`Red Hot Country' album benefits AIDS charity
By John Swenson
LOS ANGELES (UPI): Red Hot Country, the fourth special recording project arranged by the AIDS charity Red Hot, is the most dramatic musical success of the series because of the lesson it gives about contemporary country music.
The album features a number of the most popular contemporary country artists performing songs that influenced them. In the process it reveals plenty about the roots of modern country music.
There are a few obvious moments in which country stars sing material originally recorded by classic country performers a generation or more in the past -- Dolly Parton covering You Gotta Be My Baby by George Jones; Mark Chestnutt doing Tommy Collins' Goodbye Comes Hard For Me; Randy Scruggs running down the bluegrass archetype Keep On the Sunny Side and Brooks and Dunn reviving Folsom Prison Blues with Johnny Cash.
But when project coordinator Kathy Mattea teams up with Jackson Browne on his Rock Me On the Water the ante is raised considerably. The calm, prayer-like mood of Browne's soothing voice reaches an extraordinary level of pathos in the hands of Mattea, who is without doubt right now the greatest interpretive singer in contemporary country music.
Mattea also joins Suzy Bogguss, Alison Kraus and Crosby, Stills & Nash for a memorable reading of the Graham Nash song Teach Your Children. The talented Sammy Kershaw covers similar ground on James Taylor's Fire and Rain, which has become one of the high points of his live performances.
Another revelatory moment occurs when Nancy Griffith collaborates with one of America's greatest living songwriters, Jimmy Webb, on If Walls Can Speak.
If Walls Can Speak illustrates the dimensional shift country music is currently undergoing -- though the cut is included on an anthology bearing the name "country," Griffith correctly insists she is not a country artist. While Webb has written songs recorded by country stars such as Glenn Campbell, he is a pure songwriter who is not given to wearing cowboy hats.
The inclusion of If Walls Can Speak reveals the genre-wide influence of '60s and '70s rock on country, an undeniable fact that is stirring up a tempest in Nashville.
In the hands of such a capable interpreter as Mattea, material mined from the era of the rock singer-songwriter is an appropriate adjunct to the country music lexicon. But the Nashville production machine has taken this inference too far, churning out anonymous country-rock music by artists derisively known as "hat acts" in the industry.
The musical lesson taught by Red Hot Country is that rock influences are legitimate when used, as they are here, by country artists who incorporate them into a larger artistic framework. Otherwise, country singers who rework 25-year-old rock songs run the risk of sounding like just another hat act.