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 when one would expect to hear wild applause.) As usual in music “awards” shows these days, the awards themselves were secondary and came off as almost an afterthought; the real “meat” was the performances, which began with a medley of the five nominees for Entertainer of the Year -- Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett and Carrie Underwood -- each doing a snippet of their biggest hit this year -- which set the stage for a quite good show that was as high-energy as you could expect given that it had to do without the extra power of an appreciative live audience.

The first full performance of an entire song was by an African-American country singer named Jimmy Allen -- it’s nice to know that Black country singers aren’t the bizarre novelty item they were when Charley Pride emerged half a century ago (and got booed when announcers called him on stage and audience members who’d just heard him on radio were shocked when the man who emerged was Black), and the song was an intriguing one about a man who picks up a woman for a one-night stand and suddenly finds himself feeling emotional: “It Might Be Too Soon to Say I Love You (But I Want To).” Then there was a medley of three songs from the group Old Dominion, who are pleasant but little more (even though they won the Best Group prize) and a quite good song called “One Margarita” by Luke Bryan. Though I most give the current crop of country songwriters credit for writing about other alcoholic beverages than the traditional ones in country music, beer and whiskey -- later in the evening we got Kelsea Ballerini singing a song called “Hole in the Bottle” whose main novelty was that the titular bottle contained, of all things, Cabernet wine (and among other things the singer was worried that her tears would dilute the red color of the wine) -- of course there wasn’t really a hole in the bottle: she was just drinking all of it -- one old country cliche this show definitively lived up to was the sheer number of songs about people drowning their sorrows over lost jobs or relationships with alcohol. (Given that I once had a partner who drank himself to death on cheap beer -- and I watched him do it but was helpless to stop him -- this sort of song hits home for me and I could have used a few less tales of people assaulting their livers just because they had a disappointment in life.)

Other than that, this show was really not your grandfather’s (or even your father’s) country awards show: the songs that addressed political or social issues were so relentlessly liberal that if Donald Trump was watching this he was probably thinking, “Et tu, Nashville?” For those of you who think a political country song is going to sound like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” or Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” (both great songs, no matter what you think about their politics), you were in for some shocks last night, About two-thirds of the way through the program Taylor Swift, who hadn’t played the American Country Music Awards in seven years, sang a song called “Betty” about a woman she’d had a romantic crush on when they were teenagers and got at least to the point of making out (if not necessarily any farther) when she angrily broke off with Betty when she saw Betty at a school dance with a man. Then Eric Church did a stunning song that was introduced by Johnny Cash’s masterpiece “Ragged Old Flag” (one of the great songs Cash came up with in the 1970’s when he was being proclaimed as the Left’s country singer as opposed to Merle Haggard, the Right’s country singer, and wrote songs that hailed America and its ideals while acknowledging how far we had fallen short of them) and used Cash’s record as an introduction to a song of his own called “Stick That In Your Country Song.” Among the issues Church was asking his colleagues to stick into their country songs were police violence against people of color and the evil of mass shootings (one of which hit home with the country audience when an assassin targeted an outdoor country festival in Las Vegas and killed 22 people -- indeed, some of the artists on last night’s program, including Outstanding Female Singer winner Maren Morris, had been on that bill).

The next performer after Luke Bryan’s and Kelsea Baklerini’s odes to unusual (at least for country songs) alcoholic beverages (though as good as Bryan’s song was, Jimmy Bufffett’s “Margaritaville” was and remains the best song ever written about that cocktail), was an extraordinary performance by Miranda Lambert, doing an unadorned acoustic version of her song “Bluebird” with her songwriting partners, Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby, which she said was “just like we did it on the demo.” I haven’t heard the final record of “Bluebird” but I suspect I’d like the simple, beautiful version she did last night better. Then there was yet another ode to booze, “Whiskey Glasses,’ by Morgan Wallen, and while for me a lot of the thrill of watching a country-music show is being able to ogle the hot young guys in tight-fitting blue jeans, Wallen easily had the most impressive basket on last night’s show and he was brushing his hand awfully close to his crotch. (Wallen’s relationship status is actually one of country music’s mysteries; he has a child and is “co-parenting” with the kid’s mother but there’s no indication that they’re in an ongoing relationship -- and while the song specifies that the lover he’s drinking whiskey out of all those glasses to try to forget was a woman, the gender of the person he’s with now is carefully unspecified … ) -- and then Thomas Rhett and Jon Hardie (whom I thought was sexier!) did yet another drinking song, “Ain’t Nothing Wrong that a Beer Can’t Fix.”

Then Blake Shelton and his current squeeze, Gwen Stefani (when he took up with her following his breakup from Miranda Lambert, I asked rhetorically, “How did Blake Shelton get two far more charismatic, more talented and more sexy performers to fall in love with him?” -- and my husband Charles said, “Maybe he has a big dick”), did an O.K. song called “I Could Be Happy Anywhere (With You).” After that Carrie Underwood was called upon to celebrate the 95th year of the Grand Ole Opry program with a tribute medley to the female greats of country music .. some of them, anyway. I can understand why she didn’t include Rose Maddox, the tragically little-known cult artist whom you could (I could, anyway) make a case for as the greatest woman country singer of all time -- I’d never heard of her before seeing the brief segment on her and her brothers on Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary last October and now I own 10 of her CD’s -- everything Kity Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton did, Rose Maddox did, and she did it first! But why her medley didn’t include Tammy Wynette, who (unlike Maddox) does have a place in the country music pantheon, is a mystery -- certainly a chorus of “Stand By Your Man” would have fit in with the songs she did include, starting with the masterpiece Willie Nelson wrote for Patsy Cline, “Crazy.”: Underwood did “Crazy” in a sort of cocktail-lounge style that wasn’t like either Cline’s understated but searing emotion or the laid-back way Nelson does the song himself, but it worked. Then Underwood followed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,” Barbar Mandrell’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” Dolly Parton’s “Why’d You Come Here Looking Like That?,” and Reba McIntire’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” All of those were perfectly nice, respectable “tribute” performances that didn’t at all prepare me for the last song in Underwood’s medley, Martina McBride’s “A Broken Wing,” for which Carrie finally dropped her reserve and laid down a vocal of such searing soul and emotion I was too amazed at what I was hearing to wonder why she’d been holding back her power until the very end.

The next song was “Better Together” by Luke Combs, who’s not as aggressively ugly as Chris Stapleton (he’s really a not-bad-looking bear type) but gives hope for guys who don’t look like GQ models or anatomically correct mannequins that they too can have a career in country music. He’s been married (to a woman, named Nicole) for a little over a year and honored her with a song he wrote about her before they were married, “Better Together” (I couldn’t help but chuckle at the similarity to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Stronger Together” -- I can only hope Luke Combs’ marriage does better than Hillary’s campaign … or her marriage, come to think of it). Following that came what I thought was the best performance of the night, by Female New Artist winner Tenille Townes. She did a wrenching song called “Somebody’s Daughter” about driving by a homeless panhandler on the street and wondering, “Why do I have a comfortable life and she doesn’t?” Not only was it a great (and socially conscious) song, but Townes gave it a scorching performance. She reminded me of the late-1960’s/early 1970’s singer-songwriter Melanie -- whom I think is criminally underrated, dismissed as a stoned-out hippie chick (even though she avoided the excesses of the era, stayed healthy and stable, and is still alive) and written off as an influence even though a lot of modern-day women singers (Cyndi Lauper, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Lorde) sound an awful lot like her: high-lying voices with fast vibratos.

Tenille Townes is definitely a talent to watch, and the show did the runner-up for Best Female New Artist, Gabby Bennett, no favors by having her perform her own song, “I’ll Be Your Song,” right after Townes’ scorching performance, Bennett did a nice rendition of a nice song and I probably would have liked her a lot better if she hadn’t had to follow Townes. Then the prize-winning vocal duo Dan & Shea did an O.K. song called “I Should Probably Go to Bed,” after which one of the contestants for Best Male New Artist, Lionel Green, did a song called “I Wish” (a perfectly nice song that bears unfair comparison to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece of that title). Then Kane Brown came out with a song called “Worldwide Beautiful” that was one of the most astonishing moments of the program: not only is Kane Brown Black, but he stationed backup singers of various colors throughout the otherwise empty auditorium and had them join in a lyric celebrating “One Love, One God, One Family” in what I thought was the best anti-prejudice song since the one John Legend and Common wrote for the final credits of the film Selma. After that Maren Morris, who won my heart on a previous country-music awards show with her great song “My Church,” did a lovely ballad off her newest CD, Girl, called “To Hell and Back.” It was a lovely song, but would someone please sign Maren Morris to star in a biopic of Janis Joplin while she’s still young enough to play the role? She’s got the look, she’s got the voice and she’s even from the right state (Texas). After that came the political and social fireworks from Taylor Swift and Eric Church, and then Tim McGraw did a good song called “I Called Mama.”

Then came another number that highlighted how this is not your parents’ world of country music: Black woman Mickey Guyten, with Keith Urban on plano and backing vocal, on a great song called “What Are You Going to Tell Me?” Then Urban paired up with the singer Pink for yet another booze song, “One Too Many” -- which was O.K. though given Pink’s penchant for Cirque du Soleil-style antics as she performs I had thought the gravamen of the lyric would be, “I knew I’d had one too many when the girl I went home with got on her wires and started flying above me over the bed.” Then came the In Memoriam segment, featuring not only deaths I’d heard of (like Charlie Daniels and Kenny Rogers) but ones I hadn’t (like Sonny Curtis, Buddy Holly’s original lead guitarist and composer of “I Fought the Law” and “Love Is All Around,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song). The song played to memorialize these people (and quite a few others) was “I’ll Carry You Home” in a surprisingly intense performance by Trisha Yearwood that savored the song’s obvious borrowings from the Black church, down to Yearwood’s vocal keenings on it. Anything would have been a letdown after that, and the letdown was an emptily patriotic song called “I Love My Country” by the group Florida Georgia Line -- though even that wasn’t the mindless ode to American exceptionalism you’d have expected from a song of that title on a country awards show 20, 30 or 50 years ago) and a film clip of Willie Nelson joined by the other stars of the evening doing “On the Road Again” and savoring how much more that song (“Can’t wait to get back on the road and see my friends”) means in the SARS-CoV-2 era when the only person who gets to do any sort of stadium tour to big audiences is Donald Trump!