Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Miranda Lambert “Only Prettier”

Time once again for our usual midweek feature.

Miranda Lambert made her Nashville recording debut in 2005, and when she's not performing with the Pistol Annies, she is making statements on the shifting of Southern culture since the 1960s. The narrator has “a mouth like a sailor and yours is more like a Hallmark card," but at the end of the day, if you're from Dixie, hurrah for Dixie, 'cuz she's from Dixie too.

And so it goes.
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Steve ‘n’ Seagulls “Thunderstruck”

Time once again for our usual midweek feature.

What happens when you come from Finland, and you have the nerve to fuse Appalachian mountain music with American heavy metal, maybe throw in a big-@$$ button accordion? Beats the hell outa me, but Steve ‘n’ Seagulls gives it a shot. Feast your eyes and ears until they ... Finnish.

Oh yeah, let's call it “mountain metal.”

(H/T to AC/DC and Dom Bettinelli.)
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Maddie & Tae “Girl In A Country Song”

Time once again for our usual midweek feature.

In a recent interview, country music recording artist Collin Raye lamented the current state of country music.

There appears to be not even the slightest attempt to “say” anything other than to repeat the tired, overused mantra of redneck party boy in his truck, partying in said truck, hoping to get lucky in the cab of said truck, and his greatest possible achievement in life is to continue to be physically and emotionally attached to the aforementioned truck as all things in life should and must take place in his, you guessed it ... truck.

He's right, of course, except for one thing. If you ask the women, the real obsession is even worse than the one with trucks. A duo on the Republic label named Maddie & Tae are pleased to elaborate, in this latest viral video.

My cousins in the country were never like this. Then again, we tend not to marry our cousins.
 

“It was fifty years ago today ...” Why The Beatles Matter

Fifty years ago tonight, the Beatles did their first televised performance in America, on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. They had already been together for several years, and had already released at least two albums the previous year, one in the United States. They had even made their first hit single, Please Please Me. But 1964 was the year that really put them on the map, and into the mainstream of American pop culture.

People can go on at great length as to the influence of "the four lads from Liverpool" on popular music. While they certainly did not invent rock and roll, they are responsible to a large extent for the genre as we know it today. To understand that, and to know why one major label actually rejected their audition two years earlier, is to understand the state of that genre for five years prior to that time.

There is, of course, the conventional wisdom; that the tragic death of Texas rocker Buddy Holly, just five years earlier almost to the day of the Beatles' USA debut -- it was memorialized in 1971 by Don McLean's "American Pie" as "the day the music died" -- signaled an end of innocence for popular music, if only for the white audiences. The raucous rockabilly beat that came out of the white musicians of Memphis, gave way to a smoother, more polished sound of Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon, while the Motown sound, with James Brown leading the way, went in its own direction.

Then again, as Elijah Wald writes for CNN:

In fact, the rock 'n' roll scene had become increasingly integrated through the early 1960s, to the point that in late 1963 Billboard magazine stopped publishing separate pop and R&B charts because so many of the same records were on both.

Be that as it may, by 1962, it was apparent to the music industry, that "guitar bands" were already a thing of the past. Small wonder, then, that Decca Records dismissed the Beatles' audition demo that year. This wasn't the direction the music was going, and these boys, however hard-working, however optimistic, simply didn't fit the narrative. Few would have guessed that Capitol Records would have made the right choice in picking them up only two years later for American distribution.

While the Beatles did not introduce white kids to black music, they went a long way towards making more respectable for mainstream distribution. It was no longer just "Negro music," the sound of a particular demographic, but "rock and roll" that was for all with ears to hear. The would-be rockers in port cities like Liverpool scooped up the 45rpm singles by black artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, brought to their shores by British seamen returning from America, and boys like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, already teamed up with a skiffle band known as The Quarrymen (skiffle being a jazzed up form of jug band or folk rock made popular by artists like Lonnie Donegan), listened to every line, and copied every riff they heard.

The "fab four" were not the first to bring together the Negro sounds of rhythm and blues out of Detroit and Chicago, with the white sounds of rockabilly out of Memphis and Nashville. But under the influence of manager Brian Epstein, and the artistic genius of veteran producer George Martin, the band lent a degree of light and shade heretofore unknown to the emergent genré, as if unconsciously inculcating centuries of European culture. Critics would still dismiss them as a passing fad, but a few musicologists noticed a certain sophistication to their arrangements, both instrumental and vocal. Even classical music scholars such as Peter Schickele have found melodic similarities between early Lennon-McCartney compositions and various classical works.

The Beatles were not the mere fabrication of promoters, picked off the street with good looks and no talent; they were, at least in their essential form, a collective creature of their own making. There were no backup singers, no anonymous horn sections, no army of songwriters manufacturing creations for the uncreative (the occasional covers of R&B standards notwithstanding). What you saw was the whole package, on the packagers' own terms. No compromising with commercialism, but the other way around. Even trading in the slicked-back hair and the leather jackets, for the "pudding basin" haircuts and the matching suits and cravats, was their own brainchild, or at least that of Epstein, who followed a hunch for a trendsetter, by which they made their own mark on haute couture, and the culture at large.

As time went on, four young men who became overnight sensations in their early- and mid-twenties would come to terms with their sudden wealth, and their coming of age. With that would be the pull in different directions. There has been much speculation over the years, and more will be written anew, as to whether they would have lasted past the end of the decade, were it not for John Lennon's encounter with an older woman, an avant-garde conceptual artist from Japan by way of New York, by the name of Yoko Ono, who consumed John's life from their first meeting, and whose relationship has been said by some to be the catalyst of the band's demise. But the truth is, Yoko or no Yoko, all four of them were already on divergent paths. It would be some years after the tragic assassination of Lennon in December of 1980, that the remaining three would appear together in a television documentary, remembering their lost comrade, and singing the melodies together that they once knew.

It was the closest to a "Beatles reunion" the world would ever know. The opening segment begins here, with the video clip immediately above (and part two of twelve gets even better) ...
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: The Gregory Brothers “Wrecking Ball”

Time once again for our usual midday Wednesday feature.

The Gregory Brothers -- that would be Evan, Andrew, and Michael, but without Evan's wife Sarah, remember them? -- add their “high lonesome sound” from southwestern Virginia to a recent single by Miley Cyrus. That little corner of the Old Dominion which is the birthplace of country music is strictly a twerk-free zone, so gather 'round the video, and prepare yourself not to be violently ill.

(H/T to Rosemary Norris Holland.)
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Brad Paisley “Beat This Summer”

Time once again for our usual midday Wednesday feature.

You can tell we love Brad Paisley here at the old Black Hat Corral, yeah, you right? “Beat This Summer” is the name of the second single release from last March, from his latest album Wheelhouse, as well as that of his current tour. We sure wish he could have played for the BSA National Jamboree this year, instead of those other losers who ended up backing out, even after the BSA made a concession to the latter with ... well, more on that later.

Right now, let's hit the boardwalk.
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Raintown “If This Was A Love Song”

Time once again for our usual midday Wednesday feature.

Raintown is a country music duo (which only looks like a quintet at the moment) from Glasgow, Scotland, consisting of Paul Bain and Claire McArthur, and whoever else is tagging along in the studio or on tour. The latter includes Stevie Lawrence, who plays the Irish bouzouki in this video, and has been known to do the same for ... the Red Hot Chili Peppers (duuuude!). You can add a certain amount of light and shade with just a duo with tight harmonies, and without a lot of overdone instrumentation.

Now, go ahead, "make me cry."
 

George Glenn Jones (1931 - 2013)

One of the most prolific artists of country music died this morning, from complications related to irregular blood pressure. He was 81.

Born in a log cabin in Saratoga, Texas (a town outside of Beaumont), George got his first guitar when he was nine, and was playing for change on the streets shortly thereafter. From there he went on to local radio shows. His first recorded hit in 1955, “Why Baby Why” made it to number four on the country charts, the first of many in a recording career that included 119 singles under his own name, 68 albums, 26 collaborative albums, 24 compilation albums ... one could go on. In 1956, he became a member of the Grand Olde Opry.

It was particularly in later years that he was hailed as "the greatest living country singer," with unique facial characteristics that earned him the nickname “Possum.” But it was not only his distinctive voice that lent to his critical acclaim. In the tradition of Hank Williams and other country artists, Jones lived out the songs that he wrote. It was a life of hard living, hard drinking, drug addiction, bouts with the law, and stormy marriages. There were four of the latter, the first when he was 19, which lasted only a year. But he is best known for his third marriage, to country singer-songwriter Tammy Wynette, whom he wed in 1969. Despite a reputation as an abusive and irresponsible husband, their tribulations were often the inspiration for their duets, and a musical collaboration that far outlasted the marriage, which ended in divorce in 1975. Even his failure to show up for performances inspired the song “No-Show Jones.” What's more, his 1996 arrest for riding a lawn mower on an open road was parodied in the music video “Honky Tonk Song.” His cameo appearances in other country music videos also found him riding on a lawn mower.

But it was during his fourth marriage in 1983 to Jenny Johnson, that he cleaned up his act, and she was considered instrumental in his recovery from addiction. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992, and was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2008. In 2012 he was presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award. It was during this latter period that he recorded a song penned by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis entitled “Choices.”

I've had choices
Since the day that I was born
There were voices
That told me right from wrong
If I had listened
No I wouldn't be here today
Living and dying
With the choices I made

Among the many albums he recorded were collections of gospel hymns. Some might have thought him to be a hypocrite for this, but a man at his lowest on a Saturday night can still wish for his highest on a Sunday morning. Russell Moore speaks to this desperation of the heart in his First Things article.

He was the troubadour of the Christ-haunted South. The raw emotion, and even whispers of torture, in his voice can teach American Christianity much about the nature of sin and the longing for repentance ... This is not a man branding himself with two different and contradictory impulses. This was a man who sang of the horrors of sin, with a longing for a gospel he had heard and, it seemed, he hoped could deliver him. In Jones’ songs, you hear the old Baptist and Pentecostal fear that maybe, horrifically, one has passed over into the stage of Esau who, as the Bible puts it, “could not find repentance though he sought it with tears.”

For yours truly, there is a sadness that comes with the news of George Jones' passing, and a longing for days gone by. They were the days when a singer who billed himself as a country or country-western artist, was not of the comfortable suburban middle-class life, that permeated themes of the "countrypolitan" sound in the 1970s, nor the over-styled, stereotypical exurban refined redneck with designer jeans that populates the airwaves today, but one who was truly without pretense, without pre-packaging, who was genuinely “born and bred, cornbread fed.” That generation is passing, one at a time, and we will never see their like again.

If the failings of a man that were so well-published are to be forgiven him, let it serve as a reminder to us all, of the reality of the Divine Mercy, and our own need to call upon Him for ourselves.
 

Art-For-Art’s Sake Theatre: Cleve Francis “Love Light”

Time once again for our usual midday Wednesday feature.

Singer-songwriter Cleve Francis is one of the very few African-Americans of the country music genre. His first music video, “Love Light,” was released with the recording in 1990. The song made it to number 52 on the Billboard Country Music charts.

Francis went on to release three albums on the Liberty label between 1992 and 1994.
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Joe South (1940-2012)

One week ago today saw the passing of a country-crossover singer-songwriter, born under the name of Joseph Alfred Souter, from heart failure, at his home in Buford, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. He was 72 years of age.

His first major hit was “Games People Play” written and recorded in 1968, and appearing on his debut album that same year, "Introspect." It won a Grammy for Song of the Year in 1970. Dozens of artists have recorded it (some of them badly), including a Scottish folksinger named Dick Gaughan on his album "A Different Kind of Love Song."

“God grant me the serenity to remember who I am ...” till I'm covered up with flowers in the back of a black limousine.
 

Art-For-Art’s-Sake Theatre: Kitty Wells (1919-2012)

“The next young country starlet with a beehive is going straight to the top.” -- Webb Wilder, 2007

Time once again for our usual midday Wednesday feature.

Kitty Wells was one of the few country singers to have actually been born in Nashville, who married at eighteen to the man with whom she stayed married for over seventy years (one of the longest celebrity marriages in history), before his passing last year.

Her 1952 hit recording, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was a response to Hank Thompson's number one recording, “The Wild Side of Life” ("I didn't know God made honky tonk angels ..."), using the same melody, with lyrics by Jimmy D Miller.* It made her the first female country singer to top the country charts, and ostensibly the first female country star -- yes, even before Patsy Cline (and, as far as this writer is concerned, only if you don't count Mother Maybelle Carter). Wells is shown here performing her signature hit at the Grand Olde Opry, in an undated (probably 1952) recording.

Kitty Wells died this past Monday of complications from a stroke. She was 92.

* The song also shares the melody with two other country classics; The Carter Family's "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes" and Roy Acuff's "The Great Speckled Bird."