22bd Annual CMT (Country Music Television) Music Awards (MTV Productions, CBS-TV, aired April 2, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (April 2) I wanted to watch the much-ballyhooed CMT Music Awards show on CBS, whose parent company, Viacom, owns the show. The award show has a rather bizarre and convoluted history; the first one actually took place in 1967 as a project of the now-defunct Music City News magazine based in Nashville, but after a stint on The Nashville Network, it debuted in its current incarnation at the CMT Music Awards in 2002 and was first aired on broadcast television in 2022. The awards sh ow was the usual lumbering beast, starting with an O.K. performance by Blake Shelton called “My Body Is Yours.” I liked it a bit beter than most of Shelton’s oter work, though it still amazes me how h e’s managed to get two much sexier and more talented women,Miranda Lambert and Gwen Steafni, to fall in love (or at least lust) with him. (I told that to my husband Charl;es, and he said, “Maybe he has a big dick.”) For me, the most interesting aspect of the show is its quite elastic definition of what constitutes “country music.” It featured not only people with hard-core country reputations like Shelton and Keith Urban, but people wjp are usually categorized in other genres like Gary Clark, Jr. (mostly a blues musician, supposedly there tp pay tribute to fellow blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan, a native of Austin, Texas – where the show took place ≠ who died in a plane crash in 1990) and even Peter Frampton. Like James Taylor and Billy Joel, Frampton has long since list that fantastic head of hair that used to emblazon his album covers, and he was there last night only to introduce the closing tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It’s appropriate that the show ended with a tribute to this band because today’s so-called “country music” is actually what in the 1970’s we used to call “Southern rock.” It owes a lot more to the Allman Brothers and Lyynyrd Skynyrd than it odes to Jimmie Rodgers (the first one), Hank Williams (Sr.) or Johnny Cash, and as Charles pointed out, today’s women country singers sound more like Janis Joplin or Grace Slick than Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton. (In fact, the first time I heard Maren Morris, doing her song “My Church” on a previous country music awards show, I found myself wishing someone would cast her in a biopic of Janis before she gets too old for the part.) The show opened with a quite startling poea from co-host Kelsea Ballerini to the politicians at all levels of American governance to do something, anything to stop the rising tide of gun violence in the U.S. As someone who still tends to think of country music as the soundtrack of the American Right (I’m of the generation that still remembers Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” a great song and one of the few Right-wing tunes the U.S. has produced on the level of the best Left-wing songs by Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan or Ochs), it’s astonishing to hear any even a vaguely progressive sentiment coming forth from a major country star, especially on an issue like guns that symbolizes the great divide between urban and rural America.

After Blake Shelton’s opener, the next performer was Tyler Hubbard, who did a nice song called “I’ll Take You Dancing in the Country” about trying to find an out-of-the-way night-spot to which he can take his partner. Then Gary Clark, Jr. did a song called “When the House Is Rockin’” and turned in some blistering guitar soloing. Unfortunately, some of the acts were relegated to what was called the “RAM Stage,” after the Dodge RAM truck that was a major sponsor of the show, in which they got to perform excessively abbreviated versions of their songs that mostly were cut to just one chorus. One such was Lily Rose, a haunting woman singer who gave us a woefully brief version of ”What You Know About That?” Then came an equally haunting – and blessedly complete – version of a song called “What He Didn’t Do” by Carly Pearce, that looks back on a failed relationship in a surprisingly philosophical way for a country song. Then there was the much-ballyhooed reunion of Wynonna Judd and Ashley McBryde on a cover of – of all things – Foreigner’s signature hit, “I Want to Know What Love is.” Ironically, by far the best version of this I’ve ever heard was by someone just as far from Foreigner’s pop-rock wheelbase as Judd fille and McBryde: Diana Ross, who sang it at the close of a Grammy Awards in the early 1980’s and sang the hell out of it. (That was especially surprising to me because I’m ordinarily a non-fan of Diana Ross; she did O.K. as a part of Berry Gordy’s pop-soul Motown machine in the 1950’s but little of her solo work impressed me and she nad no more business playing Billie Holiday than I would have.)

Then came the most beautiful and powerful song of the night: “Human” by Cody Johnson, which I especially liked because it contained qualities like humility and introspection that usually aren’t a part of country music. Afterwards came a song called “Brown Eyes Baby” by Keith Urban, who’s become a particular favorite of my long-time friend Cat, who grew up with some of the same prejudices against country music as I did but she’s become quite a Keith Urban fan. His song seemed a bit nondescript at first, but he ended it with a killer guitar solo, and I thought, “That’s what Cat likes about him.” Then came another regrettable fragment from the RAM Stage of a song I’d have liked to hear complete: “Whiskey on You,” a nice tears-in-my-distilled-spirits lament by Nate Smith. After that came another bit of mixed-metaphoring called “Heart Like a Truck” by Lainey Wilson, which was featured extensively in the Dodge RAM commercials and is also a quite nice song if you can take its conceit of comparing a well-worn heart to a well-worn truck (which I can). After another abbreviated song from the RAM Stage that I’d have liked to hear complete, “Don’t Come Looking” by Jackson Dunn, Gwen Steafni (who acquired her country reputation by falling for Blake Shelton after having started out as an alternative-rock singer with the band No Doubt) and Carly Pearce did a powerful if rather strident duet called “Just a Girl.” Then Shania Twain received an award for helping empower women and sang an a cappella version of a song called “Up Giddy, Giddy Up” with a group of five Black women who later appeared on their own, though I’m unable to make out my hastily scribbled notation of either their band name or the title of their song. (A real pity, because I quite liked them.)

Then came a “man of size” named Jelly Roll (not to be confused with the pioneering jazz pianist and composer “Jelly Roll” Morton, whose real name was Ferdinand La Menthe), who along with Lainey Wilson won the most awards of the night, doing a song called “God, I Need a Favor.” Given the tattoos emblazoned on his face, I wondered if the favor he needed from God was help getting rid of them, but the song was impressive and so was his speech when he accepted the award for it and said it was a tribute to all the losers and people who’d grown up being told they were no good. The next performer was Kelsea Ballerini, doing a song called “If Y ou Go Down, I’m Going Down, Too.” It was quite nice but Ballerinii’s performance as artist was less impressive than her performance as host, especially her potent anti-gun violence message at the start of the show. Then Ballerini’s co-host, Kane Brown, did a prize-winning duet with his wife Kaitlyn called “Thank God for Giving Me You,” It’s a pretty silly love song, but in the immortal words of Paul McCartney, “What’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?” Then came another regrettably truncated song from th e RAM Stage, avery Anna’s “Narcissist,” and after that was an impassioned performance of a song called “She Talks to Angels” by Darius Rucker (another country singer who used to be a rock star, with the band Hootie and the Blowfish) with the Black Crowes.

Then came one of the oddest performances of the evening, a tribute to the 30th anniversary of Alanis Morrissette’s star-making hit “You Oughta Know” (a great song but hardly what anyone would think of as country music) with Morrissette joining Lainey Wilson, Ingrid Andress, Mderleine Edwards and Morgan Wade taking turns singing the song and coming up with a pretty embalmed version with almost none of the anger or spite of the original. After that yet another artist, Megan Moroney, got her song, “Tennessee Orange,” mutilated to just one chorus on the RAM Stage. Then Carrie Underwood belted out her hit “Hate My Heart,”and after the five Black women I can’t identify did their own song (a you-can-have-him "answer record" to Dolly Parton's classic hit "Jolene") came a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Chuck Leavell, Cody Johnson, Paul Rodgers, Slash and Warren Hayes, LeAnn Rimes and Wynonna Judd doing a power ballad called “Everything Is Simple” and then one of their iconic hits, “Sweet Home Alabama.” It’s a song that still bothers because it takes a gratuitous swipe at Neil Young and hi9s song “Southern Man,” of which this was an “answer record,” and like a more recent Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “God and Guns” (whch I heard a later edition of the band perform on the PBS show Austin City Limits and thought was the best Right-wing song I’d heard since “Okie from Muskogee”), it’s openly reactionary in its politics. I’d have liked it better if it had been just a tribute to the South and its beauties (such as they are) instead of a Right-wing political diatribe, but it’;s still an infectious hook and deserves its hit status. But last night’s performance of it was no great shakes and only Slash’s guitar playing redeemed it, making an O.K. if not exactly stellar finish to this rather odd program whose actual awards (most of which went to Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll) seemed even more like afterthoughts than usual.