Why Is America’s First Country Music Superstar Buried In Bridgeport?

Bluegrass musician Nick Novia plays at the grave of Marion T. Slaughter – known professionally as Vernon Dalhart – in Bridgeport's Mountain Grove Cemetery.

Davis Dunavin / WSHU

There are questions that might stump even the most dedicated country music fan: Who kickstarted the country music industry in the 1920s, even before big names like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family? And why is this Texas musician buried in Bridgeport, Connecticut?
His name was Vernon Dalhart, and he released some of the best-selling records of the era, including “The Prisoner’s Song.”

Hank Williams: The Lighter Side of The Godfather of Country

Williams lived fast and died young but in 1951 he was able to do radio broadcasts at 7.15am, where the wisecracking improvisor showed his mastery of music.

Hank Williams: more than just a tortured soul. Photograph: Supplied

By now you’d think we know everything there is to know about Hank Williams. He had a short life, dying New Year’s Day 1953 aged 29 in the back of a car parked at a gas station in rural Virginia. Three years earlier he had made his debut on the Grand Ole Opry, launching a body of work that would serve as one of the definitive blueprints of modern country music. A definitive box set in 1998 claimed to house every note Williams sang.
Not so fast. This month marks the reissue of a 15-CD set called The Complete Mother’s Best Collection ... Plus! unveiling 142 lost performances by the country music star in an unvarnished setting as the featured performer of an early morning radio program in 1951. The recordings, rescued from acetates salvaged in the 1970s and the center of a 10-year legal battle, contradict the image of a doomed and self-destructive country singer known for harrowing fare like I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, Your Cheatin’ Heart, and I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

Georgia's Lonesome Country Star

There can be few country music singers quite as lonesome as Shota Adamashvili. He is the only one in Georgia - not the American state, the country which lies on the border of Europe and Asia. With his cowboy hat and boots and pretty convincing Southern accent, many who come to see him play mistake Shota for an American. But he has never been to the U.S.A, and he taught himself English by listening to country music.

Down Range Country: Music Made in Afghanistan

Two soldiers make music while on deployment in Afghanistan.

Kiefer Sutherland - Not Enough Whiskey

The rumors are true! Actor Kiefer Sutherland has joined the world of Country Music!

Kiefer Sutherland's long anticipated Americana-tinged album, Down In A Hole, is set for release in 2016. Kiefer's debut track, "Not Enough Whiskey," will hit iTunes April 8.

"If I hear about an actor doing a music project, my eyes are the first to roll," he tells Rolling Stone. "It's been done before and, on some levels, not very well. A lot of actors make records but won't tour to support them or make videos, and it ends up not being serious. I felt strongly that this was something I wanted to do."

Today, the actor, who will be presenting at the ACM Awards this year, proves just how genuine he is in his ambitions by releasing a music video for "Not Enough Whiskey." He financed the clip himself — "I wanted something that was personal and traveling," he says — so he and his songwriting partner Jude Cole found a motel where they could film one long shot, through a parking lot and into a bar. It's a video that purposefully showcases Sutherland, who didn't want to "hide behind a band," to prove his commitment to being a musical artist.

Read more of Keifer's interview: HERE

Country Music's Newest Artist Management/Music Publishing Company

Texas native Keith Stegall is a long-time legend of Country music. Since the early 1980's, he has secured his reputation as a songwriter and producer. During his musical career he has attained "55 No. 1 hits, 40 million airplays, and 70 million in sales worldwide". He has also worked with such country acts as Alan Jackson, and Zac Brown Band!

Keith Stegall with Alan Jackson at ASCAP

Sturgill Simpson Is The Astral Explorer Of Country Music

Sturgill Simpson is the astral explorer of Country Music

Few bands plumb the depths of space and time in a way that challenges us the listeners to ask for me. Quite a few bands in metal tread these waters and it feels par for course due to the style of music and rebellious nature. Sturgill Simpson is asking folks on the country tip to go along for the ride and damn if it doesn't feel good to hear the fresh approach. Buy the ticket and take the ride.

Check it out on NPR

"Believe it or not: a country song can be about anything. People who seek out stories about Daddy's farm and fishing trips and Solo cups will easily find them, but the genre's most creative souls have long been interested in much more than sentimentality and a good old American time. Country and the rock that intertwines with it bears a rich legacy of artists asking The Big Questions in warm, relatable accents, from Willie Nelson and his friends at the World Armadillo Headquarters in the 1970s to the Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell today.

Sturgill Simpson is the latest to take on this challenge. The 35-year-old native Kentuckian, who played in the insurgent bluegrass band Sunday Valley before releasing last year's High Top Mountain, a dynamic (and fairly traditional hard country) solo album, didn't set out to blow minds with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, to be released May 13. He just found himself in a new place, both musically and in terms of his fascinations.

That personal paradigm shift is represented in the album's first track, "Turtles All The Way Down," the video for which debuts here. "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane," Simpsons sings in his outlaw baritone as his band lays down a gentle arrangement reminiscent of Merle Haggard's "Kern River".

The next lyric might make you jump: "Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain." Aliens? Simpson's having fun with a cosmic-scientific meme connected to an old myth that imagines the world perched upon an infinite stack of the green-shelled creatures. Simpson invokes the Turtle in connection to his own quest for meaning, which never does let up. The song's video, created using software artist Scott Draves's distributed computing project Electric Sheep, similarly blends a straightforward, intimate performance with synapse-stimulating, AI-generated effects.

After this detonation of the treasure chest of country stereotypes, Metamodern Sounds continues to flesh out a deep and unconventional relationship between traditionalism and new ways of thinking. The groove Simpson finds with his band is loose and immediate. At times the playing gets almost psychedelic. At other times players circle back on old styles like Southern gospel and do them right. At the center of it all is Simpson, a hot guitar player and mighty singer whose insistence on being complicated makes Metamodern Sounds far richer than most emerging artists' wrestling matches with tradition.

Simpson and I recently had a conversation via email about legacies worth resurrecting and making music that's "like life."

The new album isn't exactly what people might have expected from a guy often called a honky-tonker — though those classic elements are present, too. Where did you begin with these songs?
I just reached a point where the thought of writing and singing any more songs about heartache and drinking made me feel incredibly bored with music. It's just not a headspace I occupy much these days. Nighttime reading about theology, cosmology, and breakthroughs in modern physics and their relationship to a few personal experiences I've had led to most of the songs on the album.

Dr. Rick Strassman's book The Spirit Molecule was extremely inspirational,as were a few recent highly visionary indie films and a lot of Terrence McKenna's audio lectures. The influences are all over the place but they culminated into a group of songs about love and the human experience, centered around the light and darkness within us all. There have been many socially conscious concept albums. I wanted to make a "social consciousness" concept album disguised as a country record.

"Turtles All the Way Down," is a shot across the barricades. And you've made a video that matches it. Tell me about how the video came about and how it relates to the song. Do you think CMT will play it?

I expected to be labeled the "acid country guy," but it's not something I dwell on. I would urge anyone that gets hung up on the song being about drugs to give another listen ... to me "Turtles" is about giving your heart to love and treating everyone with compassion and respect no matter what you do or don't believe. The cosmic turtle is from a much quoted story found in publications throughout modern physics and philosophy, even ancient theology, that now essentially serves as a comedic picture or expression of a much grander idea.

The video is a tightly budgeted attempt to capture or represent a visual simulation of that idea. After some correspondence with Dr. Strassman and Andrew Stone at www.cottonwoodresearch.org I was introduced to visionary software artist Scott Draves, creator of Electric Sheep. After a few emails and hearing the music, Scott was generous enough to offer his assistance with the project. A friend of mine, Dex Palmer, knew some pretty tech-savvy kids at Cineshot Productions that I enlisted for the chore of filming and editing this thing.

As for CMT playing the video, I honestly never gave it too much thought. What they do is great to a lot of people, and it creates jobs for a lot of people, but mainstream country avenues weren't really a goal for me with this album. I'm interested in exploring various forms of newer media that might allow those who otherwise don't listen to country to find and connect with my music.

The song's title invokes Ray Charles's classic album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music — which was a huge, loving and very successful challenge to the genre. This album poses challenges too, and not just the obvious ones. It's not slick like mainstream country, but it also has a more adventurous and looser spirit than a lot of Americana music. How do you think these categories need shaking up right now?

Part of me still feels like I've never had the opportunity to properly express all my earliest influences, so for now I find isolation to be my biggest influence. Somebody told me once it takes an Americana song five minutes to say what a country song says in three — so I try to write country songs. But really, all good music is just soul music.

You're working with a traditional sound but your music still has a roughness and immediacy to it that's very vital. How do you protect that?

I want to make records that feel like life. So in terms of recording, I am very much a live performer and I've learned to treat the studio as an extension of that only with a much broader sonic palette to paint with. I cant even use headphones. We just set up extremely tight in one room and set the levels ourselves naturally with dynamics. This is how all my favorite records were made.

You cover of a song called "The Promise" on the new album and it sounds like a classic country weeper. I thought it was a Mavericks song when I heard your version. But it's a 1988 electropop hit by the English band When in Rome! Tell me about taking a song that's so different stylistically and finding the country in it. 

I believe it's one of about three thousand brilliant compositions from the 80's that got lost in production. I always thought the lyrics to "The Promise" made for a very beautiful, sweet love song and decided I'd like to lay down a somewhat "Countrypolitan" version.

You also have a trucking song on the album: "Long White Lines," written by Buford Abner but better known from a version by '90s country star Aaron Tippin. Mainstream country is full of trucks, but never mentions trucking — trucks in songs today represent leisure, not work. You turn that around here.

CB radios were a big part of the early 80's. They sort of became an obsession after Smokey and the Bandit. My grandfather had one in his truck when I was a kid and I would play on it constantly, in the garage or going down the road, until truckers started telling dirty jokes and he'd make me turn it off. Since the album is a figurative trip, I figured it needed a road song. I became familiar with the tune years ago on an old Charlie Moore & Bill Napier bluegrass trucker album by the same title. We started working it up on the road last year and it just keeps getting looser and funkier every time we play it. At this point it's basically hip-hop.

There's nothing more traditional in country than invoking family, but nostalgic songs about childhood can be so very corny. You have one on this album, "Pan Bowl," that avoids cliché by employing what seems like real details from your life. And you grandfather "Dood" Fraley announces the title of the album at its very beginning. How do you manage to invoke family without getting too sentimental?

Yeah, I wrote that song a few years back and honestly it probably doesn't belong on this album. I just felt that by the end of the record most folks might need some sort of "return to innocence," so I added it as a hidden bonus track. Every word of that song is true. As for the album intro, really I just wanted my grandfather to emcee the album, almost entirely for sentimental reasons, and I thought it made for a nice juxtaposition.

There are points with the band where you almost get into jam-band territory on this album. Is this a reflection of where you're going live? It's a different kind of stretching out than what you did with your old band Sunday Valley.

There is still so much room for sonic exploration in country music. You always have to serve the songs and the songs have to serve the records. Someday, if I ever get to a point where I find that I am repeating myself, that's when I'll know I'm done."

If Everything Is So Bad, Why Are Music Sales Increasing? Repost from Saving Country Music

Do you still buy music? Or do you try to get it all for free? C'mon, be honest with us and most of all yourself. If ya truly value the music, have due diligence and support the artists for which you enjoy listening to. Even if its just a few tracks downloaded from Itunes or Amazon, keep the fires lit and the support strong.

Link to original post on Saving Country Music

"Oh how independent music nerds love to puff their chest out and pontificate about what’s wrong with the mainstream music industry, how it’s creatively bankrupt and was too slow to evolve to the onset of the digital format, and how now the whole industry is on the brink of implosion at any moment, which would be to their little heart’s delights. And meanwhile experts love to tell us how we’re mere months away from music ownership going extinct in favor subscriber and cloud-based formats, how Spotify and other such sites will rule the day.

What none of these nerds and experts seem to be willing to recognizing though (including this one up until recently) is that over the last 18 months, music sales have miraculously pulled out of their nearly decade-long tailspin to stabilize and even increase. And in country music, sales are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the economy. Sure, we’re still very far away from the glory days of the late 90′s-early 2000′s, but music sales are staging a big comeback, especially in country.

In 2011, overall country music sales were up 4%. Though physical album sales were down slightly, digital album sales saw an increase of 27%. Overall music sales in all genres increased 1.3% from 2010 to 2011, the first time the music industry saw a year-to-year increase since 2004 (See complete 2011 Nielsen music sales figures). Country music sales are doing even better in 2012, increasing 5.6%, or roughly 1 million more units from January to July over the same period in 2011; the biggest increase in all of music. And this is all over a period when Taylor Swift, country’s biggest bread winner and a big seller in pop as well, has not released a new album (her last album Speak Now was released in October 2010). A new Swift release this Fall/Winter can only increase country’s upwards sales trend.

In 2010, we were mere months away from major bankruptcies and massive consolidation all across the music industry. The business was in such a long-trending downward spiral, just to slow the rate of decline would have been a huge success. Brought to the point of extinction, with their backs against the wall, the music industry rallied and began to figure it out. New ways of delivering music to consumers and the digital age will continue to challenge the industry, but those waiting for the fall of Rome shouldn’t hold their breath.

So what happened? How did the music industry right the ship? Here’s some theories:

Understanding Who Still Buys Music

You want to bankrupt the music industry? Teach girls and women how to steal music. You wonder why most of what you hear on the radio sounds like it was written for little girls and their moms? Because it was. Why do you think the last handful of American Idol winners have been cute young boys? Because young girls are the last ones paying attention. By understanding who is still buying music (girls and their moms), the music industry can focus music to them and not waste resources on music that is likely to sell poorly or be stolen by tech-savvy males.

Many Choices in How to Purchase Music

As much as the ability for consumers to be able to purchase digital singles has created challenges for the album format and price points, it also takes pressure off the consumer who don’t have to buy a whole album of songs when they may only want half or one of them. Meanwhile the resurgence of vinyl has increased that album concept’s viability and the price point for physical music, giving consumers many more options for purchasing music than they had in the CD era.

And purchasing music is no longer an arduous chore if you don’t want it to be. You can download a song or album instantly on your phone, have it sync with your computer or MP3 player through a cloud-based format, and still hunt for vinyl for fun when you have the time. Cheap, digital music caters to the impulse buy, and now many times it’s easier to buy it than to steal it. “The masses like crap” is how independent music fans like to put it, but the practical observation is that busy people are less likely to question the musical choices presented to them through mainstream media. Digital music facilitates this process by making purchasing easy. A catchy song gets stuck in your head from a commercial, so you download it onto your phone on your walk to work in the morning.

Increased Cross Marketing and Royalties

Using movies, TV shows, commercials, sporting events, YouTube, etc. to push singles instead of traditional radio has increased exposure across the board for music, reaching more people, and people outside of the music’s normal demographics. This is also kept up another lucrative revenue stream of the music industry: songwriter royalties. Royalties were one of the few stable elements of the industry during the late-2000′s tailspin. Songwriters and performers and their publishing houses are regularly fetching 5 and 6 figures to have their songs basically promoted on national television or in wide release movies. This is a win-win for the industry and artists.

The Mono-genre

Making music that appeals to the widest possible audience is the best way to increase sales. The biggest selling single in country music in 2011 was Jason Aldean’s country rap “Dirt Road Anthem” that just went triple-platinum last month. Taylor Swift already has a huge base in country and pop, and she just cut a hip-hop single with rapper B.o.B. Lionel Richie has the best-selling “country” album so far in 2012, selling a whopping 912,000 copies, 300,000+ copies more than the second-best, Carrie Underwood’s Blown Away. Break down distinctions between genres and you eliminate barriers to sales potential.

Substance

2011′s biggest seller was Adele, an artist many music critics and fans agree brings substance to her music. Many independent music fans may not want to admit that mainstream music is getting better (and the term “better” depends on taste), but what can be said for sure is that the music industry is making music with greater appeal, and judging from Adele’s success, part of that appeal is based on substance. The idea that all corporate music is crap has always been unfair, and may be slowly become outmoded as the industry re-introduces substance to attempt to reintegrate disenfranchised consumers.

Increasing Immigrant Population & Lower Income Access

Latinos continue to be the US’s largest-growing demographic, and they are more likely to purchase their music in the more traditional, ownership-based or even physical formats. Much of American music is new to them, and as they assimilate their music tastes with their native music, they purchase current hits and backlist classics as they are presented to them through popular media. The cheaper music and music delivery devices have become (you can store music on the phone you’ve already purchased), the more accessible it has become to lower income demographics who used to rely on radio to get their music.

Why Is Country The Fastest-Growing Genre?

It’s not because more people love country music, it’s because the amount of music that is flying the country flag is increasing. Music that used to be considered mainstream rock, pop, adult contemporary, etc., is now coming to country to seek support in the form of radio play and award shows. Lionel Ritchie’s Tuskegee became a huge commercial success partly because of the hour-long special the Academy of Country Music (ACM) put together and broadcast on CBS as part of their 2012 Awards season.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

From a business standpoint, the music industry and major labels weathered the storm, and are now retooling with the wisdom that they are not bulletproof, and must adapt with the times."

The world of online music inforgraphic. Click to go to full size view

Hellbound Glory CD Release Party 11.26.11

If you are in northern California or Nevada, do yourself a favor and get a hotel room booked and get out to the 3rd Street Bar for the cd release party of Hellbound Glory's, Damaged Goods. Not only is this going to be an amazing night with a few special surprises its going also going to mark a turn in real country music. Those that name drop to help flesh out their flat NashVegas "hits" here is your new listening material to try to copy.

Hellbound Glory CD Release Party Poster

Brand New Hellbound Glory Tshirt

Here it is folks, a simple and straight forward approach to a new tshirt for Hellbound Glory. It makes no fuss, just gets right to the damn point. Support Real Country Music by folks creating songs with grit, honesty and integrity.

Hatch Show Print - Nashville, TN

We own quite a few posters in our ongoing poster collection from Hatch Show Print and have still yet to walk into their doors. After numerous trips to Nashville and always getting caught up doing other things their magic is still on our minds. You can guess that we are planning on having a custom poster done by them at some point for sure. Now, which band should it be?

If you haven't heard of Hatch Show Print, we know that you have seen them. Dig into their work as it is as iconic as the city of Nashville is to country music.