2024 Country Music Television Awards (Country Music Television, Switched-On Entertainment, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 7) CBS-TV aired the 57th annual Country Music Television Awards. The show began in 1967 as the Music City News Awards, sponsored by and named after the now-defunct Music City News magazine. In 1988 The Nashville Network, a short-lived country-music cable channel, took over the awards and aired them; three years later The Nashville Network merged with another attempt at an MTV for country music, Country Music Television, and after Music City News folded in 1999 and another magazine, Country Weekly, took on co-sponsorship for a year or two, ultimately it became the flagship program for Country Music Television, or CMT as it’s universally abbreviated. Even the award itself was a replica of the CMT logo stuck on a pedestal. The show’s roots in a music video network are readily apparent in the category names, which all have the word “Video” in them: Video of the Year, Male Video of the Year, Female Video of the Year (which would suggest that the non-gendered “Video of the Year” category goes to Transgender or non-binary artists), Duo/Group Video of the Year, Performance of the Year, Collaborative Video of the Year and Male and Female “Breakthrough” Video of the Year (their equivalent of the Grammy Award for “Best New Artist”). The show aired on CBS, part of the Viacom empire that also includes what’s left of MTV and CMT, and at first I was hoping they would start it at 5 p.m. Pacific time because they’d announced it as being on at 8 p.m. Eastern time (though the show actually took place in Austin, Texas, which is in the Central time zone), and I even timed my last walk of the day to be here at 5 for the start of the show. Alas, for this awards show CBS reverted to the contemptible practice of time-delaying it so it was on at 8 p.m. our time, which means we on the West Coast once again got to suck hind tit and missed out on the much-ballyhooed opportunity to vote for Video of the Year. (Every time the show announced that voting for Video of the Year was still open, they flashed a chyron on top of the screen saying, “Voting is closed” – more salt in the wound caused by the terrible time-delay process.) Like a lot of awards shows, the 2024 CMT Awards was a bit of a lumbering beast, and though my husband Charles was home last night he sat much of it out and worked on our tax returns instead, but most of the music impressed me and quite frankly I’d much rather an awards show featuring modern-day country music than the sort of stuff that clogs up the pop charts today, either rap or so-called “EDM” (“Electronic Dance Music”).

The show opened with Cody Johnson doing a quite good song called “That’s Texas” – most of the songs were actually announced from the stage, either by the show’s host, Kelsea Ballerini, or the performers themselves (and Charles showed me how to use the Google app on my phone to learn the names of the ones that weren’t, so I didn’t have to do any of the guesswork I’ve had in previous years) – and then another one by Jason Aldean called “Let Your Boys Be Country.” (I don’t know, but it sure sounded like Aldean and whoever wrote it for or with him intended it as an “answer record” to Willie Nelson’s “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”) Then Megan Moroney came out and did a quite good song called “No Caller ID,” about a woman who’s getting harassing phone calls from her ex even though she’s already deleted his number from her phone. She was wearing a spangled blue skirt and a flimsy white top, and her guitar was covered in spangles to match her skirt. I joked to Charles that she was trying for the “Country Singer Barbie” look, and after the next commercial break Kelsea Ballerini did indeed go into a long and not all that funny routine about demanding a country music-themed sequel to the Barbie movie and pointing out all the young blonde women at the ceremony who could conceivably star in the film. After Paul Walter Houser presented the “Collaborative Video of the Year” award to Carly Pearce and Chris Stapleton for “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” the next performance was Parker McCallum and Brittney Spencer duetting on a song called “Burn It Down.” McCallum was just about the cutest guy on the show (notice I didn’t say the sexiest: that would have been Cody Johnson!) and Spencer was a large African-American “woman of size,” but the two didn’t create the sparks of excitement I would have expected from a duet on a song with a title like that. McCallum has a quite good but not especially powerful voice, and Spencer did almost none of the soul-style screaming I was expecting given that she’s big and Black. Maybe she was toning herself down so she wouldn’t overpower the white kid!

Afterwards Megan Moroney and Max Thieriot from the CBS-TV series Fire Country (which is apparently about a press gang of convicts forced to become firefighters) presented the “Breakthrough” video awards to Ashley Cooke for “Your Place” and Warren Zeiders for “Pretty Little Poison.” Then Kelsea Ballerini started musing about Luke Combs’s cover version of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and wondered aloud whether there was a 1980’s folk-rock song she could similarly take on. She started singing Melissa Etheridge’s “Come to My Window” and Etheridge herself walked on and joined in on vocal and acoustic guitar, much the way Chapman had joined Combs on the 2024 Grammy Awards when he performed her old song. Then there was an odd medley of “Brother” and “Next Thing You Know” by Jordan Davis and NEEDTOBREATHE (that’s how the band officially spells their name, all one word and in all caps) and the presentation of the “June Carter Cash Humanitarian Award” to Trisha Yearwood. The award was given by Jane Seymour, who recalled Yearwood’s appearance on an episode of Seymour’s former TV show, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. When I first heard the announcement of this award, which took place quite a long time before the actual presentation, I immediately flashed that an award named for Mrs. Johnny Cash was being given to Mrs. Garth Brooks – and when Yearwood accepted it she made her own set of jokes about how she could understand June Carter’s position as the wife of one of country music’s biggest legends. After Yearwood’s award, Lainey Wilson came out in a skin-tight dark-grey leather outfit and did a charming song called “Country’s Cool Again.” Then came one of the most powerful performances of the night: Bailey Zimmerman took to the stage under the University of Texas bell tower (which became familiar as the site of one of the first mass-shooter events in 1966 before they got so maddeningly common) for a song called “Where It Is.” He was dressed in a white shirt that was hand-lettered with the slogan, “This Is Based on a Real True Story,” and he seemed to be trying to create “country punk” as a genre. Then Keith Urban did a song called “Straight Line” that was quite good in its own right even though he had a hard time following Zimmerman’s piece.

Afterwards Carly Pearce presented the “Performance of the Year” to Jelly Roll for his rendition of his star-making hit, “Need a Favor” (essentially his apologia to God for only praying when he, you guessed it, needs a favor). Jelly Roll in his acceptance speech recalled that when he gave that prize-winning performance at the last CMT Awards in 2023, he’d never even attended an awards show before. He also gave a shout-out to prisoners at various juvenile justice facilities (like the late Merle Haggard, Jelly Roll came to country stardom after a background that included prison time) and referred to Cody Johnson as “my brother.” That got me to wondering whether Jelly Roll (true name: Jason DeFord) and Cody Johnson are actually biological brothers, though the article I turned up online (https://country1025.com/2024/03/cody-johnson-and-jelly-roll/) says they aren’t. The next song was a rather dreary ballad by Sam Hunt called “Locked Up,” which was introduced (fortunately not by Hunt himself) as a tribute to Johnny Cash in general and his prison songs in particular, but it was a lame piece of music that was not helped by the comparison. Then Kelsea Ballerini herself took the stage with a quite nice if rather predictable song called “Love Me Like You Mean It.” After that came a quite elaborate tribute to the late Toby Keith, who died of stomach cancer on February 8, 2024 after a two-year battle with the disease. Keith was one of the few music performers who publicly supported Donald Trump for President and he got a Right-wing reputation from his 2002 song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which he said was inspired by the dual tragedies of the death of his father, a U.S. Army veteran, in March 2001 and the September 11 attacks later that year. Keith had originally intended to reserve that song only for his live shows, but when he performed it at a concert for military leaders, U.S. Marine Corps Commandant James L. Jones told Keith it was his “duty as an American citizen” to record it. (Frankly, it’s not that great a song; I love Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” despite my strong disagreement with their politics, but Keith’s song isn’t anywhere near their league.)

The Toby Keith tribute last night avoided “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and instead remembered him with some of his less controversial material: Brooks and Dunn played his star-making hit, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” Sammy Hagar did “I Love This Bar” and Lainey Wilson sang what was probably Keith’s biggest hit, “How Do You Like Me Now?” Afterwards came two of the best numbers all night, “Can’t Break Up Now” by Old Dominion and Megan Moroney (a song I can relate to as a member of a long-term couple who’ve built up a history with each other!) and a beautifully performed piece by Trisha Yearwood, “Put It In a Song.” (Yearwood announced that she was about to release an album in which for the first time in her career she wrote or co-wrote all the songs. It’s about time!) Then a singer named Dasha whom I’d seen before on one of the late-night talk shows did a song called “Austin” with a dance troupe of white and Black people from both (mainstream) genders. After that it was time for the Male and Female Videos of the Year awards, though between them there was another surprisingly good song, a mashup between the male group Old Dominion and the female group Sugarland on an old Phil Collins song called “Take Me Home.” The Male Video of the Year Award went to Jelly Roll for “Need a Favor” and the Female Video of the Year Award was won by Lainey Wilson for “Watermelon Moonshine.” (Even if I drank alcohol, I don’t think I would like watermelon moonshine, but it makes a great song title.) Then Billy Bob Thornton (where did they dredge him up? I think he’s doing a new TV series on one of the CBS/Viacom/Paramount networks) bestowed the Video of the Year Award to … Jelly Roll, for “I Need a Favor.” Afterwards Jelly Roll himself came out for the show-closer, “Highway to Hell,” which is not a “country-ized” version of the AC/DC song of that name but to my mind a more interesting piece. Once again, as with “Need a Favor,” it’s a song about moral conflict from the point of view of someone who’s a believer but has a, shall we say, rather tortured relationship with God as he perceives Him to be. While the confluence of those two songs makes me wonder if Jelly Roll has ever written any “normal” country songs about getting drunk and getting laid (or trying to), clearly his obsession with faith sets him apart from the common run of country stars. His famously tattooed face and heavy-set figure (he’s mentioned that he has a wife and a daughter, but if he were Gay he’d do well at a Bears event) also set him apart from the common run of country stars, as does his aw-shucks manner and disbelief (real or feigned) that all this is happening to him!