As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Kacey Musgraves w/ Yola – Wolf Trap, 9/7/2019


 
With “Old Town Road” dominating the cultural conversation for the past several months (as well as the Billboard charts on which the powers that be have allowed it to appear), 2019 is a big year for defining, or disregarding, musical genre boundaries, specifically what is or is not “country”. Saturday evening’s sold-old show provided two excellent examples.
 
Kacey Musgraves’s latest album, Golden Hour, accomplished a rare trifecta by winning top album awards from the Country Music Association, the Academy of Country Music, and the Recording Academy (Grammies for both top country album and top album overall). She did this with virtually no support from country music radio, which I was tempted to point out to those staffing the WMZQ booth at the concert. To be fair, Lil Nas X probably had at least as many “elements of today’s country music” in “Old Town Road” as appear in most of “Golden Hour”; banjos do turn up now and again, and there is of course “Space Cowboy”, but most folks playing the album would probably file it under Pop rather than Country, if they felt compelled to make a choice at all.
 
Over the course of her 90-minute set, Musgraves did two covers (including an energetic version of “I Will Survive”), two songs from each of her first two albums, and all 13 tracks (!) from Golden Hour. (Since it was one of my favorites from last year, I certainly didn’t complain.) The crowd (many of whom seemed to know all the words to every song) was justifiably enthusiastic throughout; my favorites were “Lonely Weekend” (with a particularly psychedelic light show) and “Love Is A Wild Thing” from Golden Hour, plus “Merry Go ‘Round” and “Follow Your Arrow” from her debut, Same Trailer, Different Park.
 
 
Opening act Yola – black, British, and billed as the “Queen of country soul” – is if anything even less likely than Musgraves to get airplay on country radio; even when that genre was at its peak in the 60s, people like Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, and Joe Simon got airplay on R&B and Top 40 stations but were ignored by country outlets. Labels aside, she did a nice 45-minute set that generated an appreciative reaction from the crowd, especially with her note-perfect rendition of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. “Walk Through Fire” and “Shady Grove” were my personal favorites. The “soul” side mostly dominated, particularly with the smoking ballad “It Ain’t Easier”, although “Love All Night (Work All Day)” and “What You Do” both had enough traditional country to them to possibly be hits, if they were recorded by someone (probably white, alas) with some pre-existing country cred.
 

No comments:

Post a Comment