Stapleton, McBryde Highlight 54th American Country Music Awards

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The April 7, 2019 telecast of the 54^th annual American Country Music awards show on CBS is the “rump” country music awards show created by Dick Clark Productions and performed at the MGM Grand Amphitheatre in that hotbed of country music, Las Vegas. It was bizarre and a bit macabre to realize that this was the same city where there was a mass shooting incident on October 1, 2017 during the final performance of a country-music festival featuring many of the same artists being honored at last night’s show, including Jason Aldean and Maren Morris, that still ranks as the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history (though the way things are going it probably won’t hold that record long), with 58 people killed (not counting the shooter, Charles Paddock, who killed himself after police traced him and barricaded the door of the hotel room from which he was shooting down at the festival-goers).

It was also fascinating that the American Country Music awards telecast began with a defiant song by Aldean with the group Florida Georgia Line; the song is called “You Can’t Hide Red” and was a bold statement that the country audience — or at least that part of it the song was aimed at — can’t hide its redneck origins and its “red” political orientation towards the Right in general and the Republican Party in particular. After that and the second song, “Look What God Gave Her” by Thomas Rhett (who had one of the hottest baskets all night but wore a full black beard which made him less attractive, and the song itself was a piece of lightweight pop that didn’t sound particularly “country” — one could readily imagine Bruno Mars covering it), Charles complained about the red lights in the backdrop and joked, “King Crimson wants their stage set back.”

The next song was actually an appealing one that was presented as an Apple commercial, “Simple” by Florida Georgia Line, though the video was a series of stupid computer animations that didn’t really reflect the song. Next up was Miranda Lambert singing a medley of her hits — and closing with “Little Red Wagon,” which came off as considerably angrier than I remember the original hit (something like the difference between Ruth Etting’s world-weary despair on the original version of “Ten Cents a Dance” and the buzzing proto-feminist anger of Doris Day on her cover from the 1955 Etting biopic Love Me or Leave Me) — and then came Luke Bryan with a clever song called “Knocking Boots.”

After that came what unexpectedly turned out to be the high point of the show: a masterpiece, “A Simple Song” by Chris Stapleton. Chris Stapleton was a behind-the-scenes songwriter who emerged as a performer and made a selling point of his scraggly-haired, bearded, overweight homeliness in the midst of all those hot, sexy hunks in their tight jeans — I used to call him the Bruce Vilanch of country music. “A Simple Song” is a, well, simple song about the power of love, and he performed it enviably simply, with just himself on vocal and guitar, a woman doing a second vocal part (I wish she’d been identified because she’s someone I’d like to hear on her own), and an acoustic bass and drums (played with brushes, not sticks) for his rhythm.

It’s the sort of song that belies country music’s reputation as a home for excessive, overwrought melodrama, and fortunately the next song up was almost as good and continued the mood: “Not Bad for a Girl Going Nowhere” by Ashley McBryde. She’s a relatively new singer and the song is the familiar trope of the singer boasting that despite all the people who told her when she was starting out that she’d never be successful, she has been. McBryde performed it on a simple stage set with just herself singing and playing acoustic guitar, and she and Stapleton both reinforced my conviction that singers who have something to say with their music don’t need elaborate costumes, flashing lights, pyrotechnics and Cirque du Soleil performers flying about above them. They can make their point just on the strength of their voices and their songs, the way the greats of yesteryear like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra did.

Next up was a duet between Maren Morris and the Brothers Osborne on a song called (at least as best as I could guess) “All My Favorite People Do.” I’ve loved Maren Morris’s music since a previous awards show presented her doing her star-making song, “My Church” — I still hope someone will hurry up and make a Janis Joplin biopic while she’s still young enough to play her — and I liked her again last night even though I was a bit disappointed that she was wearing a very brief spangled-silver outfit that made her look like a street hooker.

Then veteran George Strait came out and did a song called “God and Country Music,” presenting them as “two things that will never change” (which, at least as far as the latter is concerned, is demonstrably untrue; as I’ve pointed out before, most so-called “country music,” especially by male performers, is much closer to the sound called “Southern Rock” in the 1970’s and owes more to the Allman Brothes and Lynyrd Skynyrd than Hank Williams and Johnny Cash), and given that I’d been to church earlier in the day all these songs about God “played” quite a bit differently in my head than they probably would have if I’d had a more secular day. The next artist up was Luke Combs doing a song called “Beautiful Crazy” — it’s nice to see a beefy-looking bear-type among all the skinny tailor’s models but he doesn’t seem all that great a singer or personality.

The next song was “Keeping Score” by Dan + Shea — the duo which won Song and Single of the Year for something called “Tequila” (not the Champs’ instrumental hit, though it’s nice to hear a country song about an alcoholic beverage other than beer or whiskey!) — with Kelly Clarkson, who I keep forgetting has one of the great white soul voices of our time, joining them in mid-song and taking over with her powerful, impassioned singing.

After that was one of the best songs all night, “The Daughters” by Little Big Town, a feminist anthem about the conflicting expectations put on women as they grow up — this would have been better had the band, the producers or whoever was in charge hadn’t put up a chorus line of women in long, flowing dresses dancing behind Little Big Town in patterns that looked like emulations of Busby Berkeley, but it’s still a great song and well worth hearing. Then Blake Shelton came out and did a song called “God’s Country” — once again I marvel at how this man has been able to get two singer-songwriters of far more charisma and talent, Miranda Lambert and Gwen Stefani, to fall in love with him, but “God’s Country” was a sincere, heartfelt paean to the land and God’s dominion over it that struck me as more powerful than anything I’ve heard Shelton do before.

After that was a nice song by Old Dominion called “Make It Sweet” — I still get chills at the number of country acts, including this one and Lady Antebellum, whose names pay tribute to the pre-Civil War South (when I first heard of Lady Antebellum I rather nastily joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”), but this was a good if not especially impressive song. Then there was a tribute to the origins of Brooks and Dunn, with Luke Combs joining them on one of their early hits, “Brand New Man” (the backdrop for their song contained a sign reading, “Est. 1990,” as if they were a whiskey brand), following which Keith Urban did a nice song called “Burden” — as in “let me help you bear yours” — and then one of the most powerful songs of the night, a duet between Eric Church and Ashley McBryde called “Rattlesnake and Copperhead” that made its effect despite the giant-sized projections, models or whatever of the two titular snakes that moved across the stage mechanically as they sang.

Then came a song called “Rival” by a new group called Lenco (I think I’m getting that right) and an O.K. number by Carrie Underwood called “Southbound” (because of their song-contest backgrounds I keep getting her and Kelly Clarkson confused, but I shouldn’t — Clarkson has real soul while Underwood is pretty much just a pop singer). Then came Kane Brown, a Black balladeer who at the start of his song sounded strikingly like Tracy Chapman, joined with the heavy-set (and not particularly country-identified) Khalid for a medley of “I Just Want to Be as Good as You” (which Brown sang solo) and “I Know What Your Parents Don’t” (the duet).

After that it was the turn of the show’s host, Reba McIntire (an infectious personality), to perform a song called “Freedom” from a new album called Stronger Than the Truth — the title makes it sound like a documentary about Donald Trump but I liked the song itself, an ode to both freedom and love, and McIntire’s no-holds-barred delivery of it. Then came a three-song performance by Jason Aldean — who in the “awards” portion of this nominal awards show was awarded the Dick Clark Award as Entertainer of the Decade — of “When the Lights Come On,” “Don’t You Want to Stay?” (for which Kelly Clarkson returned to sing a duet vocal and raised the emotional temperature considerably) and “Living Life in the Headlights.”

The next number was the highly zaftig actress Chrissy Metz from the cast of a TV show I’ve never seen, This Is Us, joined by four female country singers (including the quite interesting duo Maddie  & Tae, whom it would be worth seeking out to hear what they can do on their own), on a song called “I’m Sticking with You.” The last three songs were “Run,” an old hit by George Strait on which he duetted with Miranda Lambert; “Travelin’ Light” by Dierks Bentley and Brandi Carlile (I wish Carlile had been allowed to perform a song on her own, though this one — while hardly a patch on the similarly titled “Trav’lin’ Light” by Trummy Young, Jimmy Mundy and Johnny Mercer, a 1942 hit for Billie Holiday with Paul Whiteman, of all people — is still quite a good country lament), and the closer, Strait belting out a good-time ode to country’s past called “Every Little Honky-Tonk Bar” but, alas, only getting to do about half of it (and that over the closing credits!) before the time slot ran out and CBS pulled the plug.

I quite liked the music on the American Country Music Awards — maybe it’s just a function of my age, but modern-day country seems to deal with adult emotions and issues and speaks to me a lot more than the pajama-clad diva-ettes that clog up the mainstream pop charts today!