You may find my taste for genteel singer-songwriters strange, but there it is, and Nashville singer-songwriter and country hitmaker Gretchen Peters is one of my favorite genteel musical artists. I admire Peters’ ability to turn her unexceptionably liberal sentiments and closely observed tales of discontented marriage into songs that have an emotional core. In other words, Nashville’s fusion of country narrative and singer-songwriter aesthetics has created a variant on the work of pioneering singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill and Jackie DeShannon that is both commercial and arty. Check out Peters’ fine demo for her song “The Chill of an Early Fall” on her 2016 compilation The Essential Gretchen Peters, and then attend to Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier’s superb 2014 album Trouble and Love, which Gauthier sings in her decidedly non-genteel voice. Meanwhile, fellow Music City tunesmith Kim Richey creates interesting quasi-country on her 2013 full-length Thorn in My Heart. Thursday night’s show benefits Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee. EDD HURT
Planned Parenthood Benefit Feat. Gretchen Peters, Kim Richey & Mary Gauthier
