Indigenous Music

...The sound texture is ju there, without a foundation...

...There may be the beginning of a turnaround, however...

...She even took Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart," and though no on< was more authoritative on his own tune than Williams, Patsy turned it into her owi kind of exclusive territory...

...And that's because Nashville music factories have been so eager to keep cashing in on pop-country (or crossover) recordings that much of what is called country today has only the most attenuated relationship to the core tradition of the music...

...The texture of her voice is appealing and even pror ises sensuality, but her musical personali is without flavor...

...Listening to her is lik opening the window wide on a brisk da and remembering you're alive...

...In his acceptance speech, Skaggs was movingly grateful to his parents, his wife, his children, his country music heroes, and his God...

...But Skaggs, usually a gentle soul, said something very telling: Some radio folks who call themselves country music disc jockeys aren't playing records by the Ricky Skaggs band because "they say we're too country...

...Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and...

...In connection with the current release of the movie Sweet Dreams ("The Life and Times of Patsy Cline"), there was a tribute to Patsy, who died in a plane crash in 1963...

...INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Country in Some twenty million people were watching the nineteenth annual Country Music Awards on CBS television in October when Ricky Skaggs of Kentucky won the prize of all prizes—Entertainer of the Year...

...Also on the show was a vibrant reminder that it's possible for a country singer to reach a pop audience without turning herself into white bread...

...Many country performers thank God rather than their agents in such situations...

...The value of Sweet Dreams—aside froi its skill in showing how erotic a movie ca be without having any explicit sex—is thi it's Patsy Cline you hear singing...

...Some of the songs Patsy Cline made into hits were sung by Loretta Lynn and Anne Murray...

...As USA Today...

...a real pulse-taker, has pointed out, country's share of recording sales dropped from 15 per cent ($600 million) to 10 per cent (S430 million) last year...

...but the songs ai those vintage Decca records, magnificentl remixed in Nashville by engineers Don Crider and Glenn Meadows...

...Still, she w; in Nashville co-hosting the 1985 Count Music Association Awards...

...So too with pop-country...

...But Anne Murray, a pleasant, placid woman from Nova Scotia, has no musical or personal relationship to country in her rhythm, her phrasing, her sound, her understanding of how the words came to be...

...She kepi climbing from there until the plane crashed The best introduction, by the way, tc country music from the beginning to the troubled present is Bill Malone's Country Music U.S.A., newly available in a revised and enlarged paperback edition by the University of Texas Press in Austin Toward the end, Malone quotes veteran country disc jockey Hugh Cherry: "Let us remember what happens when you kill the roots of a tree—it dies...

...There's n artificial hyping of the original sound, bi somehow the engineers have made th...

...sound cleaner and more alive than whe the records were first released...

...In all oth< respects, Jessica Lange plays Patsy wit convincing exuberance...

...Loretta Lynn, as everybody knows, grew up country from her first breath in Butcher Holler near Paintsville, Kentucky...

...Whatever she sings is almost entirely without affect...

...I don't think the show's producers intended this, but the difference between Lynn and Murray made unmistakably clear the difference between real country sounds and faceless, rootless pop-country...

...Skaggs looked straight at the camera: "If we get to the point where country radio stations don't play country music, we're in a lot of trouble...

...Also in the se is a finely brooding song, "Crazy," by th< then almost entirely unknown compose Willie Nelson...

...Trouble is at the door...

...Murray is a kind of phenomenon, though...

...In the album of the score from the film Sweet Dreams (MCA-6149), Patsy Clin sings, among tunes she came to possess "Walking After Midnight," "I Fall to Pie ces," "Sweet Dreams," and "Seven Loner...

...That is, Skaggs keeps on being nurtured by his blue-grass roots...

...Not only did Ricky Skaggs cop the main award in October, but Male Vocalist of the Year went to George Strait, an actual Texas cowboy who sings the way he talks, not the way some record producer tells him to...

...And when she sang the words Patsy had re-Corded, there was a deep connection between the two...

...Patsy Cline sang with an openness an directness, an utterly clear, resilient voic that exulted and despaired as if there wer no tomorrow, and a command of the bea that makes me think she heard more tha a few jazz records...

...Here, and in the others there are catches in the voice and intimations of yodels that reveal Patsy nevei forgot she was a Blue Ridge Mountain girl Originally Virginia Patterson Henslej from Winchester, Virginia, Patsy kep working and pushing for a place in th< country-music scene and finally brokt through at, of all places, the Arthur God frey's Talent Scout Show in 1957...

...He's thirty-one now, and a country traditionalist...

...Skaggs is real...

...in the present, George Jones and Merle Haggard...

...The reason would appear to be that too many current country recordings sound alike...

...When you hear him on the radio, there's no way you would mistake him for some fellow from New Jersey who went down to Nashville, put on a cowboy hat, hired a dobro player, and called himself a country singer...

...Days...

...It's like the "fusion" greed that infected jazz some years ago and produced music that sounded as if it had been arranged by a computer, with all the passion of a computer...