Tom's Country View

Waylon Jennnings is alive - at least this is what comes to mind, when listening to the current 2014-album of Sturgill Simpson ! It is stunning, how the critically acclaimed singer from Kentucky sounds, if you are familiar with the legend of Waylon Jennings . Just close your eyes and you are inclined to believe, you are listening to a lost Wayon song from the 1970s. In February of 2002 Waylon Jennings died from diabetes complications at the age of 64. It would cleary fill more than one blog entry to discuss the life of the famous country outlaw. But I guess anyone who has ever paid some attention to country music, will have run across the man, who so often gets mentioned alongside Willie Nelson . Not only because the two had become friends, but also because both of them had bravely turned their backs on Nashville in the 1970s and gone to Texas to create their own brand of Country Music, influenced by the Hippie-Folk-Rock sounds around then and there. In May of 2014 the vir...

"Tonight, I'm as low as any man can go   I'm down and I can't fall much farther   And once upon a time, You turned the water into wine   An' now, on my knees, I'm turning to You, Father   Could You help me turn the wine back into water?"   ('Wine Into Water' / T. Graham Brown, Ted Hewitt, Bruce Burch) In the mid 1980s a new voice caught the attention of Country Radio listeners. A voice that one would much rather expect to hear on Soul Radio. The unmistakable Blue Eyed Soul of T. Graham Brown , the white guy with the black voice from Georgia, brought a breath of fresh sounds into the Country Charts. Until the end of the 1980s, his T-Ness had achieved 3 Number-1 and 7 Top-10 Country Hits, among them such lasting favorites as ' Hell and High Water ', ' I Tell It Like It Used To Be ' or ' I Wish That I Could Hurt That Way Again '. In terms of style, he always remained a little difficult to categorize. ...

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose " Many may be familiar with this line, without potentially knowing where it comes from. Other may know it from Janis Joplin and her hit ' Me & Bobby McGee '. But only few may know, that the song was written by Kris Kristofferson. Born and raised in Texas, Rhodes scholarship in Oxford (England), Helicopter pilot in the US Army eventually brought Kris Kristofferson to Nashville in 1965 to try his luck at music. Being very shy on stage, he was more interested in combining his love of Hank Williams and his interest in literature as a songwriter than being a singer on stage. Soon he got a reputation in Nashville for writing songs in a new poetic style that talked about sexuality very open and yet spoke directly to people in the stories he told. While he was trying to meet ends in Nashville, he managed to meet Johnny Cash. The way he made him listen to one of his songs by landing with a helicopter in Johnn...

" Growin' up in little pink houses, Makin' out on living room couches, Blowin' that smoke on Saturday night, A little messed up, but we're all alright ... "

It's been over 20 years since Tim McGraw has released his first album ("Tim McGraw", 1993 ). And this makes him one of the few, who is still being played on the radio in 2014. And Tim McGraw, the singer and by-now actor (a.o. " The Blind Side " with Sandra Bullock , 2009) can still be found on the charts! With some 40 million units sold in the US, Tim McGraw is the something like number 8 on a list of best selling solo artists across all genres. Only very few have managed to stay successful over such a long time span, and re-invent themselves. But maybe that is the secret to his success! Not only can he display a body at 47, which should could be the envy of Superman, as well as a successful marriage with singer Faith Hill , but he also managed to keep his music full of surprises. To draft his 20-years career in the entertainment business would not fit in this one blog entry, so I am going to focus on his most recent outputs, to see what makes him so suc...

I have been following Country Music now for over 30 years (as unbelievable as it sounds). I discovered it, when Alabama was starting to rise to fame. Their No.1 country single ' Take Me Down ' become one of their biggest pop hits going all the way to No. 18 on the Hot 100. It was the 80s, when the movie " Urban Cowboy " propelled country music to the forefront of pop music with artists like Eddie Rabbit , Kenny Rogers , Ronnie Milsap or Crystal Gayle who were successfully recording pop-influenced songs. And from the very first contact I had with country music, I was confronted with heated debates about what is country music and what is not. Purists and traditionalists, as they are called, were complaining about the music leaving its roots behind and catering to pop audiences and therefore not belonging on country radio. Ever since the 80s (or even before I started listening to country music) these people have complained that the old stars are not being played o...

There is no doubt, that songwriting done right, is an artform! With its typically limited time in song length it has to use words in the most efficient way to put emotions and pictures in the listeners hearts and minds. Thoughtful videos typically build upon the lyrics and evolve the stories to create actual pictures to the words. And as we know, sometimes they say more than a thousand words. Country music is about life and it os telling the stories that happen when life happens, like no other genre. But once in a while a song comes along, that is exceptional in the way it creates a story. One such song is ' Pony Express ' and I need to call it a 3-dimensional song! 'Pony Express' can be found on the 1986-album by Alabama called ' The Touch ' and it closes the album as a true story song with a length of almost 8 minutes (7:53). It was written by Buddy Cannon, Ken Lambert, Dean Dillon and Alabama bass guitarist and singer Teddy Gentry . On all ea...