Country Music is Dead

I've been thinking a lot about country music lately. I do reside in Nashville after all, and country music is why I came up here --- even if it isn't necessarily the reason why I've been sticking around --- so I might as well keep letting you folks know how I feel about it.

A couple of weeks ago I had that meeting with the suit at BMI who told me about how it works and all that ... you know, about "who are you writing with"...if you don't recall that it's only a couple of posts down so... Anyway this past weekend a made two trips to the Country Music hall of Fame, where they mostly celebrate how things ought to work in Country Music or how they used to work. (I recently purchased a museum membership so I'm trying to get my money's worth.) The Hall of Fame's moto is "Honor thy Music." And they do a damn good job of it.

Saturday I stopped by the grand re-opening of the Hall of Fame store and saw Charlie Louvin sing. He was pretty damn solid for an 80 year old man who confessed that he still likes to have himself a smoke. ( And you know that puts him in good standing here at the Leader!) Sunday I went to a steel guitar demonstration then checked out the new Marty Robbins exhibit. After that I made a quick pass through the museum. It wasn't that long ago that I was there, and there wasn't much new to see, but I did stop in a couple of the "Hear a Classic Country Song" booths --- that was a great follow up to the steel guitar demo. I listened to "Slowly" by Webb Pierce twice, and it has never sounded better. I also checked out Jimmie Rogers and watched videos of Patty Loveless talking about growing up in Kentucky and Gillian Welch doing "I want to sing that Rock and Roll." David Rawlins guitar solo in that song touches something deep inside me every damn time I hear it.

Now, there may be some way to draw a line between Jimmie Rogers and Webb Pierce to Brooks and Dunn and Rascal Flatts. But I can't come up with it. The music the big wheels in this town make now is not even close to the same thing that has historically been called country music. This is not a new sentiment I know. Lots of folks feel this way, and it has been said about Nashville several times in the past. But damn.

(Just to present a different view... I'm in no way saying that country music should not change and evolve. But it's evolved right into some other life form.)

And that brings me to the other thing I was thinking about the last couple of days in regards to country music.

There's been a lot of controversy lately about some comments that Kix Brooks from Brooks and Dunn made about the festival formerly known as Fan Fair, now called the CMA Music Festival presented by ABC, Chevrolet, Wal-Mart, and a bunch of other multi-national corporations looking to play the branding game with the country music demographic. Anyway, Kix said that the CMA ought to pay the performers or risk losing them or the festival itself to another city. Performers have traditionally appeared at the festival formerly known as Fan Fair for free. It has been their way of giving back to the fans who made them successful. The stars would set up their autograph booths and meet all the folks. It was a big, down home, country party and illustrated one of the major ways that country music was different than many other forms of popular entertainment. But it ain't like that anymore.

I don't know how i come down on this issue. Is it really too much to ask a country star to perform a short set for free one night a year? On the other hand, it's not like it's a free concert.
Really, the whole thing has just gotten out of hand. Some folks seem to want to hold onto the old myth of country music being about the fans, the stars being just like the rest of us and all that. But it's a terribly corporate system. And business folks like to get paid.

We need to take the Hall of Fame's advice and honor country music because it's dead, and it ain't coming back.