56th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions, CBS-TV, aired April 18, 2021)

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

Thanks to various pressures, mostly due to an unusually stressful couple of weeks at work, it’s been taken me nearly a week to have a chance to comment on the 56th annual Academy of Country Music awards, aired April 18 on CBS-TV “live” from various stages in Nashville, including both the current Grand Ole Opry (where a group of nurses and other health-care workers were rewarded for their services during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by being allowed to sit in the balcony, even though the main floor was devoid of audience members as has become customary in this crazy era) and its venerable original home, now known as Ryman Auditorium. It seems like every time this place is shown on TV people get all gooey-eyed and reverential – and, given me, I remember, “This is where Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny told Eivls he should go back to driving a truck.” Oddly, the show opened with a quote from Lauren Alaina’s great song “The Road Less Traveled” – but Alaina wasn’t on the program and neither were some of my other favorite current country singers, like Brandi Carlile and the amazing Tenille Townes (have I said enough nice things about Tenille Townes to get you to buy her CD The Lemonade Stand yet? What are you waiting for?).

One of my current faves that did make it is Maren Morris, whom I’ve been a huge fan of since she belted out her anthem “My Church” on a previous country music awards show – that night I decided she’d be the perfect person to play Janis Joplin in a biopic (she’s got the right look, the right voice and even the right origin – from Texas) and I’m still waiting. She actually won Female Artist of the Year and she did a duet with her husband, Ryan Hurd, called “Chasing After You,” in which she was obviously holding back so she wouldn’t drown him out – just like Janis had to do with her first band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The show opened with Miranda Lambert and Elle King doing a song called “Drunk (And I Don’t Want to Go Home,” and it’s always amusing to see how the producers handle having both Lambert and her ex, Blake Shelton, on the same show. They generally schedule them at opposite ends of the program, and here they probably had them perform in different venues as well – though I pretty quickly lcst track of just which people were at which places.

The second song was Chris Young and Kane Brown duetting on a song called “Famous Friends,” and in a way it was a tribute to Charley Pride, the pioneer African-American country music star (who passed in 2020), that the whole idea of a Black country singer was so controversial in 1970 that they didn’t put Pride’s photo on his first few albums and audiences gasped in shock when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man came out. Now Blacks like Brown and Mickey Guyton (who actually co-hosted the show with Keith Urban) are no big deal, and the days in which country music was the cultural preserve of the American Right – represented largely by songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” – are over. This show featured the same kinds of trendy odes (both in music and in speech) to diversity, inclusion and human equality as the other awards shows, and there were probably a few Right-wingers in the audience at home going, “Et tu, Nashville?” One thing that hasn’t changed about country music is its positing of “country” not only as a style of music but a style of life, an attitude that you carry around with you 24/7: this seems to have been the point of the next songs on the program, a medley of “Country Again” and “What’s Your Country Song?” by Thomas Rhett.

After that Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton teamed up for “Maggie’s Song” (a.k.a. “Run, Maggie, Run,” though it wasn’t all that clear what Maggie was supposed to be running from) and then the Morris-Hurd duet (well, at least as a real-life couple they had a bit more of a reason to be singing together than some of the stars the ACM producers threw together just for the hell of it). The next song was “Like a Lady” by Lady A – the group formerly known as Lady Antebellum until someone either in the group itself or in their organization remembered that “antebellum” (literally “before the war”) is a term used by Southern diehards who believe in the “Lost Cause” crap that everything in the South was peachy-keen and hunky-dory until those damned pesky Northerners went to war and forced them to give up their “peculiar institution” of owning Black people as slaves. (I remember joking about Lady Antebellum when they first came out, “What are they going to call their album – Slavery Was Cool?”) They have two lead singers, Hillary Scott (a woman) and Charles Kelley (a man), and I’m glad they chose a song that featured her since I’ve always found her voice a lot more interesting than his.

The next song was “The Good Ones” by Gabby Barrett, who won for Best New Female Artist and would probably have won in that category at the sort-of rival Country Music Association Awards if she hadn’t been up against the amazing Tenille Townes. (Got the message yet? Buy Tenille Townes’ album!), showing real passion and soul. Then Dierks Bentley did one of the most surprising songs of the evening – duetting with Black singer Larkin Poe and a group called The War and Treaty on, of all songs, U2’s ode to Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pride (In the Name of Love).” (Did I tell you this is not your old God, guns and glory country music show? Country has come a long ways since Rose Maddox, the first truly gutsy woman country singer and the one who blazed the trail for Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton et al.. covered Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” at a time country singers generally didn’t go near Guthrie because of his Left-wing politics.)

Then came one of the most remarkable performances of the night: Carrie Underwood came out and did a medley of four spiritual/gospel/hymn tunes from a new album called My Savior: “Amazing Grace,” “Graeat Is Thy Faithfulness,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art.” It was fascinating to hear her transform “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art” into all-out gospel, but as good as Underwood was she chose to bring on a Black guest star, CeCe Winans, to sing with her on “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and “The Old Rugged Cross” and the Black woman just blew the white one off the stage. Still, the spot had so much intensity that the next song up, Eric Church warbling something called “Bunch of Nothing,” sounded like, well, a bunch of nothing by comparison. The next song was the male vocal duo Dan + Shay doing “I’m So Glad You Exist” – a good song, but were all the non-clunky concepts for love songs taken already? The next song was, if anything, even more generic – Luke Combs and Darren Williams on something called “It’s Gonna Be All Right,” followed by Combs going it alone for “Forever After All” – nice sentiments, nicely sung, but hardly revelatory.

After that Miranda Lambert returned with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall for a quite beautiful song called “In His Arms,” and Jimmy Allen (with Brad Paisley, a bigger star, in his background) on a nice don’t-tie-me-down song called “Freedom Like a Highway.” The next song was Kenny Chesney doing his own generic love ballad, “Knowing You,” and after that Ashley McBryde (a veteran performer that somehow has stayed off my radar screen until now) in a haunting ballad called “Our Love’s Divide.” After the next medley – Alan Jackson on “When Daddy Let Me Drive” and “Forever in My Heart” – the producers apparently decided that enough time had elapsed since Miranda Lambert’s last performance to bring on Blake Shelton. He’s not one of my favorites – I think he’s not especially good-looking and his songs are mediocre, and the most amazing thing about him is how he’s been able to get two far more talented, charismatic and sexy women singers (Lambert and his current squeeze, Gwen Stefani) to fall in love with him (“Maybe he has a big dick,” my husband Charles joked), but the two songs he did this time around, a nostalgic ballad called “Austin” and an ode to happiness in spite of poverty called “Minimum Wage” (the latter of which I’d previously heard him do on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, where it was also impressive) were quite good.

Next up were Carly Pierce and Lee Brice doing a song called “I Hope You’re Happy Now” – yet another good but pretty generic run-through of sentiments that have been presented in a million songs before – and Black woman singer Mickey Guyton doing a song called “Hold On” that was good but hardly as searing as her star-making hit, “Black Like Me.” (I’ve heard “Black Like Me” on several shows and I’ve had the same reaction to it: “It’s a great song, but exactly what makes this ‘country’?” Nothing that I can hear other than a pedal steel guitar buried way in the background of the mix.) The next song was Keith Urban’s “Tumbleweed,” yet another generic country sentiment but done better than a lot of other songs that went down well-traveled roads that night. Then the Brothers Osborne came out for “I’m Not for Everyone”, and after that we got a duet by Kelsea Ballerini and Kenny Chesney called “Half of My Hometown.” After that three members of the group LIttle Big Town (the fourth had to sit out the show since he’d just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2) marched down the streets of Nashville as they performed “Wine, Beer, Whiskey.” (Wine is a bit of a novelty item in today’s country music but beer and whiskey are the emblematic country-music drinks.)

For the finale the Brothers Osborne returned with a song called “Dead Man’s Curve” (the latter was hardly in the same league as Jan & Dean’s 1960’s camp masterpiece – but that’s the risk you run when you rip off someone else’s title). There weren’t any downright awful performances at the 56th annual American Country Music awards but, with the possible exception of Carrie Underwood’s and CeCe Winans’ duets to God, nothing that really stood out either – nothing as amazing as Maren Morris’s “My Church” or Tenille Townes’ “Somebody’s Daughter,” discoveries I’ve made at previous country music awards shows – just a nice if occasionally overblown evening of entertainment, though at least I give the country artists credit for being much less overwhelming in their productions than their pop counterparts at the Grammy Awards. There were no Cirque du Soleil acrobats swinging from the ceilings of the various venues, no fireworks, no light shows that made the performers look like they were being attacked – just nice music, sung with care and taste even if it rarely reached the emotional heights this sort of music can.