Music

Veteran country-music journalist and CMT.com editor Chet Flippo's annual list of country keepers also serves as an excellent guide for the family line-dance fanatic.

1. "Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love," Trisha Yearwood
2. "Dirt Farmer," Levon Helm
3. "A Place to Land," Little Big Town
4. "Wagonmaster," Porter Wagoner
5. "Raising Sand," Alison Krauss and Robert Plant
6. "Dwight Sings Buck," Dwight Yoakam
7. "Unglamorous," Lori McKenna
8. "Rhinestoned," Pam Tillis
9. "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," Miranda Lambert
10. (Tie) "Diamonds in the Sun," Walt Wilkins & the Mystiqueros; "The Wolf," Shooter Jennings

I particularly like what he writes about Levon Helm:

I know this is not catalogued as a country album, but 'Dirt Farmer' is by far the most country-sounding record of the year. It's truly as country as dirt. Helm sounds like the very mountains and the prairies singing. Like the voice of the land itself. There are some voices that carry the world of human experience in them, like those belonging to Ralph Stanley and Willie Nelson. And Helm. There is a very good reason why Helm was the voice of The Band.

I watched neither the 41st annual "Country Music Association Awards" show Wednesday night nor the eighth annual Latin Grammys Thursday night. Fortunately, others did!

Chet Flippo at CMT.com thinks the Writers Guild of America strike may have had the unintended consequence of highlighting the 20 live performances at the CMA Awards. Flippo praises performances by Miranda Lambert, Alison Krauss, Jennifer Nettles, and Little Big Town. The evening's winners included Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, and Taylor Swift. However, Flippo notes a dearth of tradition in the proceedings: "I saw a belated fly-by salute to Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Vince Gill, Mel Tillis and Ralph Emery. Dwight Yoakam, in what I wonder was done by his insistence, gave a fitting tribute to the late Hall of Famer Porter Wagoner. But there was no mention at all of another Hall of Famer who had died the day before, the great Hank Thompson."

For a more irreverent take on the show, check out Idolator's real-time version of the event:

8:05 p.m. Miranda Lambert singing "Gunpowder and Lead," one of my favorite songs of the past year, and looking kind of like she just flew in from a Cheryl Tiegs convention. Like, on the wing of whatever plane she was traveling on.

8:07 p.m. Yay, Miranda. Your album deserves to sell more!

Alas, no one seemed to be live-blogging the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, where Dominican star Juan Luis Guerra walked away with five trophies for album of the year, record of the year, song of the year, best merengue album, and best tropical track. Pick up Guerra's "La Llave de Mi Corazon" if you're curious about what all the fuss is about.

Compare and contrast Dolly Parton's demure original with the White Stripes' histrionic arena-rock cover.

CMT's Chet Flippo recently put Kris Kristoffersen on the witness stand for a fascinating two-part Q&A focusing on the stories behind many of his best-known songs. Kristoffersen rises to the occasion with great honesty about his creative process and the real-life events that have inspired him. A few highlights from part one and part two:

On "Sunday Morning Coming Down": "[P]robably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and "Sunday Morning Coming Down" was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing....There were holes in the wall bigger than I was....I guess it was depressing, I don't know, but the chorus was kind of uplifting....Ray Stevens cut it first, and he cut a great version of it. I remember I just wept when I first heard it."

On Johnny Cash: "Cowboy Jack Clement had showed him a letter I got from home where my mother had basically disowned me and said don't come and visit my relatives, you're an embarrassment to us, you know. And this tickled John to death, I guess, because when I was working over at Columbia as a studio setup guy, he came up to me and said, 'It's always nice to get a letter from home, isn't it?' I gave him every song I ever wrote after that."

On "Shipwrecked in the Eighties": "It started out from a personal place where I was. I had just come out of [the film] Heaven's Gate, the biggest bomb of all time. My manager died, my agent died, and the company I was recording for, Monument, went under. I was feeling kind of adrift—and my marriage was over and my little girl was gone, and I felt pretty shipwrecked."

On "Help Me Make It Through the Night": "I was actually sitting in a helicopter tied down on top of an oil rig 50 miles south of New Orleans out in the Gulf and just thinking about asking someone to just help me through the night."

That's what longtime country chronicler Chet Flippo wonders in his latest Nashville Skyline column for CMT (Country Music Television). And like so much recent industry news, the outlook is bleak, especially when it comes to CD sales. Flippo writes that

"CDs have stopped selling well. Period. In pop, I think that's because the market has drastically shifted to downloaded songs. That is not yet the case in country, where consumers are the last to still buy hard CDs. Another factor in country is the quality as well as the frequency of the releases. When the country music industry releases only one CD by a major A-list artist in the first quarter of 2007 -- and that release comes in the final week of that first quarter -- that tells me that things are not right. How can you sell CDs if you're not putting any out?

"That one major release, Tim McGraw's Let It Go, came out on March 27 and sold 325,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That's good but not great. McGraw's previous studio album, 2004's Live Like You Were Dying, sold 766,000 in its first week. A new CD by three country legends -- Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price -- sold just 12,000 copies in its first week. That's alarming."

And yet. Nelson, Haggard, and Price sold out Radio City Music Hall last month, venerable country gentlemen such as Charlie Louvin and Porter Wagoner are back on the road, the Dixie Chicks are bigger than ever, and how about Martina McBride's new Waking Up Laughing? The spirits may be willing, but the numbers are weak.

Flippo is specifically lamenting the lack of young Nashville talent. From a broader perspective, country has become the influence of choice for countless rockers and others eager to tap into American roots music. They may not be selling like, but the Richard Buckner, Neko Case, Laura Cantrell, Ryan Adams, the Handsome Family, and Ollabelle CDs in the stereo and MP3s in my iPod are humming a sweeter tune.

With the possible exception of a Rolling Stones concert, it's hard to imagine a more lived-in love fest than the adoration of all ages that greeted Ray Price (81), Willie Nelson (73), and Merle Haggard (69) last night at Radio City Music Hall. Rolling through New York on their Last of the Breed Tour, these silver foxes opened up a large and laid-back sampler featuring a few dozen of their countless hits. The bill's value-added aspect lay in the show's creamy hour-long center, when Nelson and Haggard, backed by Ray Benson's Asleep at the Wheel and eventually joined by Price, picked and harmonized on one another's material.

Ray Price, who opened the show backed by his Cherokee Cowboys, sounded wonderful on "Crazy Arms," "Heartaches By the Number," "The Other Woman (In My Life)," and several other picture-perfect examples of romantic country realism. After a couple of Asleep at Wheel tunes, Merle Haggard ambled onstage, plugged in his fiddle, and warmed up with a few Western swing tunes before singing "That's the Way Love Goes," "Silver Wings," and "Big City" for the umpteenth time. A sunglassed relative leprechaun of a songwriting legend, Haggard actually came off as a tad older than his elders, phrasing haphazardly and playing guitar with almost ghostly economy.

Willie Nelson and Haggard sounded ragged but righteous on "Okie From Muskogee," "Pancho and Lefty," and "Reasons to Quit." It got even better when Price joined the duo for seven songs, particularly Bob Wills's touching celebration of childhood obesity, "Roly Poly," and Nelson's "Nightlife," which Price stretched out into a positively decadent jazz vehicle.

Between "On the Road Again" and "Whiskey River" (which at least one bandmember seemed to be praying to never have to hear again), Nelson introduced a pair of new songs he said he wrote during a physician-imposed four-month rest period for carpal tunnel problems. "Too many pain pills, too much pot/ Trying to be something that I'm not:/ Superman" went the opening lines to the first. The second, "You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore," inspired a loud woman seated behind me to cry out, "I know how that feels!"

The Last of the Breed Tour winds down in Detroit, Milwaukee, and the Chicago area over the next few days.

The all-woman old-time string quintet called Uncle Earl don't confine themselves to songs about moonshine, dancing, sex, and death, nope. The most charming moment of their sold-out show last night at Joe's Pub, in the country-craving borough of Manhattan, turned out to be the kid-music ditty "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color For Your Eyes." Written and sung by Kristen Andreassen, it quotes Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight," contains an impressive spectrum of colors, and is performed a cappella while the girls play two separate clapping games.

The G-rated portion of their show completed, Uncle Earl dove into old timey meat and potatoes with "D&P Blues" (an ode to Drinking and Promiscuity), the bluegrassy "Drinker Born," and Ola Belle Reed's gloriously morbid carpe diem, "My Epitaph." Banjo picker Abigail Washburn is the group's most emotive singer (even when barking in Mandarin, as on "Streak o' Lean, Streak o' Fat"); fiddler Rayna Gellert its most accomplished instrumentalist; mandolin player KC Groves stood out during Bob Dylan's "Wallflower"; and step dancing lives, with Andreassen the proof.

Uncle Earl sometimes seems the sum of disparate parts, since every member, you may have noticed, works a solo side project or two. But there's a comforting sororal energy to Uncle Earl, especially when they blend their voices into rich four-part harmonies or circle their wagons for instrumentals like this.

Their show's a hoot and they sound even better on their crackling new album, Waterloo, Tennessee, produced by former Led Zeppelin mandolin player John Paul Jones. Tonight Jones joined the group on mandola for "My Little Carpenter," a downbeat yet unusually nonfatal traditional tune from Kentucky, and hung around for the remainder of their set. Look for him at a string jam near you.

And since all roads apparently lead to the Grateful Dead (last hippie post for a while, promise), singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale's version of "Black Peter" was a highlight of the Workingman's Dead evening of last month's weekend-long American Beauty Project. Lauderdale also has two fine new albums, Country Super Hits Vol. 1 (featuring "Single Standard Time" and "I Met Jesus in a Bar") and the even better Bluegrass, which was nominated for a Grammy in the obvious category. (He won a 2003 Grammy for his collaboration with bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, Lost in the Lonesome Pines). Criminally underappreciated though he's written hit singles for the likes of Mark Chesnutt, Lauderdale spoke recently about his bluegrass fantasies, songwriting, Tai Chi, and about how his best-laid plans go awry:

"I've been wrong about most things that I thought were a plan. From the very beginning, when I was in high school, I wanted to make bluegrass records. Then I wanted to make a record that was half bluegrass, half Hank Williams country instrumental with no drums. And then the next record would have drums and then kind of go on from there and have this progression, and it never turned out that way."

Jim Lauderdale Recalls His Bluegrass Roots [CMT]