Bogus "Country" Performers

It never used to bother me that a so-called "country" performer wasn't really from the country. But Bush does the fake country thing, and now it bothers me. I don't know where Steve Earle is from, but he tries very hard to sound like a hayseed. A real hayseed wouldn't do that.

Is Dwight Yoakum the real thing? Creedence Clearwater came from just north of Berkeley, California - home of "Country" Joe McDonald, where his Mom was the city treasurer. What about Buck Owens? He lived in Bakersfield, but for all I know, he grew up in rural Tennessee.

but he has plenty of country cred.

willie nelson is a true good old boy though.

so that wouldn't disqualify Coe anyway :)

rednecks are infinitely preferable.

hillbillies are much more preferable to rednecks.

Rednecks hate hillbillies (i.e. white trash). Rednecks are arrogant. They hate anyone unlike themselves.

I am a proud hillbilly - raised in Kentucky and livin' in Southern Ohio.

that i find missing in most hillbillies. it might have something to do with hillbillies' geographical proximity to the north and yankiedom.

it makes them "ugly" like their yankee brethren.

that you find no innate goodness in I, a true-blue Kentucky raised hillbilly (Eastern Kentucky - Wolfe County)?

I suggest you visit my links fine person!

;-)

there's good people everywhere.

and god bless kentucky for cheap cigs. at least they were in 2005 relative to illinois prices.

you can drive right over The Ohio River into Covington and snatch some really great prices on booze.

In my opinion he is one of the most authentic ARTISTS performing today. He has always spoken his mind without fear of the consequences. I don't think he's trying to sound like anything or anybody.

Bush does a self-deprecating act that reads as country-authentic. Of course it's a fake. Even if he were genuintely from some rural county, Bush has two Ivy League degrees. He doesn't have to talk like a hayseed.

It's only since Bush that the faux country thing has bothered me. But now it goes right through me.

He went to prep school & college in the N.E.

He fakes that country act so people think he's from Texas. His country accent is about as real as his "ranch".

His family is from back East where they spend the majority of their time. Bush I saw an opportunity in Texas so he moved down here later in life to take advantage of what he saw then as weak repukes in the state. He never could have gotten elected in CT so he moved everyone down here. He's from Texan.

....and it was surprisingly popular, my parents played it ALL the time. Now I have an earworm....:banghead:






Cowboy In Sweden
Cowboy In Sweden
slr030

1. Pray Them Bars Away
2. Leather and Lace (with Nina Lizell)
3. Cold Hard World
4. Forget Marie
5. The Night Before
6. Hey Cowboy (with Nina Lizell)
7. No Train To Stockholm
8. For A Day Like Today (Suzi Jane Hokom)
9. Easy & Me
10. What's More I Don't Need Her
11. Vem Kan Segla (with Nina Lizell)

This 1970 film and album project was the first of several collaborations between Hazlewood and Swedish filmmaker Torbjorn Axelman. Singers Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokom bring unique approaches to Hazlewood material which would have been way too sophisticated, in its humor as much as its subject matter, for mainstream pop audiences. It's prime Hazlewood: a singular synthesis of cowboy rambles, rockabilly rhythms and symphonic pop with dark, poetic lyrics intertwining hard luck tales, pragmatic politics and love odes. Peppered with esoteric images and declaimed with wit, irony and wry honesty, they prefigure the self-conscious self-referencing of successive generations of lyricists. Out of Print

...until you've heard German cowboy music! It was quite popular a few decades back, too. And, I will admit to liking some of it.

...a kindred spirit. :rofl:

Cheers

in Sherman, TX. Dwight Yoakum was born in KY and raised in Ohio. There's a whole lot of "country" in every state, even in parts of some large cities. Country refers to a style not necessarily the artist's place of origin. If you want to talk bogus country artists look to those that populate the FM dial these days.

A group calling itself Brooklyn Hillbillies entertains the Wall Street crowd on weekends.

New York City is about as un-country as you can get. Forget about any easy living or rocky tops or green, green grass of home. It just don’t get any bigger, louder, or more obnoxious than here, folks.

Yet there’s a growing bunch of us, right here in the middle of the world’s largest city, who like nothing better than to pick up an old guitar (or a banjo, or a mandolin...) and bang out the sort of rugged, twangy music you’d expect to hear in some beery backroads honky-tonk fifty years ago. We come from all parts of the country--men and women, all ages and backgrounds, brought up on all styles of music. The one thing we all seem to share is a love of old-style country music at its rawest, wildest, and most sincere.

http://www.brooklyncountry.com/manifesto.htm

I don't have any objection to genuine naugahyde groups like this. They call themselves faux-country and I'll go with it. But an implicit claim of authenticity needs to be supported by the facts. If you ain't a hard-travelin' man, I think you should say so. How sincere can you be when you sing of a life you've never lived?

called Tree Top Flyer. He's never been one, he never served in Nam, but he's narrating a story, like so many others do. I have no problem with someone doing that or playing a style they enjoy even tho they weren't born to it.

John Mayall and Eric Clapton play some incredible authentically styled rhythm and blues, as do so many others that weren't born in the Mississippi Delta. They are perpetuating and preserving a style. I got no problem with that.

Most musicians aren't pretending to be something they aren't. They are playing according to the style that they love and that most influenced them.

To compare that to the CT frat boy that illegally occupies the WH, is not an apt analogy at all.

but there ain't no soul in it.

that's why lomax didn't ever try to sing the blues, he just recorded it.

it's like the equivalent of "corking up" in blackface minstrelsy

and they sounded about as country as anybody I'd heard. They preceded the whole alt.country movement by 7-10 years, but they had it down as well as anybody, IMHO.

If you're an eMusic subscriber, check out "Whatever Happened To The Rockingbirds". They sound a helluva lot more country than anything you'll hear on the radio masquerading as country nowdays.

It's really more about the style the artist plays than anything else. Where the artist comes from originally can make a difference to a point, but even then it has more to do with what type of area in a state the artist came from and wouldn't be restricted to being from a certain region of the country. I'm not really a country purist anyway. There are country artists I enjoy that may not be "country" in the strictest sense of the word, but are still worth listening to at least IMHO, and sometimes they are from areas that are more traditionally "country" than the places some of the artists playing music closer to true country hail from.

Pokes fun at all of them, including the Pretzeldent.

"He owns a ranch/
wears a Stetson, He's a hip-shotting ex-oil king/
Even talks like Buddy Ebsen/
But he's sitting in the West Wing

Frankenstein I'm well aware of/
But wont somebody please explain/
How you get a county sheriff/
walking with a frat boys brain.

Countrier than thou, countrier than thou
You went to Andover
What's the banjo fer
countrier than thou,

Etc...

It's when they don fake cowboy suits that it bugs me.

country performers.It came into vogue in the late 30s due to the phenomenal success of Gene Autry. Some resisted. As Roy Acuff said, "Why would I wear a cowboy hat? I'm from Tennessee"