Well, looky here. The CMA Awards derned got turnt around this past November when the corporate Bro-Country boys and girls got to sit in their chairs and watch a true Honky Tonk hero, Chris Stapleton, win three top honors. The pendulum shift is nothing new — the battle between lame Nashville Pop (the mainstream cookie-cutter horseshit mostly heard on the radio these days) and true-grit Country music has been raging for a very long time.
It is no coincidence that Stapleton grew up across the Ohio River in Eastern Kentucky (Paintsville), not far from where Kentucky Music Hall of Famer Larry Cordle was raised; Cordle, along with Larry Shell, co-wrote “Murder on Music Row,” a song about the beginning of the devaluing of the true nature of Country music. George Strait and Alan Jackson won a CMA Award for their version of the song back in 2000. The sentiment didn’t take, except in places like Cincinnati, where the Dallas Moore Band and others stayed true.
Real-deal Honky Tonk music has always been around, throughout this current Country/Pop music debacle, and its success has been on an uptick lately. One excellent example of this is Whitey Morgan and the 78’s, whose show in Newport, Ky. this week is sold out.
When Morgan and crew come to town, Brett Robinson will pluck that rectangle-shaped bunch of strings sitting on a table, aka a steel guitar, Morgan will play guitar and sing, Joey Spina will add more guitar, Alex Lyon will hold the bass bottom, Tony D will rock the drums and Tony Martinez will play acoustic guitar. The band’s latest album is Sonic Ranch, which features songs like “Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue,” “Drunken Nights in the City,” “Lowdown on the Backstreet,” “Me and the Whiskey” and an awesome version of Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got To Memphis,” which has been covered by Bobby Bare, Lee Hazlewood, Solomon Burke and many others.
For more info (the show is sold out), click here.
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2016.