“It scares me[...] It feels contrived on so many levels. Unless you’re wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and singing and whining about your girlfriend or boyfriend leaving you it’s not going to sell. I think that’s why my dad finally got out of it. You have to wear those cowboy boots and be sweet as pie. It makes me nervous, the politics of it all.”

“The only thing I did differently [with Revolution] was to take a bit more time to do the songwriting. Things were very rushed with the last album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I was on the road, and was finishing songs in the studio. For this album, I used the same musicians and the same producers, but I used different co-writers, and I took more time. Having some success allowed me to have more control of my schedule.”

“I always listened to the Grand Ole Opry,” said the blind-from-birth, venerable and still warm-throated [singer], speaking Monday from his home in Decatur, Ga. “Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl.”

“Corbin approached an employee to ask about his CD and was told workers had been too busy to unpack them and stock the shelves. The employee then went to the back and found the CDs for him. When she returned, Corbin asked if the employee knew the man on the cover. She said, ‘Yeah, it’s you,’ ” Corbin said flatly. “I guess they get singers coming in their store to buy their CDs all the time.”

“It’s very clear from seeing how aggressive some of these other cities are working on this, that we can’t just sit back and say ‘we’re Music City’ and that’s that.” [Janet Miller of the Nashville-area Chamber of Commerce, via WPLN Radio]

Top New Solo Vocalist: Luke Bryan
Top New Vocal Group: Gloriana
Top New Vocal Duo: Joey + Rory

“[...]it was a high-budget, multi-costume spectacular that visually underlined the progression from modern country into the pop world that Underwood, who plays this Saturday night at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods, began on last year’s “Play On” album. The set list didn’t include “I Ain’t In Checotah Anymore.” That much was obvious.”

“But let’s be honest. In concert, Nelson seems to be going for quantity rather than quality, both in the number of shows he plays and the number of songs he packs into each show. And while that might make for a crowd-pleasing show, it makes for one that runs on good will more than passion, on familiarity more than skill.”

[Shelburne] I bet Strait Country was a landmark album for you.

[Womack] Mmm-hmm. Oh, yeah. I remember my dad coming in and handing me an album and saying, “This guy sounds just like Tommy Duncan.” [Duncan was the lead vocalist for Bob Wills' Texas Playboys band.] And I knew who Tommy Duncan was because I had listened to all of my dad’s records. That’s a big compliment coming from my dad. He’s real picky and real hard on singers, and he just loved George’s voice. That’s kind of where it started for me.

“Despite having one of the hottest country albums of the moment and several top-charting singles, new Nashville darlings Lady Antebellum suffered one of the cruelest fates[...] Audience indifference.”

Music Fog: Kevin Welch – “Andaman Sea”

“I guess I had way over 200 people looking for me. I had the FBI looking for me and I’ve never had them looking for me before,” Rogers said.

Striking a more serious chord, Genachowski explained the nuts-and-bolts of the situation:

“However, according to a CMA survey last June, only 50 percent of core country fans have Internet access at home. This is, in part, a deployment issue that our National Broadband Plan intends to tackle through a reform of the Universal Service fund. The Plan is intended to get broadband deployed to unserved households around the nation over the next several years. But part of the problem is also an ‘adoption’ problem: 42 percent of core country musicfans who are offline, say they are not interested in getting online.”

New releases for the week of March 16, 2010 include:

• The Bellamy Brothers – Greatest Hits Volume 3: Deluxe Edition
  Amazon | iTunes | MySpace

• Brantley Gilbert – Halfway to Heaven
  Amazon | MySpace

• The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Presents – Sunday in the Country
  Amazon | Country Music Hall of Fame

• Kimberly Kelly – Sweet Time Dreamin’
  Amazon | Best Buy | MySpace

• Kristin Kelly and The Modern Day Drifters – Placekeeper
  Lone Star Music | MySpace

• Michael Perry and The Long Beds – Tiny Pilot
  Amazon | iTunes | MySpace

• Shy Blakeman – Long Distance Man
  iTunes | Best Buy | MySpace

• Travis Rush – Feel
  iTunes | Artist Website | MySpace

“I have a huge reverence for country music,” [Church] said. “I still have albums, and still play my old albums. I have no problem with somebody coming in and making a great album. If they come in and don’t make a great record and are just trying to extend their 15 minutes of fame, I got a problem with that.”

“I got invited to go out to Colorado to write with Mark D. Sanders and Carson Chamberlain. Great writers, very talented folks. ["Leaving A Lonely Town"] was the last song we wrote out there. I was just looking for a song that George Jones would sing. It’s got that feeling. That’s what I wanted to go for. That kind of country music has always moved me. The sadder the song, the better for me.”

“Look, man, I (messed) up major, man. It was a drunken mistake. I love your music so much!! God will get me for what I have done. Well, hope to see you in MI soon. But I would like to deeply and sincerely apologize for what I’ve done. Like your wonderful song, “How I Got To Be This Way,” we all make mistakes. … I’m going out and buying 50 of your CDs today. I hope and pray you have a wonderful and long career. …”

[Author] McDonough, who plumbed the depths of rocker Neil Young in “Shakey,’’ could have subtitled this dishy book “Tabloid Country Queen.’’ Wynette’s life and death were the stuff of supermarket checkout-line rags, as is, often, McDonough’s treatment of his material.

“However, it’s on the ballads where Allan truly flies. “Along the Way” and “She Gets Me” both find a rowdy rambler acknowledging how much his lover sacrifices to keep him. On the musically stripped-down “No Regrets,” Allan attunes his gruff-but-powerful voice to convey a hard-earned strength that’s come in the five years since his wife Angela’s suicide, while admitting, “I still miss her every day.” That’s the kind of searing honesty too often missing from country radio today.”

What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or experienced while on tour?

CW – Detroit. We were loading into a show and Leigh saw a guy…
LW – (Interrupts) Let me tell the story! So we’re loading into the Majestic, and there was no dressing room. I’m changing clothes in the van, and I look out the window and there’s a homeless person who’s lost his mind who is lighting pieces of paper on fire and throwing them at people. Literally people are walking down the street and he’s throwing these fireballs at them. Then I look in the other direction and here comes a tricycle with a giant dude with dreads carrying a humongous snake wrapped around him. I’m freaking out about that and I turn around and the building next to the venue is on fire.
CW – Welcome to Detroit!
LW – I was like “Armageddon is here and I’m going to go down in Detroit.”

It happened a little while back, and it’s one of the hardest things we’ve ever gone through. They weren’t wanting to put out new music quite as fast as we were hoping, and for that and other reasons, we decided to move on.

Brad Paisley recently had a bad fall on stage while performing his song, “Alcohol.” The accident happened because:

A. He stepped on Little Jimmy Dickens and tripped.
B. He stepped on Justin Moore and tripped.
C. He was sober and singing about drinking.
D. He was scratching a tick bite.
E. None of the above

Speaking of flipping, boy, can that gal flip her hair. Admittedly, it’s spectacular hair and she worked it, her head seemingly capable of 360 degree motion — I counted ten different angles in a four bar passage during the piano ballad “You’re Not Sorry” point. Somewhere, her chiropractor is already putting money down on a beach house.

If you’re interested in beautiful pedal steel, gorgeous mountain mandolin, and old-school country, this is one of the best offerings of the last year.

I won’t ever forget, I had gotten an offer to do a show in Florida, and they wanted John to open for me. I told them, “Absolutely not! There’s no way I’m going to go out there and be a headliner with John Anderson, one of my heroes opening for me.” I’m so glad I made that decision because I got out there and played my 40 minutes, and he comes on and plays two hours worth of hits. It was unbelievable and just knocked everybody dead. So that was one case where being humble was the right way to go, because he would have just put me to shame regardless.

“We have found that with satellite radio and the Internet, Asleep at the Wheel still sells records and [has successful] tours,” says Ray of stations’ quest for young listeners. “Great country music still exists all over the place; it’s just not on country radio anymore … I don’t mind but it has certainly changed the format.”

That old man Wrigley
Offered me advice on life
Like, always chew gum

The two will take part in a Nashville-themed challenge that will have the celebrity teams try to figure out what it takes to make a country music superstar.

There’s a grand legacy of Johnny Cash music that American VI: Ain’t No Grave does not by any means trash. It simply presents the man in his final phase, reflective but also active; wanting, needing to make more music. You must choose the way you want to interpret the sentiments that he has left behind.

He tells Us Weekly, “I thought we were getting a little closer until she took me to Tiffany’s to show me the ring she wanted.

“It was a $450,000 pink diamond. I probably need to save a bit longer before I’m ready for that.”

One such trip was to Belmont University in Nashville, TN. I was particularly excited about this audition because I felt like I could really play some music that I dug, and really showcase myself doing what I loved to do. I didn’t have to sing an aria, or a classical piece, but I could sing a contemporary country song and accompany myself on guitar. The song I chose to sing was one of my favorites at the time, and remains so to this day. It was called “The Cowboy Song” and was the last track on Garth Brooks’ In Pieces album.

Gokey’s complete lack of investment in anything resembling country music is readily apparent. He’s a Christian soul singer tapping the conventions of country music from a safe distance, seeing if he might strike gold. The nearest analog is Phil Stacey, who released exactly one ‘country’ (at Disney’s insistence) single and album on Lyric Street before following his heart to a Christian label the next year. I hope Danny Gokey’s country stint will be similarly short, so he can move on and make some music he actually enjoys.

“Hopefully with the right mojo I’ll watch my songs go up the charts and hopefully sell records,” he said. “I think when people hear this CD they will know exactly who I am as a writer, as an artist and as a person. The only thing I can do is try to write great songs.”

Clicking through and scroll to the bottom for a video tour of Thompson’s van.

Music Fog: Eric Brace & Peter Cooper – “Wait a Minute”

• Standard Edition: Amazon ($7.99)
• Deluxe Edition: Amazon | iTunes

Read C.M. Wilcox’s four-star review on The 9513.

The potential pitfall, rather, as I’ve seen it, with Cash’s final, Rubin-esque recordings is not their necessarily partial presentation of a great artist but the tendency of some members of his audience, especially many young and new members who don’t know any better (but are wrong just the same), to mistake these concluding pieces for the whole. The American Recordings, even when taken together, explore incompletely Cash’s many sides.

FTM: Alright Dean, so you were born in New Braunfels in the big state of Texas. Tell me about your upbringing there.

Dean: Actually, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and went to college in Virginia, which is where I started playing music… so New Braunfels didn’t play a very large role during my formative years. And it’s Drew, not Dean.

This is a truly empty, cliche-littered, bubble-headed book. I read it on a long plane trip, and there were times when I wished the plane would crash, just to put me out of my misery.

He recently parted ways with longtime sideman Cory Younts — and at one point snapped at an audience member, “He was fired; let’s not talk about it” — but Earle’s current backup, fiddler Josh Hedley and bassist Bryn Davies, more than made up for Younts’s departure with sweet harmonies and high energy.

“When I busted my ass, I looked over and Ronnie was on his ass, and the guitar player was on his ass, and Ronnie had that look on his face,” Kix recalled. “You know how ice is when it has water on it? It’s not just ice, and you can’t even shuffle your feet. That’s how slick it was, and I saw [Ronnie] try to get up a couple of times, and he was lookin’ at me like, ‘If I ever catch you I will kill you.’”

Country outlaw Jamey Johnson will release two albums in 2010: A “white album,” due first, will focus on upbeat material, including the hard-rocking singalong “California Riots” and the title track, which is sung from the perspective of old guitars hanging on a wall. (A more somber “black album” — featuring songs about money troubles — will follow in the fall.) Johnson says the abundance of material reflects a hot streak he’s been on for the past year or so. “It’s an epic journey through honky-tonk-ville,” he says. “If I record all this material, I fully intend to get it out.”

How country boys roll:
First, have about 20 beers
Then fire up the truck

In a way, the raw, loose feel of the band — Hill signaled cues to the ace musicians a couple of times; toward the end, she let loose with a few notes that would make Jennifer Nettles quake in her boots — provided a nice contrast with the high-toned folks watching appreciatively.

In the stripped-down area where country meets folk, sometimes called Americana, there hasn’t been a phrasemaker as wryly quotable since when — the heyday of Kris Kristofferson and John Prine?

So, take awards shows on their own terms, you know. Or ignore them completely. Just don’t cite them as gospel. And when they don’t truly reflect country music, let people know that. Remember, these aren’t so much awards ceremonies as they are — first and foremost — TV shows. And the nominees are, more and more, just the cast.

People say, “Oh, you know, country music went bad,” and they like to blame it on Nashville. People say, “I can’t stand Nashville for what it’s done to country music.” Nashville was the home of Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells. To blame Nashville for the state of country music is like blaming the house for being robbed. People came, cheapened it, and they took away a lot of the magic. That’s not Nashville’s fault, it’s the industry’s fault, and it’s the same industry that’s responsible for a lot of the mediocre rock music you get nowadays too [but people don't go blaming L.A. for that]. Country fans feel so betrayed by Nashville as a city and I’d like to champion Nashville and say that no, Nashville is still a good place. We’ve still got Little Jimmy Dickens and we’ve still got some good things here. It’s the only place in the world where you can see Little Jimmy Dickens at Cracker Barrel randomly on a Saturday morning.

“There’s always been some interesting activity behind our barn,” Hiatt told me during a recent interview. “When our kids were little, they wouldn’t go back there at night, and when they did with their friends, they’d come running into the house scared, saying they’d seen eyes.”

Well, I don’t allow my music to be tampered with; it goes directly to tape with very little sweetening. I don’t believe in a producer; God is my producer. Anyways, I want it to be real so we can do it properly onstage.

Music Fog: Chris Knight – “Hell Ain’t Half Full”

“In Nashville, country is presented as something not dynamic and backward-looking – like stamp collecting,” says [BJ] Cole. “The cowboy hats and line-dancing associations have become something to be laughed at.”

“Mainstream Nashville is obsessed with money and commercialism,” says [Hank] Wangford. “Acts get huge by essentially playing AOR [adult-oriented rock], and the machine pretends that any artist making mid-tempo rock music while wearing a cowboy hat is a country act.”

“The main hurdle I have to overcome is getting over the word ‘country’,” says Paul Spencer, curator and organiser of Maverick, the UK’s only festival dedicated to this music. “Like ‘folk’, it’s a word with negative connotations, but this music is an authentic combination of folk, gospel and the blues and, apart from the DJ Bob Harris, it gets no exposure in the UK.”