Often enough, when major labels shelve debut albums or drop acts, it's no great cause for tears (except, of course, for the discarded artists). Chances are, they were just emulating some other act anyway. Not so with Joanna Cotten.
She's louder and funkier than a neo-traditionalist or country-pop crooner. Still, country music has flirted with R&B before, with genre-bending talents like Bobbie Gentry, Charlie Rich, Delbert McClinton and T. Graham Brown. And theoretically, Nashville is an environment in which R&B can thrive. There's a B.B. King's Blues Club here and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has been paying homage to R&B with Night Train to Nashville and Ray Charles exhibits.
So, if anybody ought to have been able to pull off a commercially viable union of country and R&B this decade, it's Cotten. She has the pipes (potent, Arkansas-raised and Juilliard-trained), the attitude (like a strutting, platinum-blond gospel diva set loose in a rock club) and the background (a childhood of singing soulful country any old place from Beale Street to Nashville). But—after she spent five years on a major label, cut 21 songs and saw her first and only single fail to chart (the safe choice, a fairly forgettable song titled "The Prize")—it didn't happen.
"That's why it's sometimes a curse to be able to go in any direction musically, more so than it is [to be able to say], 'I do one thing and that's what I do,' " says Cotten. "You look at Alan Jackson. It's obvious that he sings country songs. That's what the man does. When you can go a little bit funky, a little bit country, a little bit gospel...what do we do with that?"
That's exactly the question that Cotten posed to the head of her label early last year. The answer she got was, "We don't know."
Remarkably, Cotten talks—even blogs—about the whole ordeal now with clairy, insight and no trace of bitterness. "It's not the people that I was working with, because I loved all of them and I really felt like there was a mutual admiration there," she says. "They liked me. They wanted me to be successful as an artist. They just didn't know how to do it. I mean, their system's broken and I felt like at least they would look right at me and say, 'We don't know what the hell to do with you.' "
Cotten's album may never see the light of day, but something good came of writing and recording it: She hit on a term for her musical blend—funkabilly—and co-wrote a song explaining the concept. "Funkabilly"—which was supposed to be the title track—maps out in a simplistic, slightly overproduced way the Southern region from Arkansas to Louisiana where groove and storytelling have never been quite as separate as many years of marketing have made them seem. Says Cotten, "I thought, 'Well, if I can't tell them why my music sounds like it does, then maybe I can sing to them why my music sounds like it does."
In the year since Cotten and her label parted ways, she's toured and recorded with the American Soul & Rock & Roll Choir, narrowly missed getting cuts with Beyoncé and Tina Turner, recorded and produced an as-yet-unreleased album (it's more sophisticated, keyboard-driven R&B than country) and generally regrouped.
At the moment, a very different sort of female voice—Taylor Swift's willowy, confiding one—is handing commercial country huge sales. Next to that, an unabashedly fiery, big-voiced woman for whom a hot groove is just as important as a heartfelt lyric might not seem to make much sense.
Cotten has an opinion on the subject of her music's appeal: "I believe that people do love that kind of music. I see it affect people when I'm on the stage."
But is Cotten sure that R&B-infused country (or countrified R&B, depending on how you look at it) will work here right now? "For me, no," she says. "I'm going to have to just carve my own way."
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
