55th Annual American Country Music Awards: New Artist Tenille Townes Shines in Politically, Socially Aware Show
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night CBS-TV aired the 55th annual American Country Music Awards, which were originally supposed to be in April in Las Vegas (yeah, that well-known center of country music … ) since this was the “rump” country-music awards compared to the Country Music Association awards in the mother ship of the genre , Nashville, Tennessee. Alas, the SARS-CoV-2 dictatorship struck again: Nevada went under lockdown and so the ceremony got put off for five months and ultimately ended up in Nashville after all. The ceremony, such as it was, took place in three venues, all of them without audience members: the main stage at the Grand Ole Opry; Ryman Auditorium (the converted barn that was the original home of the Opry until it outgrew it in the early 1970’s) and the Bluebird Cafe. (It was occasionally jarring to hear an incandescent performance on one of these stages -- and have it greeted with silence at the end