Garth Brooks: The 2020 Gershwin Prize (Library of Congress, Bounce, WETA, PBS, aired December 31, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had wanted to watch the show immediately after it on PBS because they were doing something involving Garth Brooks but I couldn’t remember what it was. When the show opened with Brooks himself and his touring band in a live video of a hot version of one of Brooks’ neo-honky-tonk numbers, “Ain’t Goin’ Down ’Til the Sun Comes Up,” that turned out to be a film clip from a 2008 concert video. The show was actually the celebration of Garth Brooks performing at the Library of Congress and being fêted by others in his realm of the business in honor of him being given the George and Ira Gershwin prize for songwriting – or at least the hype surrounding it says it’s for songwriting. The previous recipients, according to a Google search, are Hal David (Burt Bacharach’s lyricist for his glory years), undated; Carole King, 2013; Billy Joel, 2014; Willie Nelson, 2015; Smokey Robinson, 2016; Tony Bennett – who isn’t even a songwriter! – in 2017, and Emilio and Gloria Estefan, 2019. It’s a truly bizarre list because not only is Bob Dylan not on it – though Dylan did win the Nobel Prize for literature, but even if you assume they’re only going to give the award to people who are still alive (which lets out major figures like Fats Domino, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and Prince) I can think of a lot of songwriters who have had more significant careers and been covered more often than some of the ones who did get the award. The last is significant because one of the criteria for getting the Gershwin prize was the number of people who’ve recorded your songs, indicating that they’ll survive after you’re no longer around to sing them yourself – but still, even not counting the omission of the titanic Mr. Zimmerman, where are Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, James Taylor (one of the predecessors Brooks paid tribute to in this show) or Bruce Springsteen?

Anyway, Garth Brooks has had an incredible level of success – reportedly he’s broken Elvis Presley’s record for the number of record sales by a solo artist (though if you count all the records he’s been on, both with the Beatles and on his own, Paul McCartney remains the biggest record seller of all time) and the people who go to his concerts know his oeuvre so well they sing along. They were doing that last night (as was Brooks himself when other people covered his songs in the first half of the program) and Keith Urban, who recalled seeing Brooks in concert before he started recording himself, said he had a seat at the very end of the auditorium, literally up against the wall, and he never heard Brooks’ own voice that night because all he could hear was the audience singing along. Brooks certainly is an accomplished songwriter and, though he hasn’t pushed his way out of the country genre the way some other people have (notably country-identified women like Lauren Alaina, Brandi Carlile and the amazing Tenille Townes), within it he’s capable of writing virtually anything from uptempo songs celebrating drinking and clubbing (usually drinking and clubbing to forget a lost love) to quite haunting romantic ballads and anthems of tolerance like “We Shall Be Free.” That song appeared on the tribute (which by the way took place on March 4, 2020, just weeks before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shut down almost all big public events – which explains why the audience was crowded together and none of them were wearing masks) sung by Keith Urban with the Howard University Choir – Howard University being the first and most prominent of the historically Black colleges and universities, named after General Otis Harlan Howard, who as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau was supposed to supervise the integration of former slaves into free society and give them each 40 acres and a mule. (Howard’s plans were sabotaged by President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a racist, who vetoed the bill to fund his agency.) It was at Howard’s law school that Thurgood Marshall, Spottswood Robinson, Robert Carter and the other Black lawyers who won the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision were trained.

What the writers of this show – who clearly wanted to present Garth Brooks’ career as an unbroken line of successes – didn’t mention was that “We Shall Be Free” was a considerably controversial record in 1994, particularly for its line, “When we’re free to love anyone we choose.” The Right-wingers who dominated much of the country-music infrastructure as well as its audience heard that (correctly) as a pro-Gay statement and turned against Brooks, with the result that the album it was on, The Chase, was a commercial nosedive after the huge successes of his three previous releases and at least a temporary hiccup in Brooks’ overall career. Also discreetly unmentioned last night were some of Brooks’ experiments – notably an album and TV special he did under the alter ego “Chris Gaines” (in which he tried to transform himself not only musically but physically into an analogue of Prince – David Bowie could pull off transformations like that but Garth Brooks still looked like the white Oklahoma football player he had started out to be until his love of music sidetracked him) as well as his 16 years of retirement during which he neither recorded nor toured. When his comeback tour was announced as “Garth Brooks, with special guest Trisha Yearwood,” my husband joked that since Trisha Yearwood is the current Mrs. Garth Brooks he probably didn’t have to work that hard to get her to open for him – and I joked that maybe she said over their breakfast table, “Darling, you haven’t worked for 16 years and I’ve been recording and touring all that time. Maybe you should be opening for me!”

The show opened – after that scorching film clip by Brooks himself and the host, former Tonight Show MC Jay Leno (who said Brooks was the most cooperative guest he ever had in terms of how he treated his fans, including keeping the production staff and clean-up crew there for hours as he greeted people in the audience), kicking things off, with Chris Stapleton doing Brooks’ “Rodeo” (about a woman whose husband is hardly ever home because he’s off riding in some rodeo or another) and Billy Joel’s “Shameless,” a song Brooks also recorded. When I saw the Gershwin Prize show for Willie Nelson I complained that, though it was Nelson’s talents as a songwriter rather than a singer that were supposedly being honored, an awful lot of the songs on the program (ranging from Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” to Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty”) were songs Nelson had recorded but didn’t write. That happened again in the Brooks tribute -- perhaps even worse since Brooks did it himself and used his own portion of the show to pay tribute to some of the writers who’d influenced him. After Stapleton the next performer was the Black neo-blues artist Keb’ Mo, who announced that he had patterned his own career after Brooks (which made me joke that he’ll have to find the Black equivalent of Trisha Yearwood and marry her) and did a marvelous version of one of Brooks’ plaintive ballads, “The River.” Next up was Keith Urban, who before he sang “We Shall Be Free” recalled that his first major tour was opening for Trisha Yearwood (well before she became Mrs. Garth Brooks) and therefore he already had a family connection to them well before he (or they, for that matter) knew it. The next performer was ethnically ambiguous country singer Lee Brice doing a song he co-wrote called “More than a Memory” whose only connection to Garth Brooks was that Brooks had recorded it. After a spoken tribute by Margaret George (who was spoken of so reverently I got the impression I should know her name better than I do; the only Margaret George whose name came up on Google was an American historical novelist who writes books about people like Cleopatra), Trisha Yearwood did a song called “For the First Time I’m in Love for the Last Time,” which she said she and Brooks wrote together to celebrate their relationship when it was new.

After that there was a bizarre segment featuring U.S. Senators and Congressmembers, both Republican (Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Ray Blunt and Bobby Davis) and Democratic (Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Patrick Leahy), which I guess was intended to prove that love of Garth Brooks and his music transcends party labels. Then it was time for Brooks’s own set, which took up half the show (considerably longer than most previous Gershwin Prize shows) and, though he had his full touring band on stage with him, was mostly an acoustic medley of songs by other writers who had influenced him: Don McLean (“Vincent” and “American Pie”), Jim Croce (“Operator,” whose relative subtlety and understatement clearly influenced Brooks in his own slow, sad songs), Merle Haggard (“Sing Me Back Home” an autobiographical piece about a man in prison who witnesses another man being walked down the last mile to be executed and determines to stay on the right side of the law and pursue a career in music on his release), Otis Redding (“Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”), Bill Withers (“Ain’t No Sunshine”), Cat Stevens (“Wild World”), Bob Seger (“Night Moves”) and Billy Joel (“Piano Man”). At least Brooks got some of his own songs in there, including “Unanswered Prayers” (about how he meets the girl he had a crush on in high school years later, when they’re both married to other people, and he realizes it’s just as well he and his crush object didn’t get together then because he’s a lot happier with the woman he did marry), a bit of “The Highway” as an intro to “The Thunder Rolls,” the ubiquitous “Friends in Low Places” (as I’ve commented on Brooks before, it’s the signature song he has to do the way the Rolling Stones have to do “Satisfaction”) and a quite beautiful ballad, “The Dance,” as his closing number. Before “The Dance” he paid tribute to his pianist, David Ganz, and said that by extension that was a thank-you to his whole band – which seemed a bit unfair to the rest of the members, but the song itself was lovely and at least as good a way to end a quirky and not always satisfying but mostly good evening as an all-out fast flagwaver would have been (though I’m still a bit sorry he didn’t do one of my favorite Brooks songs, “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association,” and neither did anyone else!).