Making the Rounds

CMT: Country Music Television will sponsor Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s 1996 “Spontaneous Combustion Tour,” a venture that will take the two videogenic performers to shows in 100 cities. The tour begins March 14 in Wheeling, W.Va.

Before each show, CMT will have a party for the concert-goers featuring games, CMT merchandise giveaways, showings of music videos, and huge onstage screens that will broadcast interviews with audience members and celebrities. CMT will provide a party host who will accompany the tour for its duration. Besides leading the preshow celebration, the host and a camera crew will also visit each concert city in advance to give away concert tickets and to record local fan interviews.

In certain markets, CMT will conduct sweepstakes and give away tickets and autographed tour jackets. All those who enter the local sweepstakes will also be entered into a national sweepstakes, the grand prize for which will be an expense-paid trip to Nashville to attend a Tim McGraw concert.

Lining Up Tin Pan South

The Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) will present its fourth annual Tin Pan South Music Festival April 16-20. The event, which celebrates and showcases prominent singer-songwriters, includes a golf tournament, a symposium, and performances at 10 area clubs. It will be capped off by the “Legendary Songwriters Acoustic Concert” at the Ryman.

Among those scheduled for club performances are the Randy Bachman Band (with Jack Tempchin), Gary Nicholson & the Change, Delbert McClinton, Webb Wilder, Al Anderson, Sonny Landreth, Jonell Mosser, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Steve Dorff, Angela Kaset, Michael McDonald, Billy Stritch, Jimmy Webb, Felix Cavaliere, Robert Earl Keen, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Headlining the Ryman concert are Roger Cook, Randy Goodrum, John D. Loudermilk, Michael Masser, John Phillips, Allen Toussaint, John Sebastian and Janis Ian. All the performances are open to the public. The schedule can be obtained from NSAI, and tickets are available through Ticketmaster.

Article of Faith

Reluctant as I am to praise any article about country music that doesn’t cite me as a source, I must concede that Bruce Feiler’s “Gone Country” piece in the Feb. 5 issue of The New Republic is pretty solid. Although it suggests that modern country can be seen as the soundtrack for suburban Republicans, it ventures no further toward character assassination than that.

“Just as rock ’n’ roll foreshadowed many of the changes in gender and race relations that followed in the 1960s,” Feiler observes, “country music today—with its suburban, middle-age themes of family and renewal—may be the clearest reflection of many of the anxieties and aspirations that have just begun to bubble to the surface in American political life.”

Using Simmons research data to buttress his points, Feiler asserts that country listeners are better educated and wealthier than rock and adult contemporary fans. He frets needlessly (and incorrectly) that country music has traded in its traditional affinity for the downtrodden. “Gone are the days,” he laments, “when Johnny Cash railed against the mistreatment of Native Americans in ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ or Merle Haggard plumbed the darkness of his own prison life.” Contrary to Feiler’s assumption, the late ’80s bristled with country songs about the plight of the American farmer, and one has to look no further than Tim McGraw’s “All I Want Is a Life” or Travis Tritt’s “Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man” to realize that blue-collar sentiments are still rampant.

Instead of picking on country music for changing with the times, however, Feiler rightly commends it for adapting—for embracing non-rural, non-Southern talent and a wide variety of social themes. “In a climate where politicians of all stripes are concerned about the apathy, the anxiety and the downright ‘funk’ of the American people,” he concludes, “political leaders would be well-advised to take a clue from the vitality and quiet optimism of today’s country music, where morality is hip, despair is surmountable, and struggling to save a relationship...is the national sport of the day.”

From honky-tonks to outreach centers. That’s us.

Academy Awards

A broad cross section of country music’s new and veteran artists are competing for awards from the Academy of Country Music. The West Coast-based trade association will announce the winners April 24 on a live NBC-TV special. Here are the major categories and their contenders:

Entertainer of the Year: Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, Reba McEntire.

Top Female Vocalist: Faith Hill, Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, Pam Tillis, Shania Twain.

Top Male Vocalist: John Berry, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, George Strait.

Top Vocal Group: Alabama, BlackHawk, Diamond Rio, The Mavericks, Sawyer Brown.

Top Vocal Duet: Baker and Myers, Brooks and Dunn, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Shelby Lynne and Faith Hill, Dolly Parton and Vince Gill.

Top New Female Vocalist: Terri Clark, Alison Krauss, Shania Twain.

Top New Male Vocalist: Wade Hayes, David Lee Murphy, Bryan White.