57th Annual Country Music Association Awards (Omaha Productions, Country Music Association, ABC-TV, aired November 8, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, November 8) I watched the 57th annual Country Music Association awards show on ABC-TV. What impressed me most about the show was the sheer quality of the music presented; I could make a case that we’re living in a new Golden Age of country music, and at least part of that may be due to the fact that at last Nashville has embraced the African-American heritage that was fundamental to the evolution of country music. When I wrote about the first episode in Ken Burns’ eight-part mega-documentary about the history of country music, I argued that all the great American musical genres have come from the combination of Black American music with something else. You combine Black music with the white marching-band tradition, and you get jazz. You combine Black music with Jewish music, and you get Broadway, Hollywood and the so-called “Great American Songbook.” And you combine Black music with the British and Irish folk tradition, add bits of Mexican and Hawai’ian music, and you get the bluegrass, hillbilly and cowboy styles that later fused to form what we know as “country music.” Blacks have invaded the country world big-time – the days when Charley Pride’s record company, RCA Victor, left his picture off the covers of his early albums and audiences gasped when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man came out are long gone – with not only top stars like Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton but up-and-comers like a married Black couple who call themselves “The War and Treaty,” African-Americans have cracked the color bar in country music wide open. The CMA Awards began this year with the heavy-set white singer Jelly Roll singing his star-making hit, “God, I Need a Favor,” with Wynnona Judd singing an impassioned second vocal and turning the song into an electrifying duet. Then there was a gag clip of co-host Peyton Manning (the multi-Super Bowl-winning quarterback) joining country singer Peter McCullough on stage for a bit of a song called “Red Dirt Road,” and Manning got his back on his co-host, country singer Luke Bryan, by showing a clip of Bryan absent-mindedly appearing on stage with his fly open (he noticed it and stopped the song to zip up again).

The first two awards went to country singer Luke Combs for his cover of Tracy Chapman’s 36-year-old classic “Fast Car”; Combs’ record won for Single of the Year and Chapman got the award for Song of the Year (and though she wasn’t there to accept the award in person, she sent a nice memo of thanks). Then Luke Bryan came out for a medley of his biggest hits – as often happens in awards shows like this, I had to guess at the titles since I’m not that familiar with the Luke Bryan oeuvre. They were “Hunting, Fishing and Loving Every Day,” “One Margarita, Two Margarita, Three Margarita, Shot,” a song title I scrawled in my notes as “Lay Down and Love You Right,” “Play It Again” and “Country Girl.” Then Ashley McBryde did a really beautiful ballad called “Leave a Light On in the Kitchen” (and did it in a powerfully understated performance that, like much of what gets performed in shows like this, belies country’s reputation as a genre of overwrought excess), and Cody Johnson followed in a similar vein with “The Painter,” in which the singer tells his girlfriend that he is just the canvas and she is the painter. After the Brothers Osborne won their sixth-ever CMA award for Vocal Duo of the Year, Morgan Wallin and Eric Church did a charming duet on a song called “Man Made a Bar” – whose central theme was that God may have made everything else but it was man who created the bar to make the rest of God’s creation endurable. Then Luke Combs did, not the “Fast Car” cover I was hoping for, but a song of his own called “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Chris Stapleton (a homely man whom I’ve referred to as the Bruce Vilanch of country music; at a time when virtually all the male country singers were hot, rail-thin hunks wearing skin-tight jeans and showing ample baskets, Stapleton came on and showed his vocal and guitar chops rather than his looks) came out with a song called “White Horse.” After that I got to hear Jordan Davis do a song called “Next Thing You Know” which I’d previously seen him do on one of the late-night talk shows, and then Old Dominion won Vocal Group of the Year; like the Brothers Osborne, they’d won the award five times previously and I had the feeling it would be nice if the old geezers would move out of the way and give younger people a chance (much the way a lot of American voters feel now about the likely choice in the 2024 Presidential election between 80-year-old Joe Biden and 77-year-old Donald Trump).

Then Lainie Wilson did a lovely song called “Wild Flowers and Wild Horses”; I think the presentation, with a large circle of barbed wire through which Wilson made a seemingly spectacular entrance and which burst into flames at the end, was overdone, but Wilson’s singing was powerful enough to overcome the pyrotechnics. (One of my musical biases is a mistrust of singers who do overly elaborate stage tricks; my feeling is that if they were confident enough in their voices, they wouldn’t need to do all this bizarre stage production.) After that, Dan + Shea (one of the many vocal duos crowded out of a win by the Brothers Osborne) did “Save Me the Trouble” and then came one of the highlights of the evening: Kelsea Ballerina doing a stunning song called “I Hope I Never Leave Me Again” (a breakup song with a difference; she hopes she never again subsumes herself by trying to reinvent herself as what her man of the moment thinks she should be) and doing it utterly alone, just her voice and acoustic guitar. Then came another of the most stunning acts of the night, the Black husband-and-wife duo The War and Treaty doing a powerful song called “That’s Not How Love Is Made” – and the female member had one of the most amazing soul voices I’ve heard in quite a while. Then they gave Jelly Roll the award for Best New Artist (I’d have rather seen it go to the woman singer Megan Moroney), and after that they brought various living stars for a tribute to Jimmy Buffett. Surprisingly, Buffett was the only recently deceased artist they mentioned – they didn’t do an “In Memoriam” segment – and it began with a beautifully understated version of Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at 40” by Kenny Chesney and Mac McAnally. Then the Zac Brown Band and veteran Alan Jackson came on to extend the Buffett tribute with a little-known song (at least to me) called “Adios, My Friend” followed by the inevitable classic “Margaritaville,” which they sang to a giant photo of Buffett on a yacht moored at a pier in Florida. Then Megan Moroney and Old Dominion came together for a song called “Can’t Break Up Now,” after which Lainie Wilson’s Bell Bottom Country won for Album of the Year (and she’d also win Female Vocalist of the Year) and Carly Pierce and Chris Stapleton joined forces for “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” about a long-term couple who are so bored with each other they no longer even bother to argue.

After that there was a tribute to country singer Joe Diffie which his son introduced; HARDY (apparently he spells his name in all caps) and Morgan Willen did “John Deere Dreaming” and were joined by the heavily tattooed Post Malone for “Pickup Man.” The last two awards of the evening went to Chris Stapleton as Male Vocalist of the Year and Lainie Wilson as Entertainer of the Year, and the two final songs were truly special: Tanya Tucker coming out to sing her star-making hit, “Delta Dawn,” with the group Little Big Town; and the finale, “Let Love Build a Bridge,” done as a duet with L. Michelle and Jelly Roll. My husband Charles got back from work early and caught the last fourth of the show, and we also watched a Jimmy Kimmel Live episode featuring two country stars who hadn’t been on the CMA Awards, Blake Shelton and Luke Grimes. Shelton didn’t sing – he merely talked – but Grimes both did an interview and sang a quite lovely song called “Burn” from a new EP, Pain, Pills and Pews. The comma isn’t in the official title, but I added it to indicate that the title is supposed to be read as four words, not three – “Pain” and “Pills” are separate objects, not “pain pills” as one thing.