I just posted a video of a 1976 country hit (during the CB craze) by Shirley and Squirrely. Apparently YouTube is allowing its users to prevent posting of videos elsewhere.
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Country At a Crossroads?
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
Based on what evidence? Not speculation.
No debate on Aldean’s dog whistles. But poverty, hopelessness et al are far wider than country music fans.
Country, rock, rap, pop…when you look at the totality, there is nearly always a mix of the deeper and introspective with the lighter and sometimes just goofy.
There really isn’t a controversy here much as some try to make one up.
I remember reading recently that Tracy Chapman’s label never shopped the single to country music stations when it was released. That said, I’m not sure if Tracy’s single was released today if country stations would play it. We’ve come a long way but country radio is still very white and very straight.
The same could be said about rock radio.
Chapman wrote the song in the 80s. It has a universal message, but Country Radio formats never played it. It was played on other formats.
The controversy is over the irony that a song written by a Gay Black Woman (Who would never get one of her performances played on a Country station) is now embraced by a White males version. It's similar in the way many people bristle over Black Lives Matter...
I remember a listener complaining one time over the fact that our station played Lenny Kravitz and Bob Marley(and many other Black artists). He said Jimi Hendrix was OK because he was "actually White". Unfortunately, bizarre prejudiced thinking can be anywhere...
R&B never played it either, and she's a black woman. You're overthinking this.
There's no controversy, unless you invent one. If you approach this as Luke did with the innocence of a 5 year old driving in the car with his father and hearing the song, it makes more sense. It's only when you layer all of the prejudices adults place on things that it becomes an issue. It's just a song. That's the genius of a show like The Voice, where the judges hear the singer with their backs turned. They can't see the person singing. They just hear the voice.
You were the one who started this thread. There are several articles about this story including the one you posted. If any good comes out of it, Country listeners will go out and purchase other Chapman records. The Byrds helped introduce Bob Dylan to Top 40 listeners in the 60s. Maybe Chapman gets invited to perform at some Country Festivals...
I don't think she's looking to profit or benefit from this new exposure (although she will receive songwriting royalties). Luke says she controls the rights to whether he can perform it on TV or even make a video. So far, those rights haven't been granted. The good that has come out of it is she will receive a massive royalty check. That's the great thing about songwriting. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
With hip hop, there's definitely the "party" stuff as well as socially conscious records and groups. Same thing with rock. There's everything from "Rock and Roll All Night" to Rage Against the Machine. Yet those all fall under the umbrella of hip hop/rock respectively. There are even crossovers like "Walk This Way" and "Bring The Noise."
With country, it seems like a lot of stuff that could be considered country is being referred to now as "Americana." And it seems like a lot of that is the more socially conscious stuff. The New Yorker had a long (kinda rambling) article on country music's "culture wars" not too long ago.
Non-Paywall link
And in that era, stations had to get serviced from the label. If the label did not send a song to their list of country stations, the country stations did not get it or hear it.
Small stations that did not get label service would subscribe to new release services, but each was specific to a single format.
Of course, a station could buy the song at a record store. If that ever happened, there should be some kind of memorial engraved stone placed on the sidewalk where the store used to be located.
"Go out and purchase"? Wrong decade. Nobody "goes out" and purchased "records" and nearly nobody has for going on two decades.
Country does not need any "new" old artists. Chapman is 50 this year, and would have to compete with a slew of interesting young artists, ranging from Blacks and Hispanics to "weight challenged" with some awfully good songs.
Also by the late 80s, all of the labels had Nashville divisions that oversaw that genre, those artists, and their promotion to radio. So country radio stations only received promotion from artists signed to the Nashville divisions of those labels.
Which is probably why "Love You Anyway," the fiddle-heavy ballad that was sent only to country radio, continues to be pushed despite "Fast Car" becoming a monster hit. "Love You Anyway" has a video, so it's to Columbia's advantage to keep the clicks coming on that rather than abandoning the song the way Big Loud did to Morgan Wallen's "One Thing at a Time" after it became clear that "Last Night" would become a monster at country as well as crossing over to pop formats.
I think that there is a mistaken view by people who never worked in radio programming that stations somehow get every record from every label.
Since we are talking about a hit from 1988, or 35 years ago in the case of "Fast Car", we can look at the way stations were serviced then.
In that period, stations got promo CD or, still, vinyl promo singles from some labels. That would have been horribly expensive, if you included every song released each week.
Even if you were at a key station in a big market where labels did personal visits and dropped of songs, you also got them by mail or an overnight service if you were a really big station.
So labels sent only the songs they thought your station might possibly play. Country stations did not get rock, R&B, Smooth Jazz, Latin or CHR releases or anything that was not considered by the label to be country. Of course, on some rare occasions a label might think that a particular song could "cross over" and then a rock song might also be serviced to CHR.
Small market stations did not get much, if any, label service. A few big labels had services where stations payed a fee to get new releases in specific genres, but the mid-size and independent labels did not do that, so stations had to use some kind of a service; when CDs became cost-efficient we got things like the TM Century Hit Disk (also specific to each format).
And? You know people can be exposed to more than one format?
Still not a controversy.
You may be thinking of Shane McAnally
Oops, you're right. Shane is a producer.
He's both writer and producer.
A local AM station was owned by a gentleman who also owned a record store called “The Pied Piper” ( not sure if the store’s name came from the Crispian St. Peter’s hit-it was a long time ago). Anyway, the afternoon show, which catered to teens, was also appropriately named “The Pied Piper Show”. The DJ’s name was rarely mentioned…the show was the star, which obviously was also to promote his record store.
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