musical Traveler
FOR DECADES, COUNTRY HAS HOSTED IDENTITY-CRISIS ARGUMENTS ABOUT WHAT CONSTITUTES COUNTRY MUSIC
On paper, Chris Stapleton doesn’t look like an Americana music star.
His first album, 2015’s “Traveler,” has sold more than 2 million copies in an age when people don’t buy albums, and his second album, “From a Room: Volume 1,” can be found among the few titles in big-box retailers like Target. He’s playing outdoor amphitheaters to crowds that top 10,000. His singles play well on country radio. If you weren’t paying attention, his success came quickly, like something generated from the mainstream country music machinery.
But there’s more to it than that. Stapleton was for years a successful songwriter, invisible to all those but the few who knew him as a big-voiced anchor in a bluegrass band — the Steeldrivers.
Also, look and listen. At 39, the Kentucky native is young but not radio young. And with his long hair, bushy beard and body that seems stocky but soft, he resembles a bouncer. This, at a time when most male hitmakers on the country music charts look like pitchmen for body spray, sleeveless outerwear and bedazzled designer denim.
Still, the mainstream country music establishment certainly claims Stapleton. He’s twice won the Country Music Association’s male vocalist of the year and “Traveler” won album of the year.
But unlike his peers on the various country music awards shows, Stapleton comes from a different place. He is, really, the first country music superstar created in the Americana genre — a large umbrella catchword for numerous American music traditions from yesteryear that have been bundled together.
Defining what is Americana is no easy task. It’s country, but not new country. Bluegrass seems to qualify. African-American forms like blues and soul and gospel are in the mix. So is rural-sounding rock, but not all rock.
The term “Americana” has cycled in and out of vogue for years, though it has been recently codified with its own annual convention in Nashville and a Grammy category that was introduced in 2010. Criticism for the tag has mirrored the swiftness of Americana’s rise as a musical shorthand: It’s too white. It’s too old. It’s a veneer over shallow content. It’s performance art. It doesn’t mean anything.
The last one kind of holds some weight because no genre title really means anything. They’re just all tools for people in various lines of work (mine included) to convey information.
Defining what Americana isn’t proves a little easier. Unlike much mainstream country music today, thematically, it deals more with struggle than revelry. In other words, there’s no tailgating.
Stapleton’s music draws as much from the Southern soul tradition of singers like James Carr as it does Hank Williams. Though the music made by those two men is quiet different, both wrote of the hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Marty Stuart, who will open for Stapleton at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Friday, is an interesting character in the country music timeline. He’s 20 years older than Stapleton and a former child prodigy who struck gold with some hits in the late 1980s. Years ago, Stuart told me the entire history of country music was established by Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s: “He laid the foundation for the entire planet of country music. Those themes you talked about: love, death, murder, sin, redemption, riding trains, getting out of town, hoboing, dreaming, winning and losing. That’s still country. If you pick up a newspaper, if you pick up the Houston Chronicle tomorrow, it’s full of what Jimmie Rodgers sang about. And it’ll be the same way 100 years from now. It’s not what’s being sold as country music anymore, which is pop culture. But that’s true country music. And I understand it better now than I used to.”
For decades, country has hosted identitycrisis arguments about what constitutes country music. One can find a critic for any era from 1960 to present, claiming country has gone pop.
Stuart has seen that duality in himself. “I’ve been a fence rider, trying to be a hillbilly ass wiggler making money and still getting some credibility,” he said, referencing “The Pilgrim,” a contemplative album without an ear for radio Stuart put out in 1999.
Stylistically, country music has evolved over the years. But thematically, it leaned on some of the ideas Stuart outlined for a long, long time.
A cynic could view Americana as a code word for country music that doesn’t sell. But it has become a haven for rootsy artists who no longer find a home on the radio.
“I used to attend industry events in Nashville and I’d look across and see Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin and think, ‘That’s where I need to be,’ ” said Lee Ann Womack, who enjoyed widespread country radio success that in 1999 crossed onto the pop charts. Then trends changed.
Womack, who recorded “There’s More Where That Came From,” a song written by Stapleton, said country music is, “a home for a lot of people who don’t have real strict lines around what they do.”
Americana operates the same way. The Grammys have handed out eight awards for best Americana album to artists young and old, black and white, male and female. Last year, ’60s soul great William Bell won. The year before, it was young rootsy singersongwriter Jason Isbell. The previous year, Rosanne Cash won.
Cash practically mapped out the path that guys like Stuart and Houston native Rodney Crowell followed. She made country radio hits in the ’80s, before focusing in 1990 on writing dense albums about life and death, conflict and resolution, hopes and disappointments.
Even the youthful players in this big field look to its totems who existed on the fringes. Rising talent Aaron Lee Tasjan said of the late songwriter Guy Clark, “To me, he’s the same as Elvis or the Beatles. He’s not as well known, but he made stuff you can hold onto for the rest of your life.”
Timelessness is one of those vaporous concepts that music writers often apply with sentimental carelessness. Hit songs certainly can endure. But in a field like country music, so committed to its present, they do increasingly sound designed to be temporary.
Some artists have it both ways. Country singer and songwriter Jamey Johnson has made a couple of albums of dark meditative country music. He notably also co-wrote the 2005 novelty hit “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.”
Stapleton has similarly been fortunate to have it both ways. He’s written hits for the wigglers, while certainly giving the impression that his own music is made without regard for radio.
It’s a rare place for a country musician to be in 2017.