My association of today's arts and entertainment situation with the ancient fire tender, supported by the clan to tell stories -- from the wind he learned that varying his voice increased interest, and, to save illustrations scratched in the dirt feet of rowdy children, he painted them on the wall of the cave -- announces my eccentricity, perhaps, but any functional appraisal has to be historical in attitude. My all-time favorite quote concerning country music is from Roy Clark: "It has to come from something; it can't be just made up out of nothing." Roy's career certainly hasn't been confined to the songs his grandfather taught him or the licks he learned from his father, but the grounding is obvious, and Roy Clark exemplifies what young performers should strive to be: his show is entertaining and his music is honest. Not everybody should even try to be funny (which he is), but any performance people pay to see or hear should be entertaining and honest. And it should always be the best you can possibly be and do. Since Christmas, I have made a from-now-on friendship with Jeannie Inman in Jackson, Michigan, thanks to an e-mail request for input for her book inspired by the book that her friend Justin Tubb intended to write but didn't. Jeannie's immediate reaction to the George Strait/Alan Jackson cut of "Murder On Music Row" was that it relates exactly to today's music industry as Justin's "What's Wrong With The Way That We're Doing It Now?" did in the '70s.

Interestingly, Jeannie tells me that Justin had written an updated version of "What's Wrong;" she heard him do it on a show, to a standing ovation, a short time before he died, but he didn't get it recorded.

"I actually cried when I heard 'Murder On Music Row,'" she notes, "because I could just hear Justin go on and on about it -- something that he would study and study and do it every week on the Jamboree."

Jeannie guesses that the cycle of country music "going back and forth between traditional and say Shania is to perhaps get the older ones more fired up and not be so complacent and just sitting back." The lady has a point. Public tastes are cyclic. Conformity sets in, then somebody does something different, which isn't different for long because everybody jumps on it, and here comes conformity again. In addition to the general cycles, a lot of things go on with individual acts and within sub-genres -- the point is to find a balance between innovation and tradition, which gets more and more difficult with the main clout of the music industry in the hands of corporate interests, answerable to people who neither know nor care about country music's history.

The key to that point really is to get more fired up, to use Jeannie's words; to record good songs regardless of who has publishing, to put effort into a show that makes people want to come back next year, to stay in it only so long as it's fun -- when it's no longer fun, go do something else.

The greatest key, however, is to remember our Divinely-bestowed individuality -- "tradition" is a wonderful concept, yet none of us came up exactly the same way in the same place at the same time; a lot of variations exist. As long as we honor those variations and remember our collective and individual roots, the music from those traditions will grow and flourish, even though "flourish" in our case may not be the working definition of the big labels.

But that's okay. The folly of placing commercial country music at the mercy of the youth market is that, historically, that market changes a lot. What do Johnny Mathis, Little Richard, the Kingston Trio, the Beach Boys, Edgar Winter, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Guns 'n' Roses, and Shania Twain have in common? They've all been the darlings of the youth market at different times. And none of them work as many dates, year after year, as Roy Clark. Or Alan Jackson and George Strait, for that matter, whose careers, ironically, deny the "death" of country music.
My case rests.

Bill Littleton, from thebridgeworks for March, 2000
billandconnie@juno.com