Nashville isn’t what it used to be. Sure, there are the cowboy hats and boots, but the people wearing them are airbrushed pop avatars with little real relation to the blue-collar traditions country used to represent. They’re traditions to which Dale Watson remains dedicated. Watson’s music harkens back to the Bakersfield country of Buck Owens and the worldly, haunted twang of Johnny Cash — a sound he delivers with a deep, dark baritone nearly as big as that of the Man in Black. He’s sung convincingly of our mortality and our passage from the cradle to the grave. He’s also frequently revisited the trucker country of the ’70s on two discs called The Truckers Sessions, as well as elsewhere in his catalog, surveying the landscape from a “Truckstop in La Grange” to the surf-inflected “…Loose Nut Behind the Wheel.” But he’s probably best known for his succinct honky-tonk Nashville-bashing provocation “Country My Ass.”
Sat., Jan. 30, 6 p.m., 2010
Sat., Jan. 30, 6 p.m., 2010
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