by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent most of the evening
watching the 50th annual Country Music Association Awards on ABC —
though I turned it off in the last few minutes because it was running past 11
p.m. and I wanted to watch the second episode of Suffragettes Forever! The
Story of Women and Power (a
fascinating three-part British TV documentary on the history of the women’s
movement in Britain from the 17th century — when they were hopeful
the Puritan Commonwealth would consider seriously the emancipation of women, a
hope that was dashed quickly — to the present) and so I missed the final
musical performance and Garth Brooks’ win as Entertainer of the Year. (There
were an awful lot of “Mr. Trisha Yearwood” jokes about him, probably inevitable
given how he retired for several years while she continued her career. The
hosts were Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, and the show began with a
confusing medley — 12 songs (or snippets of songs) in 12 minutes exemplifying
the history of country music in general and the CMA awards (not to be confused
with the Academy of Country Music Awards, a rump show promoted by Dick Clark
Productions — the man finally croaked but his production company lives on! —
and held in Las Vegas, where the CMA Awards are properly held in a city that
actually has something to do with country music, Nashville) in particular,
starting with Merle Haggard’s youngest son Ben doing his dad’s song “Mama
Tried.”
In the modern style of awards shows generally none of these people were
introduced, and the only clue for us non-cognoscenti as to who they were were very briefly flashed Twitter handles in case you wanted
to tweet them (or tweet about them) during the evening. At least the songs were
well chosen — “Tiger by the Tail,” “Stand By Your Man” (the woman who sang it
sounded a lot like Tammy Wynette without being too close a clone), “Kiss an
Angel Good Morning” (was that Charley Pride himself trotted out without
recognition? Is he even still alive? According to Wikipedia, he is, and his
Wikipedia page says he’s sold more records for the RCA Victor label than any
other artist except Elvis Presley!), Alabama’s “Play Some Mountain Music,” one
of Charlie Daniels’ songs about a violin duel (not “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” but something
pretty similar — I must confess to a prejudice against Charlie Daniels because
he once gave an interview saying he offered $10,000 to any major jazz musician
who could cut a decent country record, and he got from Stan Kenton’s manager a
bill for $10,000, a copy of the album Kenton made with Tex Ritter in 1962, and
a note by Kenton himself saying what a pleasure it had been to work with
Ritter, who was a real gentleman), Dwight Yoakam’s “Guitars, Cadillacs and
Hillbilly Music,” Clint Black’s “This Killing Time (Is Killing Me),” Ricky
Skaggs’ “Country Boy at Heart,” “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” (performer
unspecified), and Randy Travis’ “Forever.” (I apologize in advance for any song
titles I got wrong, since some of them I wasn’t familiar with and therefore had
to guess — this will be true throughout most of this commentary because, once
again in the usual modern style, almost no titles were announced.)
The
12-songs-in-12-minutes medley was succeeded by a weird comedy routine between
Paisley and Underwood satirizing the upcoming Presidential election, giving
both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton their lumps — any thought you might have
had that Trump would have a special appeal to the country music audience and
therefore they’d go easy on him was quickly dashed, though the spoof of Hillary
was actually funnier: they brought on a box which they said was her “Basket of
Deplorables,” including a joke in dubious taste but one which was still
hilarious: an oversized bra that was made out of different colors of cloth
which they billed as the “Bra of Many Colors” in honor of Dolly Parton, who was
getting the “Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award” at the end of the show.
(There were also an awful lot of jokes about Willie Nelson’s penchant for
cannabis.) Eventually they got down to the music — and the awards, though in
modern-day awards shows (with the Oscars only a partial exception) the awards
themselves are an afterthought and the real purpose are to do what the old variety shows used
to: present popular performers that audiences will want to watch. Kelsea
Ballerini (that’s the correct spelling of her first name, by the way) did a song
called “Peter Pan” featuring a couple of performers, a man (obviously embodying
the title character of her song) and a woman (who I guess was supposed to be
Wendy), being whirled around in mid-air on wires like Cirque du Soleil
performers as she sang a song whose basic point was a rejection of Peter Pan
for his refusal to grow up. I liked the song but I liked Ruth B’s beautiful
“Lost Boy” (which takes exactly the opposite “take” on the Pan myth, a desire
to be a Lost Boy and pal around
with Peter) even better. After that Jason Aldean joined Brooks and Dunn for a
nice performance of “Brand New Man.”
Then, in quick succession, came the two
best songs of the evening: Dierks Bentley and Cal King (at least I think that’s her name) doing “Different for Girls,” about
how a woman who goes through a breakup can’t just go hang out in a bar, get
drunk and pick up a partner for casual sex the way a man (or at least a man in
a country song) can — not without being damned as one of those “honky-tonk
angels” Kitty Wells famously told us God didn’t make years ago. After that came what was by far the high point of the night:
Maren Morris, who would later win the Best New Artist award, with the McCrary
Sisters and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on a song called “My Church,” about
the spiritual power of music and all that good stuff. It was a song so awesome
I had my mouth hanging open from the sheer joy and righteous power of what I
was hearing — Maren Morris’s album Hero has just zoomed to the top of the list of CD’s I want by living artists
(I do sometimes ask myself,
“Mark, when was the last time you bought a CD by someone who’s still alive?”)
and, if this song is anything to judge by, she’s an addition to the quite
remarkable group of women artists who are dominating the music world these
days, both aesthetically (Tori Amos, Neko Case, Rhiannon Giddens, Lorde) and
commercially (Adele, Taylor Swift, Pink). She’s also a prime candidate for
anyone who wants to make a Janis Joplin biopic — when I heard Idina Menzel tear
her heart out on “Let It Go” from Frozen at the last Academy Awards I rejoiced at the thought that the perfect
star to play Janis now existed, but Morris would be even better: she’s also a
Texan, she looks surprisingly like Janis,
and she’d have no problem singing the role — or acting it, if the power of her
vocal performance is any indication of her ability to communicate emotion when
speaking as well as singing. I was just so awed both by her song and her
performance of it that it was hard to get excited about the rest of the evening
— I rooted for Morris in every category in which she was nominated and rued it
when Carrie Underwood beat her out for Best Female Vocalist. Frankly, the only
other woman singer in her league on that stage last night was Rhiannon Giddens,
and she was ill-used — just a few lines and a backing vocal part on Eric
Church’s “Kill a Word” (the song
is a good one, and it has a nice message — let’s get rid of the words that
express prejudice and hate — but quite frankly she could have sung it a lot
better without him!).
After the incredible “My Church” Garth Brooks and Trisha
Yearwood came on for a medley including “Jackson” (the fact that one of country
music’s most famous real-life couples would begin their appearance with a song
about breaking up seemed odd — I only hope it’s not an omen that they’re going
to go the way of Blake and Miranda!), “Chug-a-Lug,” “Don’t It Make My Brown
Eyes Blue?” (the director cut to a glimpse of Crystal Gayle, who had the hit on
that song originally, sitting with her sister Loretta Lynn, and the look on
Gayle’s face was priceless), “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “I Never
Promised You a Rose Garden” (what on earth prompted them to dig that one up?), “Don’t Close Your Eyes” and “Golden
Ring,” a nice closer and the most heartfelt singing from Mr. and Mrs. Yearwood
— oops, I mean Mr. and Mrs. Brooks — all night. Then Carrie Underwood did a
song called “Dirty Laundry” wearing an outfit that looked like it was made from
scraps — a woman’s skirt and a man’s collar and tie — the sort of thing one
might indeed wear because every other piece of clothing you owned had become
dirty laundry and you needed to have something on while you washed it. Then Little Big Town did a
nice song called “I Wish You Were a Better Man” — i.e., I wish you weren’t such
a lying, cheating, abusing son-of-a-bitch because then we could still be
together — and their dark-haired woman singer sang lead and adopted the
properly sad-looking mien, looking as well as sounding right for the song. Miranda Lambert did a nice song
called “Another Vice” and then Tim McGraw came out with the Song of the Year
winner, “Humble and Kind” — it’s an O.K. piece but I’m suspicious of anyone
coming out and telling me how humble and kind they are; one can’t help but think
they’re lying! Then they started to bring out the odd combinations that have
become de rigueur in shows like this —
they’ve come to be called “Grammy Moments” because the Grammy Awards have
become notorious for jamming together musicians who have nothing to say to each
other (like the Foo Fighters and Chick Corea — I like them severally but
jointly they’re just a pain) — including Brad Paisley with the Oak Ridge Boys
on “Elvira” (it’s still a dorky song but it’s also still a lot of fun), Alan Jackson and George Strait on what
sounded like a medley of songs called “Remember When” and “Old Troubadour,”
Keith Urban (blessedly solo) on “Blue Ain’t Your Color” (not a great song but a
quite nice one), and what was billed as a major event: the first appearance on
the Country Music Association Awards by that well-known country star Beyoncé.
(That’s irony.)
An ambiguous announcement sounded like she was duetting with
the Dixie Chicks, and there was a Black harmonica player, bald and with thick
black shades over his eyes, that made me wonder if it was an uncredited Stevie
Wonder sitting in. The song was something called (I think) “Daddy Said Shoot,”
about a young girl getting firearms-handling lessons from her father — this is country music, after all — and it was actually one
of the most appealing numbers of the night. Then Kenny Chesney got the Pinnacle
Award for expanding the audience for country music — it’s only been awarded
twice before, to Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift — and Thomas Rhett came on for his hit, “Die a Happy Man,” another song that’s not
truly great but is really nice, a warm little
piece about how the singer doesn’t care about all the big ambitious things he
wanted to do and never got around to because his relationship is working so
well he’ll die a happy man just from his partner’s love. Then Chris Stapleton —
who’s sort of the Bruce Vilanch of country music, a big, homely schlub of a man who rose from songwriting to singing and
won the Male Vocalist of the Year award against several other, considerably
hotter guys in tight jeans (and let’s face it, to this old queen part of the
appeal of a country-music show is watching all those hunky guys in incredibly
tight jeans!) — and Dwight Yoakam did a lovely song called “Seven Spanish
Angels,” followed by Luke Bryan doing a song I didn’t recognize which was
either called “L-O-V-E” (like the old Nat “King” Cole hit) or “I Can’t Move
When You Move,” or maybe something else, an O.K. ragbag of country clichés but
still infectious enough to work. Then Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood spotted
Lee Greenwood in the audience and got him to sing a chorus of “God Bless the
U.S.A.” — it was a pretty obvious tie-in with Walmart, the show’s sponsor, and
their campaign to get people to buy green lightbulbs and burn them 24/7 to show
their support for America’s veterans. (America can best show its support for
veterans by dramatically increasing the appropriation for the VA so veterans
don’t have either to wait for care or take their chances in the private health
market — and it’s a sour comment on the poverty of choice America’s political
system gives us that, as much as I hate, despise and detest Walmart, I’m about
to vote for a former Walmart board member for President.)
Then Florida Georgia
Line and Tim McGraw did the song “May We All,” a would-be anthem, and then came
the Church-Giddens “Kill a Word” before we finally got to the Dolly Parton
tribute, with her former Nine to Five co-star Lily Tomlin introducing her and presenting the award and some
good tribute performances of Parton’s songs (or bits thereof): Jennifer Nettles
and Pentatonix (this time truly a cappella instead of performing with a drum machine!) on “Jolene,” Reba McIntire
on “Nine to Five,” Kacey Musgraves on “Here You Come Again” (one of Dolly’s
late-1970’s hits that were really pop-rock — only her reputation and her twangy
voice “typed” them as country!), and Martina McBride in a lovely rendition of
Parton’s subtler “take” on “I Will Always Love You,” communicating with the
song’s churchy origins (remember that both Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston started out as church singers!)
without the overwrought melodramatics of Whitney’s version. Dolly Parton
accepted the award graciously, as is her wont, joking about how she wanted to
crowd as much of her life into accepting a lifetime achievement award as she
could but they kept trying to play her off so she couldn’t — she also promised
us a sequel to the bathetic TV-movie Coat of Many Colors called Christmas of Many Colors (ouch!), but her spirit was positive enough I can
forgive her just about everything, including the way she’s milked that
genuinely heartwarming story from her childhood into a hit song (and a
three-minute song is just the right length for it!) and now two TV-movies.
