Bill Crook
From:
Goodlettsville, TN , Spending my kid's inheritance
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Posted 9 Jul 2001 12:04 pm |
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(b0b, If this subject is too long, you can delete it if you wish.)
Just read this in the New York paper this morning. we may come back after all !!!
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The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack is the year's best-selling country album so far, selling nearly 2 million copies of music modeled after the hillbilly records and field recordings of the 1930s. It has spawned a documentary follow-up and live disc, Down From the Mountain, due later this month. While by itself, the soundtrack's success might appear anomalous — its buyers hardly reflect the typical country audience — other signs point to increasing interest in the rich musical sources of the Appalachian and coal-mining regions of the eastern USA.
Artists such as Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs and Ralph Stanley, all of whom come from the area around the western foothills of the Appalachian mountains, have found renewed musical prominence with recent recordings. Last week, Pikeville, Ky., native Patty Loveless released Mountain Soul, an acoustic album that harks back to her first musical influences. Early critical reaction marks it as one of the year's most acclaimed country albums. And the instruments of the region's British, Scottish and Irish settlers, from the banjo to the pennywhistle, have returned to country radio.
"Every single time that country has come back from a significant downturn, it's done so with music that had strong traditional relevance," says Music Row publisher and editor David Ross.
When Randy Travis hit the scene in 1986, country music was so moribund that, months before, The New York Times had declared it dead. Travis' arrival was accompanied by several other acts, most of them in the honky-tonk and Texas singer/songwriter traditions, who attracted outside attention to country music: Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, k.d. lang. The pool of new talent today isn't that deep, but there are signs that it could be.
The three members of Nickel Creek — mandolinist Chris Thile, 20; fiddle player Sara Watkins, 20; and guitarist Sean Watkins, 24 — haven't had a radio hit yet, but prominent play of their Lighthouse video on country cable channel CMT has helped them build a burgeoning audience that brings together traditionalists, teenagers and jam-band fans. Nickel Creek's fresh-faced appeal and inventive musicianship has every major label in Music City salivating over them.
"That little Chris Thile is a rock star," says MCA Nashville president Tony Brown.
Paisley, a multi-talented singer from northeastern West Virginia, won the Country Music Association's Horizon Award last fall after topping the charts with He Didn't Have to Be, a sentimental song about stepfathers. His latest album includes Darrell Scott's You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive, a harrowing song also covered by Loveless on Mountain Soul.
There's also North Carolina native Mark McGuinn, whose Mrs. Steven Rudy sounds like so much back-porch banjo picking. Only now, that back porch has an electrical outlet for plugging in a drum machine.
Just as listeners flocked to country music in the late '80s to avoid rap, this new attraction to old-fashioned music may be partly a response to the pervasiveness of teen-pop acts and their Nashville knockoffs.
"I think people, their taste buds change," says singer/songwriter Leslie Satcher. "Maybe they're just hungry for something traditional and soulful."
If there's a backlash against Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, the reaction to such heavily processed music could be something earthy and organic.
"If country music is real," says Grand Ole Opry general manager Pete Fisher, "Appalachian music is really real."
"The mountain sound was songs that were taught to us, music that was taught to us by our elders, not through instruments, but through voice, through words," Loveless says.
Loveless, whose father mined coal, can still recall the powerful music in the Old Regular Baptist churches she attended as a youngster in Pikeville.
"To this day, I can go into one of those churches and still feel very moved," she says. "There's such a power there, to hear these people make music with their voices. Their instrument is their voice. It's the way they phrase. It's just that mournful sound in their voices and the way they project it."
The most traditional music is already enjoying a commercial boom. Nickel Creek's debut album and Dolly Parton's last two albums have each sold more than 200,000 units.
"Compared to O Brother, that doesn't look so impressive, but if we hit 10,000 eight years ago on a bluegrass release, we were thrilled," says Bev Paul, general manager of Sugar Hill Records.
Acoustic music festivals, such as North Carolina's MerleFest, have seen huge leaps in attendance. Performers like Stanley and Del McCoury are selling more albums than they ever have.
But that doesn't mean hard-core bluegrass will start showing up on the radio next to Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
"You're going to hear those folks be the impetus for other folks to have an opportunity to be on the radio," Fisher says.
When that influence does reach radio, it will have mutated, perhaps retaining the sentimentalism of the mountain ballad or the instrumentation of bluegrass, and combining it with modern production and sensibilities.
"Out of this will come a hybrid form that we'll probably call bluegrass, but it's not," Brown says.
Mainstream entertainers may cut more songs by bluegrass writers, or the genre's musicians may start getting more calls for recording sessions. The new sound likely will have more in common with the Eastern Kentucky vocal tradition of Ralph Stanley than the Western Kentucky picking tradition of Bill Monroe.
An early beneficiary of this trend is Scott, a multi-instrumentalist whose albums have suddenly become fertile sources of material for tradition-minded mainstream singers. Besides the two covers of Harlan, Travis Tritt recently had a hit with his It's a Great Day to Be Alive, and the Dixie Chicks have just released his Heartbreak Town as a single.
All three songs come from Scott's 1997 album Aloha From Nashville.
The chilling Harlan, which depicts the soul-crushing cycle of early coal-mine economics, was inspired by Scott's search for information about his great-grandfather.
"My family came from Harlan County," says Scott, a native of London, Ky. "They traveled the hillbilly highway, where you leave the mines to farm. The next chapter is you leave the farm to go to Detroit to work in the car factories or steel mills. (The song) encapsulates the experience of trying to find out what happened to a great-grandfather that family history had obliterated."
Already, country music has seen a resurgence of one popular old-time staple: the tear-jerking ballad. Recent hits such as John Michael Montgomery's The Little Girl, in which a child sees a vision of Jesus comforting her during her parents' fatal fight, and Tammy Cochran's Angels in Waiting, about her two brothers, who died from cystic fibrosis, descend directly from gothic ballads like Little Bessie and Put My Little Shoes Away.
"One of the problems we have in current American culture is the notion that sentimentality has always been looked down upon," says music historian Charles Wolfe, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. "In an earlier day, there was nothing wrong with sentimentality. There was nothing wrong with seeing grown men shed a tear over a particularly effective piece. Something like that is starting to emerge in our culture today."
Radio may have accepted the old lyrical themes, but it has been slow to pick up on the sounds. However, CMT, with an audience that skews broader and slightly more male than its country-radio counterparts, has had great success with the Soggy Bottom Boys' Man of Constant Sorrow, Nickel Creek's Lighthouse and, most recently, Parton's acoustic cover of Collective Soul's Shine.
Chris Parr, vice president for music and talent at the country cable channel, expects to add a second O Brother video, featuring Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch (Krauss and Welch will release new albums soon), and a track from Loveless' album in the coming weeks.
Parr says he tries to pace the introduction of such videos. "I don't want to overestimate the magnitude of what is happening," he says, "but it certainly feels like there is a huge groundswell out there."
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