That Roy Orbison shot was Bruce Springsteen backing Roy on Black and White Night. Only a slight mistake...

That Roy Orbison shot was Bruce Springsteen backing Roy on Black and White Night. Only a slight mistake, but worth noting. The guitar duel between Bruce and James Burton is the reason I own that DVD.

On the one hand, Charlie Parker loved Country, said "listen to the stories", and I can't say I'm better than Bird. On other, I don't say I like the genre, but I like several artists within it.

Genre is audience and the chasing of, more than anything else. You mention Television; I took the fact that Dwight Yoakam played CBGB and survived as a sign that it was okay for me to enjoy it. Similarly, I took Eddie Martinez's crucial riffs on "Rock Box" as an okay to enjoy Run DMC as a teen. In these cases, I could expand my genre - teenage white guy <=> hard rock - to include country and hip hop due to demonstrable "rocking".

Tropes of genre are transient. The Carter Family's Country was mostly folk song from Britain. Jimmie Rodgers' Country was very close to piedmont and delta blues. Bob Wills' Country is swing with steel guitars instead of horn second. Hank Williams' honky tonk pulls a lot from electric blues. Big and Rich remind me of nothing more than arena-filling hair metal from the 80s. Examples galore. Nobody's going to say that "Whiskey River" is less country than "Great Speckled Bird" even as there's little in common musical between the two. The audience is the same, adjusting for time.

This is distinct, of course, from which industry it came from. 70s Laurel Canyon Singer-Songwriter is very Country, but it can't from another place and spoke to a different audience. Taylor Swift's audience is suburban teenage girls, and the machine that developed her added some Country identifiers which are decreasing, but it is a mistake to say there ever was an overriding allegiance to the fundamentals of country in her music, in style or in subject. Which, of course, is more than okay. If removing what little twang there was in TS allows more people to let her music into their hearts, to allow something that moves them into their personal genre, so be it.





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