shania.funurl.com

In Nashville's 'Circle'

Nash's encyclopedia spans country music from early 1900s to today

The Courier-Journal
By Tamara Ikenberg
tikenberg@courier-journal.com
June 7, 2007

When she was a little girl growing up in Louisville, Alanna Nash's parents banned country music from their house.

But their daughter still grew up to be a fountain of Nashville knowledge. The country music scribe, 56, recently co-edited an encyclopedia of the genre, titled "Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Country Music in America."

"Circle," which she edited with fellow music writer Paul Kingsbury, recently received the annual Belmont Book Award for the best book on country music. The honor is bestowed by Belmont University in Nashville, home to the prestigious Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. The book spans from the early 1900s to today, examining artists from Doc Watson to The Dixie Chicks and placing country in the context of American history.

We talked to Nash about past and present country superstars, topics in "Circle," from country power couples to the good and evil Garth Brooks and more things even a non-country music lover could appreciate.

Q: Carrie Underwood has certainly done well for herself as a country star.

A: Carrie's album "Some Hearts" has just gone six times platinum, and the quality of that record was surprisingly good. I reviewed it for Amazon, and that album really holds up.

Does this mean a smart Idol should aim at the country market?

If they already have that bent. The mistake is trying to make yourself a country singer when you're not. A number of people have tried to do that through the years, a lot of rock and rollers that no longer were viable, like Connie Francis, Davy Jones and Bill Medley. They usually fail. People underestimate the intelligence of the country music audience. While they're an embracing and forgiving group, they can spot the frauds in a second.

Why do folks underestimate how sharp country fans are?

Because they were initially rural people. The music didn't have a lot of sophistication in the early years. People still stigmatize country performers as being illiterate, ignorant, corny; and sometimes it's hard to defend some of that early work.

Sometimes it does sound like someone's singing with a clothespin on their nose, and some of that music of the past is unbelievably corny, and you just wince when you listen to it. But people who lived on farms, and lived off the land, they didn't have a lot to cling to. They had church, their faith, their family and their music from the radio, which connected them to their own emotions and a greater world. The music and the people who performed that music were extremely important in their lives.

They gave wings to their hopes, their desires and their ability to keep on in the face of incredible hardship. … Although there are so many closet country music fans.

Johnny Cash seems to be the go-to favorite of people who claim to otherwise hate country music. Why him?

He started out as a rockabilly performer in his early days in the mid-'50s. He has one foot in rock and roll and one foot in country music. Plus, his personality was more akin to a country performer. He was a very gracious man. Rosanne Cash is a friend of mine, and I remember her saying to me not too long ago, that she never saw June (Carter-Cash) or Johnny be ugly to anyone who came up to them. She never heard them raise their voice or give someone an unkind answer.

You can't say that about a lot of rock performers. (With Johnny and June) there was always that kinship, where the performers came from the same ilk as the audience. But Johnny also certainly had the hip stance and the attitude that made him appeal to the rock and roll crowd.

He's in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and he was probably the coolest artist country music ever had.

Johnny and June were definitely a classic country couple. And today we have Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. Who do you think is country's most iconic power pair?

George Jones and Tammy Wynette were really the king and queen in their day. They were the president and the first lady of country music. And they were the last of the power couples who really defined the redneck persona in that they were always fighting and making headlines.

Wynette did come from that kind of impoverished background and was not an educated person, and the country stars of today are so different from the country stars of yesterday in that so many of them came from a middle-class background, they go to college. … The music itself is smarter than it used to be in the old days. And that's a good thing and a bad thing.

There aren't many characters left in country music anymore. George Jones was famous for being kind of a sad drunk. Once, one of his wives hid the keys to the car, so he rode the lawnmower to the liquor store.

Can you give an example of an important early country/pop crossover hit?

"Heartbreak Hotel" is certainly a big one; 1956, Elvis Presley. That was the first hit that Elvis had that took him out of being strictly a country performer and appealing to a pop rock crowd. No matter what happened to him, even when he began to die on pop and rock radio, country stations continued to play him. At the end of Elvis' career, at the end of his life, he was back to playing and listening to country music again. He never left it and it never left him.

Garth Brooks: friend or foe?

Both. Garth Brooks did a lot of wonderful things for country music. He was the first modern performer to bring rock arena gymnastics and pyrotechnics to country music. He brought a lot of new fans to the music. When I was growing up, country music was the music of the older crowd. Young people didn't listen to country music. Alabama was the first act to really lure younger listeners, but Garth really galvanized them. He was a fan of Billy Joel; he was a fan of a lot of rock acts.

What accounted for Brooks' downfall?

People turned on him because he got really greedy. He was so obsessed with beating the Beatles' sales record that he got rid of any record executive who wasn't doing what he wanted done. He got them fired. He sold so many records he could do that. And he became so obsessed with beating the Beatles that he began to insist that his music be repackaged in different ways so he could just say he won. He just got so greedy and power hungry that it turned a lot of people off.

Who else has contaminated country music?

When Shania Twain first arrived, I was really horrified at her music. Her husband and producer Mutt Lange was the producer of Def Leppard and other highly successful bands. He's a brilliant producer. He introduced a lot of sounds to the music that had Nashville producers shaking their heads, asking, "How did he get that sound?" Shania sold more albums than any other female in the history of country music, but it wasn't really country music, and it did open the door to a lot of poseurs, and a lot of really bad music. But again, she brought in a lot of fans and a lot of dollars into country music that it wouldn't have had otherwise.

But your view of Shania eventually shifted. How?

I interviewed her. And I give her huge credit for coming to the mat to be interviewed, because I had been so hard on her (in reviews). And I just loved her. She was really open and honest and she was really up front about the fact that she has a secret writing life and she writes music, which is very akin to early Dolly Parton.

She has a whole secret cache of songs that she's written. She doesn't play them for anyone, including her producer husband. She knows that if she doesn't write commercial stuff that's going to be on the radio, she's finished. ... Is that watering down what country music is essentially about and has always stood for? Yes, of course. Has it evolved like every other genre? Yes, in order to stay viable and survive.

Reporter Tamara Ikenberg can be reached at (502) 582-4174.

.