that is the fact that it came out not under his own name, but rather as The Blue Ridge Rangers (which is just him, playing every instrument, singing every part). And the music is pure, unadulterated Classic Country music, as Hillbilly as all get out ;-) .
I didn’t like Creedence (still don’t), but loved this album the instant I heard it in 1973. But then my father grew up on a farm in South Dakoda, his father a sharecropper. I grew up in the suburbs of various cities in California, but came to love Country music when I first heard it done by Bob Dylan, The Byrds, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep At The Wheel, and Poco. Well, that’s not quite true; my mom had Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire album, which I played a lot. And I loved The Everly Brothers long before I heard John & Paul imitating them ;-) .
The songs on the Fogerty Country album:
Side 1:
"Blue Ridge Mountain Blues".
"Somewhere Listening (For My Name)".
"You’re The Reason".
"Jambalaya (On The Bayou)", by the Hillbilly genius Hank Williams.
"She Thinks I Still Care", a hit song by the favorite male singer of Gram Parsons and Elvis Costello: George Jones.
"California Blues (Blue Yodel #4)", by the Father Of Country music, Jimmie Rogers.
Side 2:
"Workin’ On A Building", a Country Gospel song.
"Please Help Me I’m Falling", the fantastic original recording was by Hank Locklin.
"Have Thine Own Way, Lord", a Gospel obviously.
"I Ain’t Never", written by Mel Tillis & Webb Pierce, a hit for the latter. Dave Edmunds also did a great version of the song on his superb second album Subtle As A Flying Mallet.
"Hearts Of Stone".
"Today I started Loving You Again", one of Merle Haggard’s best songs.
As you can see, Fogerty has great taste in Hillbilly/Country music. And his recorded instrumental and vocal performances are top notch. A good candidate for a Rocker’s first Country album.
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For anyone who wants to hear current Country music that will appeal to his or her Rock ears, try Larry Campbell and his wife and musical partner Teresa Williams.
Larry was in Dylan’s road band for eight or nine years, then lead the band at the Midnight Rambles shows held in Levon Helm’s barn in Woodstock for about the same length of time. Teresa was a regular singer at the Rambles, and she and Larry have two fantastic albums available on LP and CD.
Jim Lauderdale is another, a fantastic singer and songwriter (a lot of the 80’s-90’s Country singers recorded his songs). Jim wrote the song "The King Of Broken Hearts" after reading about Gram Parsons characterizing George Jones thusly. For female vocals, Patty Loveless is highly recommended.
All the above are real/traditional/"hard" Country artists, not Rock guys who decided to jump on the Country bandwagon (no offense intended to Robert Plant ;-) . No songs about pickup trucks or drinkin’ beer down at the river.
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For those who like Iggy Pop and dislike "modern" Country music, here’s a quote from IP about an old-timer with a new album: " ’London Too’ will break your heart if you’ve got one".
The song is on Tommy McLain’s new album I Ran Down Every Dream, his his first in forty years (!). Collaborators with Tommy on the album are Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Van Dyke Parks, Ivan Neville, Denny Freeman, and some others less well known. The album was released on LP and CD by Yep Rock Records (a very hip label) last year, and Tommy has been on the road promoting it (at the age of 82!), on some nights sharing the stage with Nick Lowe.
This album is just one of the many Country albums which you do not hear on the radio or TV, with songs that do not talk about going down to the river in a pickup truck to drink beer, are not sung with an exaggerated Texas accent, and are not played as Rock music. Would those of you who keep repeating the lie that THAT is what all modern Country music sounds like please stop doing so? There are dozens and dozens of currently-active Country artists who DON’T sound like that. Expecting to hear music you like on radio or TV is rather silly. ;-)
By the way, Iris DeMent’s new album is now available (sorry LP purists, at the moment only on CD), and her tour in support of the album is commencing. I’ve seen her live on stage three times, and she is a fantastic live performer. A startlingly-great singer, a powerful pianist (she plays a grand piano on stage), and a delightful entertainer. I saw her on her last trip through Portland, but this time she’s not coming up from San Francisco.
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At the risk of beating a dead horse (no relation to a broken down pickup truck ;-), I must reiterate that there are many current Country artists making music that is deeply rooted in the music’s Hillbilly origins, not in Rock music, Southern Rock, or Garth Brooks and his ilk. No, you don’t hear it on radio or see it on TV, but so what? They’re out there, you just have to care enough to look for them.
Speaking of which, Robbie Fulks has a new album entitled Bluegass Vacation coming out on April 7th. Providing Robbie with musical accompaniment are a who’s who of Bluegrass practitioners: Jerry Douglas (the master of the dobro), Sam Bush, Tim O’Brien, Ronnie McCoury, Alison Brown, and John Cohen. All these musicians are virtuosos on their instruments, many of them also playing Bluegrass-Jazz Fusion music.
I mean, Jerry Douglas is heard on all of Alison Krausses albums, for God’s sake. Just pick up a copy of No Depression Magazine for an intro into the world of Americana/Alt-Country.
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Here’s a fact that may come as a surprise to those of you who are Neil Young lovers and Country music haters:
Neil likes Hank Williams so much he bought Hank’s Martin acoustic guitar, the one upon which the latter wrote all his classic Country songs. And it wasn’t cheap.
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News flash!
For those who think all current Country is crap, this may give you cause to reconsider:
On May 5th New West Records (whose artist roster is of a very high quality) is releasing (on both LP and CD) Rodney Crowell: The Chicago Sessions. I've been tellin' ya'll about Rodney for years now, but have you listened? ;-)
Well, you might now, because for this album Rodney got together with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, both in writing the songs and recording them. I have mixed feelings about this partnership. While I'm all for Rodney attempting to widen his fan base, I consider Crowell a far better songwriter than Tweedy, and a far, far better singer (Tweedy consistently sings slightly flat). Curiously, they won't be singing in duet fashion, but merely in unison.
Why unison? Perhaps because they tried singing harmony and Tweedy couldn't do it. We know for sure Crowell can, there's plenty of evidence of that. He was for years Emmylou Harris' singing partner, and Rodney has recorded duets with Jim Lauderdale as well.
The album was recorded by Tom Schick in Wilco's Chicago loft. I'm perfectly willing to have my opinion of Tweedy's talent elevated. Are you willing to listen to one of the great Americana artists I've been tellin' ya about? No songs about driving down to the creek in a pickup truck to drink beer, I guarantee you. ;-)
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@macg19: Excellent! Now consider giving the album producer’s Buddy Miller a listen (if you haven’t already). He’s a mighty fine singer in his own right, an unusually interesting guitarist (he plays on the War & Treaty album, as well as those of Emmylou Harris), and though not a prolific songwriter has the songs of his wife Julie as material (they did two albums together, and he of course produced and plays and sings of her solo albums), plus he has excellent taste in the songs of others he has recorded.
I love the recorded sound Buddy gets: very "alive", with great immediacy and presence. And you often can hear the sound of the room in which his recordings are made, which I love. He sometimes manipulates the sound, to replicate that heard on old records (as did Dave Edmunds on his fantastic 1970 Rock ’n’ Roll re-imagining of the old Blues "I Hear You Knocking").
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Lately I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos of Robben Ford discussing all things guitar. I saw and heard Robben live a lot when he moved to San Jose (during my senior year in high school I had been in a band with a bassist who was in Robben’s band for awhile), as did all the other musicians in town. I then followed his career when he moved down to L.A., where he worked first with Joni Mitchell. He went on to play with a lot of greats, including Miles Davis (who gave Robben his blessings when he tendered his resignation from Miles’ band, understanding Robben had to forge his own solo career), George Harrison, many others.
Anyway, Robben freely acknowledges that he is self taught, never took any lessons, and doesn’t read music. But if you watch his videos you will soon learn that he has a deep knowledge of music theory, which is more important than being able to read. That is, unless you intend getting into doing a lot of session work, in which reading is pretty much mandatory.
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@taxonomy: Have you read the entire thread? The "Country" music to which you refer is not at all what Americana (the underground---not on radio or TV---"Hard"---Traditional---Country) artists (T Bone Burnett, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Buddy & Julie Miller, Jim Lauderdale, Marty Stuart, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, etc. etc.) are producing.
Are you saying Robert Plant is making music (his two albums with Alison Krauss) which is "classic rock with an occasional mandolin"? You my friend need to try a little harder if you want to know what is available for your listening pleasure (reading this whole thread would be a good start). You ain’t gonna hear it on commercial Country radio, and shouldn’t expect to. That’s like expecting to hear Rock ’n’ Roll on a jazz station. Just because the music business calls something "Country" doesn’t make it so. As T Bone years ago said: "They’ve learned how to sell Country music to people who don’t like it." It’s called marketing, which is all the music business is now.
Have you seen the movie Ghost World (a great one)? If so, think back to the scene where Steve Buscemi’s character is dragged to a Blues club by his date, and the band Blues Hammer gets up on stage and bludgeons (Blues Hammer is an apropos name ;-) Blues music with their hideous attempt to play it? The Country music you have apparently heard is the Country equivalent of Blues Hammer.
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@tylermunns: Excellent post! You said it all, your every point well taken and perfectly argued.
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If it’s complexity you want, listen to J.S. Bach’s Concerto For 4 Harpsichords and Orchestra. Each harpsichord plays a different melody; just trying to keep those 4 threads separate will keep your mind busy! And those 4 parts are played over an insane string of chords, the string played at breakneck speed. A lot of other Baroque compositions have a mind-boggling progression of chords through which the musicians must traverse. And modulations (key changes), not to mention the counterpoint parts in the Fugue form. The hardest thing I ever had to learn to do was sing one part in a Fugue-based Pop song, when I was recording with a songwriter who was a music major at The University of California at Riverside, known for it’s excellent music department. It was he who turned me on to J.S. Bach. By the way, his favorite Pop music songwriter was Brian Wilson.
"Classical music is it’s own genre." Well yeah, of course. I agree, you can’t compare it with Blues-based music. But it was you who said "Jazz is the most complex music ever created." You didn’t say the most complex Blues-based/non-Classical music.
As for improvising, you apparently aren’t aware that a lot of Baroque compositions are written with sections requiring the harpsichordist to provide "ornamentation", the baroque term for improvisation. Keith Jarrett is one pianist equally capable in both Classical and Jazz musics; I have a bunch of his Classical recordings.
Terry Adams is one Rock ’n’ Roll keyboardist (piano, clavinet) who uses Jazz influences (Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra) is his band’s (NRBQ---an acronym for New Rhythm & Blues Quartet. Still going strong after 55 years!) songs, and does so with a great sense of humour. The best band in Rock ’n’ Roll!
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@coltrane1: If it’s Soul music you want, there is one current "act" I can enthusiastically recommend: The War & Treaty. An unlikely name, but this husband & wife duo of Michael and Tanya Trotter are absolutely fantastic!
They came to my attention solely for the fact that their debut album Healing Tide was produced by a favorite of mine---Buddy Miller. I don’t know who put the Trotters and Miller together, but the results have to be heard to be believed. Buddy started out in the Contemporary Christian Music field with his eventual wife and musical partner Julie. When he evolved into the secular market, he ended up as guitarist, harmony singer, and bandleader for Emmylou Harris (a position previously filled by Rodney Crowell).
A "Country" musician (he’s far more than that) producing a Soul duo?! Perhaps because he came out of Gospel music, as did Soul music. The duo have VERY strong voices, and the album’s material is excellent. Emmylou joins the duo on one song, the result being fantastic 3-part harmony (Emmylou is a master at singing harmony), which we all love. Right? ;-)
Healing Tide is the strongest debut album I’ve heard in a long, long time. No studio tricks were used in it’s making, done at Buddy’s home studio in Nashville. I use the term literally: Buddy turned his entire 19th century house into a recording studio. When Julie isn’t feeling well (she’s somewhat sickly), he runs a mic cable up to their bedroom, recording her in bed ;-) .
While not wishing to appear argumentative, I must take issue with your proclamation that "Jazz is the most complex music ever created." All Jazz? As in all genres, there is a range of complexity found in Jazz. But more importantly to me, are we to ignore the Baroque era in Classical music? Now THERE is complex music! J.S. Bach was an absolute genius, no secret there.
As for a 4-chord song, I’ve heard a fair amount of Jazz that is composed of less than that, sometimes only one chord, as heard in the music of the "Modal" movement. And then there is the issue of the relationship between complexity and quality. Is quality determined solely by complexity? Using that yardstick, ALL Blues sucks.
For an example of a song that superficially sound simple and non-complex, listen to "God Only Knows", written by Brian Wilson. If you try and play the chords of the song on piano, you are in for a surprise. The chord progression and use of modulation, bass inversion, counterpoint, and other musical devices is surprisingly sophisticated. His peers (including Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Leon Russell consider him a genius. But he’s no J.S. Bach ;-) . Another example is "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted", my absolute favorite "Soul" song.
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I neglected to mention that Chris Hillman also penned his autobiography, and it too is a great read (a term I for years have resisted using, but am finally giving in ;-) .
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@jpwarren5: When I saw The Dead (and The Airplane) live in the Summer of ’67 they sounded just like their debut album, which I at the time liked a lot. They still sounded like their choice of drugs was cross-tops (what my friends and I called the little white pills mentioned in Dave Dudley’s "Six Days On The Road") washed down with a quart of beer.
They sounded completely different on their 1968 album Anthem Of The Sun and 69’s Aoxomoxoa, which were very psychedelic (acid had sure influenced their music). While Jerry had a background in Hillbilly and Bluegrass (there are pics of him playing banjo in ’65, I believe it was), you didn’t hear it in the music of The Dead until 1070’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and even more so in Jerry’s first side project (as far as I know), Old & In The Way (which I bought when it was released in ’75).
But in 1968 the Rock band playing pure Country/Hillbilly was The Byrds, with the release of their Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album (which contains songs written by Dylan, Merle Haggard, Woody Guthrie, and The Louvin Brothers. Anthem Of The Sun and Aoxomoxoa sure don’t ;-) . Bassist Chris Hillman invited Gram Parsons to replace the departed David Crosby, and he did. It is said the album sold poorly, but everyone I knew had it in ’68.
Gram Parsons is given the lion’s share of credit for the Sweetheart album, but Chris Hillman deserves at least as much. Prior to joining The Byrds in 1964, Hillman had in the late-50’s started out playing mandolin in a Bluegrass band, and his band The Hillmen (a quartet whose other members included future Country music star Vern Gosdin) had a single album released in 1963. By the way, Chris’ solo Bluegrass albums on Sugar Hill Records are fantastic, as is his latest album, produced by Tom Petty.
Before joining The Byrds, it was Folk music Parsons was playing, not Country, Hillbilly, or Bluegrass. Parsons is also given credit for discovering Emmylou Harris, but it was, again, Chris Hillman. Chris had heard Emmylou in a Folk club in NYC, and knowing Gram was looking for a singing partner for his upcoming solo album, told Parsons about her. The rest is, as they say, history.
In 1969 Hillman and Parsons had taken their Country/Hillbilly leanings even further than the Sweetheart album, when they both left The Byrds and started The Flying Burrito Brothers. Future Eagles member Bernie Leadon eventually joined the group, and Gram left after their second album to go solo.
In the mid-80’s Hillman started a new Country music group, The Desert Rose Band, Joining him was a fantastic singer and musician named Herb Pederson, formerly of the Dillards. The DRB were very successful, producing a lot of great music and hit records.
You are spot on regarding Gillian Welch JPW. And you audiophiles who might consider listening to this music we are discussing if it was available in high end audiophile recorded sound quality, Gillian’s albums on her own Acony Records label are just what the doctor ordered. Her partner David Rawlings has a couple of solo albums, but they are unfortunately not so hot (imo).
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@joshindc: Wynn Stewart; now THERE’S a name you rarely see mentioned! I have a 2-LP collection on Bear Family Records of his 1958-1963 Challenge Records recordings. He was part of the Southern California Honky-Tonk/Rockabilly scene, and was a favorite of Merle Haggard. Dwight Yoakam of course loves him.
Also rarely mentioned is Lefty Frizzell, another favorite of Merle. I learned of Lefty when The Band included his 1959 Country & Western hit song "Long Black Veil" on their 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink (Johnny Cash had recorded the song in 1965, but I didn’t hear it back then). Yes, as the rest of the Rock world was still being psychedelicized by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, etc. etc., The Band included a Lefty Frizzell song on their 1968 debut! Six months earlier Dylan’s John Wesley Harding was released by Columbia Records, itself a very Country-influenced album (recorded in Nashville).
As you say, there are of course plenty of others, including George Jones (Gram Parsons’ favorite singer), Buck Owens (a huge influence on Yoakam). The list is actually quite long, that is if your musical taste includes the genre.
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Oh yeah, there are a couple of other observations about "West" I had intended to include in my comments about this fantastic song.
The song is performed in a VERY slow tempo, which many drummers find difficult. Not Keltner, of course. He takes advantage of the slow tempo to play some great bass drum parts, including the coolest employment of triplets I have ever heard. It reminds me of why Jim has been my Gold Standard of drumming since I heard his playing on Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys album in 1974, almost fifty years ago!
And then there is the lead guitar playing on the song. Very, very tasty, it sounds to me like Bill Frisell, one of the handful of the very best guitarists playing today.
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Sure have @stuartk. Chinaberry Sidewalks, 2011. It’s on a shelf in a bookcase, alongside those by Ray and Dave Davies.
I managed to see Rodney live at The Roxy Theater on Sunset in 2001. Just he and his guitarist Steuart Smith, along with master bassist Jerry Scheff (Elvis, Roy Orbison, L.A. studios, a favorite of T Bone Burnett). Hearing Scheff live was transcendental! Perhaps the best bassist I’ve heard live, and that includes John Entwistle (The Who of course), Joey Spampinato (NRBQ), and Rick Danko (The Band). Sitting at the table next to me and my gal was Dave Alvin, taking mental notes to himself no doubt ;-) .
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For those who don’t care for Rap, I have one suggestion for which you may make an exception, and it is from a rather unlikely source: Lucinda Williams!
On her album West she has a 9:06 song entitled "Wrap My Head Around That". The song structure is just two alternating chords played on acoustic and electric guitars (both Bill Frisell and Doug Pettibone are listed in the album credits), with a simple boom/crack drum beat (played by Jim Keltner) and a mildly funky electric bass part (Tony Garnier, Dylan’s long-time bassist).
Like the entire album, the song’s lyrics are absolutely fantastic. Lucinda "sings" them is Rap style of a sort---almost every word in the same note, sung rather "matter-of-factly". For you Rockers, late in the song a stinging, kinetic electric guitar part erupts from out of nowhere, filling the space between the last verse and chorus. Quite thrilling!
Two songs later comes the last song on the album, and it is really something special. It is entitled "West", and once you hear it you will know why she chose the song as the album’s title, and as the album’s final track (it is the best ending to an album I have ever heard, and that includes "The End" on Abbey Road).
"West" is the most beautiful, deeply romantic song I have heard in a VERY long time, and brings me to tears every time I listen to it (almost every day for the past two years). It sort of reminds me of "Moon River" by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, as sung by Andy Williams. A masterpiece of a song imo.
The album also starts off strong with "Are You Alright?", in which Lucinda inquires as to a friend’s well being after suddenly disappearing from her life. Yes, Lucinda is a very romantic soul. I deeply love her, and often replay in my head my mid-80’s meeting of her in Club Lingerie on Sunset Blvd. We were both there to see her then-husband’s band The Long Ryders live (he was their drummer. For you musicians he was playing a set of 1940’s Radio King drums. Very cool!).
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"I like both kinds of music---Country AND Western" is an old, old joke (I first heard it in 1969). It wasn’t written by anyone involved in the Blues Brothers movie, it was just repeated in it.
Here’s another good one:
On one stay in the hospital later in his life, a nurse asked Buddy Rich if he was allergic to anything. His reply was "Yeah. Country music."
By the way, there are two basic strains of Bluegrass music: Traditional, and Progressive. Traditional is that which usually features singing, with the instruments providing musical accompaniment. Progressive is purely instrumental, with lots of Jazz elements. Jerry Douglas plays both. I love his Traditional playing, his Progressive not so much. He and his band came through Portland on his last tour, and I of course went to see and hear them. As is common in Progressive Bluegrass, there was lots of soloing, lots of "noodling", just like in Jazz (and The Grateful Dead and Phish). Not my cup of tea.
Jerry has produced over 100 albums, and played on over 2000! A recent one is his collaboration with John Hiatt: Leftover Feelings, which was nominated for the 2022 Grammy Award For Best Americana Album (Jerry has won 14 Grammy Awards), and as I have been saying for quite a while now is my favorite currently active living musician. But only when playing Traditional Bluegrass ;-) . In this genre Jerry has a "side project"---The Earls Of Leicester, who have produced two albums, one studio, one live.
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I love how songwriter Harlan Howard (4,000 recordings of his songs! In the early-60’s, 15 of the Top 40 songs on the Billboard Country charts were his!! Amongst them are Patsy Cline’s "I Fall To Pieces" and Guy Mitchell’s "Heartaches By The Number". Ray Price, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Dwight Yoakam, Rosanne Cash, Cyndi Lauper, and even Country Joe & The Fish! have recorded the latter) characterized Country music:
"Three chords and the truth." Harlan is being modest; some of his songs have four chords ;-) .
Emmylou Harris is one of Harlan’s biggest fans (as is Elvis Costello), and about him Marty Stuart said "He was truly a master." Did you know Marty became a professional musician at the age of 13, when he joined Lester Flatt’s band? 13! That’s the age at which many Rock guitarists are just beginning to learn how to play. I met Marty in the early-90’s, at The Palomino Club on Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood, and he couldn’t have been a nicer person. Believe it or not, that’s where The Pretenders played in L.A. on their first U.S.A. tour. The place was stuffed to the gills! They were great live, by the way.
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@jpwarren58: Yup, Jimmie Rodgers is considered the founding father of Country music, and the Carter Family the first family of Hillbilly. When Johnny Cash first crossed paths with June Carter, he considered her "royalty" ;-) . In 1990 Rounder Records issued a series of LP’s of Jimmie’s earliest recordings. I have First Sessions 1927-1928 and The Early Years 1928-1929, along with The Best Of The Legendary Jimmie Rodgers.
By the way, June’s daughter Carlene (her pa was Country singer Carl Smith) was for a time married to Nick Lowe, after which she was with Howie Epstein, Tom Petty’s second bassist. Howie produced a couple of albums for John Prine, and played bass on recordings of some of my favorite artists, including John Hiatt. Howie unfortunately developed a taste for heroin, which cost him his life.
It’s ironic that after a lifetime of playing drums in Garage bands, Frat bands (while in high school I played a lot of gigs in the frat houses of Stanford University. Before moving up to San Francisco, Jerry Garcia did some busking on the campus of that rich-kids school), Blues bands, Country-Rock groups, Jump Blues/Swing bands, Singer-Songwriters, New Wave bands and singers (Pearl Harbor, who had three albums on Stiff/Columbia Records, married to Clash bassist Paul Simonon, sweet girl), Instrumental combos (Surf, Lounge, etc.), backing Oldies acts (Don & Dewey, the 1950’s Specialty Records Rock ’n’ Roll pioneers), Power Pop masters (Emitt Rhodes, John Wicks of The Records), and the one-and-only Evan Johns (he was a bandmate of the guitarists-guitarist, Danny Gatton. Vince Gill nicknamed Danny "The Humbler" ;-) , and I end up loving Bluegrass---drum-free music, as jp correctly points out!
Here’s a Bluegrass story: In the Fall of 1971 I was entering a San Jose band just as it’s bassist and drummer were leaving. The drummer was starting a band with Dave Shogren, who had just been kicked out of The Doobie Brothers. The bassist was going to focus on mandolin, and was going up to Marin to study (okay, take lessons ;-) with David Grisman. David advised Todd (Phillips) that there were plenty of great mandolin players, but a dearth of upright bassists.
Todd took David’s advice, got himself an upright (he had been a Fender P Bass player), and carved out a very nice career for himself. He even ended up playing in bands with David! Todd also worked with everyone’s (including the late Art Dudley) favorite flat-top acoustic guitarist, the great Tony Rice. Not bad for a kid from San Jose. Yeah, but I still have my hair, and Todd is bald ;-) .
I last saw Todd ten years ago, when we played music together for about an hour. I heard the sound of his 19th Century bass in the flesh, and can use my memory of it’s sound when I listen to Todd on recordings. My Rythmik/GR Research OB/Dipole Subs are fully up to the task of reproducing that sound..
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@thebingster: As you have evoked the name of Merle Haggard, allow me to offer a couple of stories about the great man.
By the early-90’s I had already discovered Lucinda Williams (her album on Rough Trade), seeing her and her 4-pc. band play in small joints around Los Angeles (once in a pizza parlour to an audience of about a half dozen), Lou Ann Barton (her great debut album on Asylum Records, produced by Jerry Wexler and Glenn Frey. Lou Ann was the lead singer in the original version of Double Trouble, double referring to her on vocals and Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar, he doing no singing. Lou Ann now works a lot with Jimmie Vaughan. She’s a fantastic singer!), and all the "New Traditionalists", the term some marketing man came up with for the emerging crop of young Country artists whose influences were Hank Williams and all the other "real" Country artists of yore. That crop included Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, George Strait, Clint Black, Patty Loveless, Carlene Carter, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Marty Stuart, Jim Lauderdale, etc.
I read an interview with Haggard, in which he heaped massive praise on a new female artist: Iris DeMent. So I of course got her new 1992 debut album (Infamous Angel) and immediately fell madly in love. She instantly became my new favorite female singer (displacing Tammy Wynette), and remains so to this day. Rock critic Robert Christgau gave her follow up album (My Life) a grade of A+ (!) in his Creem magazine review. My Life contains the single most devastating song I have ever heard: "No Time To Cry", which Merle himself recorded. His version is good, hers brilliant.
Second Merle story: In the early 1970’s Merle played the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, a half hour south of San Francisco. Doing sound at the theater that night was a soundman who had done sound at a lot of shows my bandmates and I had played around the Bay Area. My bassist partner was a huge Merle fan, and attended the show. Standing at the theater’s monitoring board and chatting, the sound man asked my bassist if he would like to go on Merle’s bus and meet him. Well duh ;-) . When they got up the stairs and into the buses "living room", Merle and his band were sitting around a table, playing poker. In the middle of the table was the biggest pile of blow my pal had ever seen. They might not smoke marijuana in Muskogee, but they apparently snort coke ;-) .
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I spent three months in Europe in the fall of '82, traveling around via a Eurail pass. I used my sister's apartment as my "base camp" (she was in the Navy, stationed in Stuttgart, but lived off-base), and in December she and I went to a nearly mall to shop for Christmas. The mall was 2-leveled, with an open area in the middle. I was upstairs and heard music emanating from the open area, so walked over to the rail and looked down. The music was being played by an American Country outfit, and all the Germans stopped what they were doing and watched and listened attentively, applauding appreciatively at the end of each song. A better audience than many American ones, I wager.
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@hilde45: Are you still in Austin? An old San Jose friend of mine has been playing Country & Western (as he likes to call it ;-), Western Swing, and related musics in Austin for about forty years now---Cornell Hurd. Ever seen him live? He’s a great songwriter, some of his recorded by Junior Brown and The Skeletons/The Symptoms/The Morells (same band, different names)---a great Roots Rock band out of Springfield Missouri. Their fans include Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, and Elvis Costello. Their drummer was Bobby Lloyd Hicks (R.I.P.), later in Dave Alvin’s band The Guilty Men, their bassist Lou Whitney (also R.I.P.) a well known (amongst musicians) Roots Rock recording engineer/producer, whose credits (over 1,000!) include Dave Alvin, Exene Cervenka, Jonathan Richman, The Del-Lords, and.....Cornell Hurd.
@stuartk: The first time I saw Kenny Vaughan live was also with Lucinda, on her Car Wheels On A Gravel Road tour, at The Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. Leading her band and playing acoustic guitar and singing harmony was Jim Lauderdale, himself very much a part of the Americana scene (he hosts the Americana Awards Show), with lots of his own albums, and one he made with Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris’ guitarist, harmony singer, and band leader. Buddy is my current favorite producer, sort of the Dave Edmunds of the 2000’s.
@patrickdowns: There is one Bluegrass album you may have missed (a lot of people did), and it’s a doozy! Wires & Wood by The Johnny Staats Project. Johnny won a mandolin and guitar competition, and came to the attention of Bluegrass fiddle superstar Tim O’Brien, who appears on the album. Joining Johnny and Tim are Sam Bush (mandolin), John Cohan (upright bass), Jerry Douglas (dobro. Jerry is favorite currently active living musician), Sara Evans, along with others. The song flow alternates between instrumentals and ones with vocals. A fantastic album! Johnny was offered tour support to promote the album, but declined, as his $ guarantee was less than his day job as a UPS driver paid. ;-)
The genres of Traditional Country (which I call "Hard" Country), Bluegrass, Folk, Singer-Songwriter, and even Country Blues---like Lucinda Williams---overlap, some music having a foot in different camps. One such album is The Houston Kid by Rodney Crowell. The Houston Kid is, I currently feel, THE best album I have ever heard. A perfect album (even The damn Beatles can’t claim THAT), and an absolute masterpiece. Joining Rodney on one song ("I Walk The Line Revisited") is Johnny Cash, Rodney’s one-time father-in-law (Rodney was married to Rosanne Cash). If you don’t already have this album, do yourself a HUGE favour and buy it. Sorry LP purists, it has been released on CD only.
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I admit Shania is a guilty pleasure of mine (she was produced by Mutt Lange, of AC/DC---a favorite Rock 'n' Roll band of mine---renown), but still found Steve's comment funny, and not without merit.
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@mcondo: While the term Outlaw Country is widely used as a separate genre---and pre-dates Americana by a few decades, I view the former as part of the latter. By the way, I’ve never cared for Hank Williams Jr., but love Hank III, who sounds a LOT like his grandpa.
If there’s one current Country artist who deserves to be considered Outlaw, it is surely Steve Earle. When Shania Twain was huge (made possible by the success of the Country music Anti-Christ, the deplorable Garth Brooks), Steve characterized her as "The highest paid lap dancer in Nashville". ;-)
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While the "Country" music you hear on radio and see on TV may be of questionable quality, there is a very healthy, active underground "alternative" Country music scene, often referred to as Americana, that is producing music as good as has ever been made. IMO, of course. No, you can’t hear it on radio, or see it on TV.
The mass audience was introduced to the original Hillbilly music of the 1920’s and 30’s in the Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou. The Brothers wisely hired T Bone Burnett to do the music for the movie, and he did a fantastic job (in 2002 the album won the Grammy Award for Album Of The Year). T Bone has long been involved in the Americana movement and scene, amongst his productions a pair of albums by Alison Krauss (a long-time leader in the modern Bluegrass genre) and none other than Robert Plant, a name of course well known to the mass Rock audience. Ironic, isn’t it? At the time Country music was being introduced back into Rock (beginning in 1968, by Dylan, The Byrds, The Band, a few more), Led Zeppelin was putting into motion the modern "Hard" Rock music movement, which heavily emphasized Blues. It took a while, but Robert finally saw the light ;-) .
Music in O Brother includes that by The Carter Family, Ralph Stanley, Jimmie Davis, and a bunch of people you’ve never heard of, plus new recordings by current artists (including Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Dan Tyminski, The Whites, The Cox Family). The original Hillbilly music is as primitive as is the Blues of the 20’s and 30’s, the two being more alike than different.
A lot of our most well known Rock guitarists were more attracted to old Blues (Eric Clapton, of course) than to old Hillbilly, but not all. While I like Rock ’n’ Roll guitar a LOT (the 1950’s originators of the style were influenced equally by Blues and Hillbilly), in the 1960’s the Hillbilly element in Rock ’n’ Roll all but disappeared (it remained in the music being made by the likes of The Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, a few others). These days I find myself more interested in the music being made by those who emphasize the Hillbilly element in Rock ’n’ Roll. (To hear great guitar playing, give a listen to dobro-master Jerry Douglas). The music being made by Marty Stuart And His Fabulous Superlatives (imo the current best band in the world) sounds FAR more like 1950’s Rock ’n’ Roll than does that being made by Rock bands. Marty’s Way Out West album was produced by Mike Campbell, Tom Petty’s guitarist. Mike’s one hip cat ;-) .
There are dozens and dozens of fantastic modern Traditional Country (as opposed to the Country/Rock/Pop of which the OP speaks) artists making great music. There is an annual event named The Americana Music Honors And Awards Ceremony, held at The Ryman Theater in Nashville. I don’t want to again list the many Americana artists currently active, as I have previously done so a number of times here on AudiogoN.
Expecting to hear good Country music on commercial radio and television is as unrealistic as it was to expect to hear Jimi Hendrix or The Mothers Of Invention on AM radio in 1967. It was in that year that underground FM radio sprung up, to serve the counterculture audience who wanted to hear something other than Top 40 Pop hits. The same situation exists today; if you want to hear the good stuff, you have to do your homework. It takes a little effort, so is only for those who care enough. One source is a print and online magazine dedicated to Americana music which debuted in 1995 (I have a complete collection)---No Depression. When Jeff Tweedy (now of course leader of Wilco) and Jay Farrar (now in Son Volt) made their band’s (Uncle Tupelo) debut album, they entitled it No Depression, the title of a 1936 Carter Family song.
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