Country

Keith Richards Helps Memorialize Merle Haggard

They held the Merle Haggard memorial concert last night at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. It was a three hour affair.

Keith Richards was one of the headliners, which makes perfect sense. After all, The Rolling Stones recorded country and country-influenced songs. Country rock is a category. The Grateful Dead put out two albums heavily influenced by country (“American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead”). Haggard’s “Mama Tried” was one of the band’s standard tunes.

From Alan Scherstuhl’s obit of Merle Haggard at Slate: “As a singer, he was country music’s Sinatra, restrained yet penetrating, always in full command of each note’s emotional resonance. As a songwriter, he has no true point of comparison. He was singular, a terse and potent poet of good times and bad ones, misery and gin, prison and grievances, love and reconciliation.” A bit of surfing doesn’t show agreement on his best album, so click here or on the image for Haggard’s 40 biggest hits from Amazon. Here is the album from iTunes.
Still, it’s interesting to think how the passage of time has made what were serious philosophical differences into vague memories. This memorial was for the guy who wrote “Okie from Muskogee,” which was one of the songs that best characterized the huge social gap between rock and country. That gap is forgotten, of course.

It’s funny that those who live long enough find a way to honor each other. It is as if the divisions that characterize music in the 1960s didn’t exist. But they did. You were for the war in Vietnam or against it. You were for Nixon or against him. You were a hippie or a hardhat.

That is all over. Musicians still are important, but less influential. Part of this is the technology. They speak to their own group. Rock fans listen to rock, rap fans to rap, jazz fans to jazz and so forth. Performers today are preaching to the choir, literally and figuratively. The politics of an artist means less today than it did in 1970. I think that’s a good thing. In many cases, the political positions are really marketing in disguise. The Rolling Stones were never street fighting men. They were counting receipts. It was a contrived conceit.

It’s also important to remember that the differences between blues, country, jazz and rock are much less than we imagine. When Louis Armstrong appeared on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970 (talk about a meeting of icons) he described playing with Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, in 1930. Cash and Armstrong recreated one of the songs that Pops and Rodgers played, Blue Yodel No. 9. You can’t get more country than that and, of course, Louis Armstrong was jazz.

The show in Nashville – “Sing Me Back Home: The Music of Merle Haggard” – must have been a lot fun. Other performers included Miranda Lambert, Tanya Tucker, Willie Nelson, Toby Keith, Billy Gibbons, Warren Haynes and Alison Krauss.

The concert was held a year to the day after Haggard died, which was his 79th birthday.

Slate was cited in the blue box.

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Duke Ellington brought class, sophistication and style to jazz which, until that point, was proudly unpolished and raucous. His story is profound. The author, Terry Teachout, also wrote "Pops," the acclaimed bio of Louis Armstrong. Click here or on the image.

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What else is there to say? Here is the story behind every song written by The Beatles. Click here or on the image.

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The Grateful Dead don't get enough credit for the profound nature of its lyrics. Many of the band's songs are driven by a deep and literate Americana ("I'm Uncle Sam/That's who I am/Been hidin' out/In a rock and roll band" and "Majordomo Billy Bojangles/Sit down and have a drink with me/What's this about Alabama/Keeps comin' back to me?").

David Dodd's exhaustive study tells the story, song by song. Click here or on the image.

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