The Country Music Country Radio Ignores

I just spent the past week and a half on vacation in Alabama and I drove there from Massachusetts. I listened to country music the whole way (how can you not listen to country music when driving to Alabama!). I listened to about a dozen and a half different country stations along the way (and then along the way back) and I must have heard "Man of Constant Sorrow" at least three or four times a day so it looks like it is going to be a big hit. I even found some decent stations in Tennessee and Alabama that played good country music and not the schlock that most of them have taken to playing.

For instance, there was this station out of the Knoxville area (I forget the call letters) that played lots of Waylon Jennings and George Jones along with some of the better cuts in modern country music. Such as "18 Wheels And A Dozen Roses" by Kathy Mattea and "High On A Mountaintop" by Marty Stuart.

Unfortunately however, most country stations have taken to playing the same old vapid, generic songs geared towards housewives that sound like 1970s Adult Contemporary. Picture Air Supply with a fiddle and you have your modern country band. The airwaves are still clogged with the talentless Garth Brooks who hasn't put out a tolerable album since 1991 and has since released a body of work that can only compare with Barry Manilow and Michael Bolton for its unlistenability. Then you have Shania Twain who keeps releasing the same old tired song over and over again, with her irritating yelps and proclamations of female liberation which is apparently limited to coming home from a dead-end job and turning on the TV while hubby gets her a drink.

Thank God for MP3s so I can take the few decent new country songs out there and burn them on my own CDs. In fact, I now have a receiver hooked to my PC so I can tape hours of radio and make .WAVs out of the songs I like which later can be burned directly to CD. The sound quality of doing this is much better than I had anticipated. Of course, you sometimes get the DJ bleeding into the song intros but it sure beats paying $15.98 or more for an album with only one decent song. As for the "good stuff" from artists like Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, well I got no problem buying those CDs and have in fact purchased hundreds of them during the past 15 years.

When I first discovered the internet I spent a year doing al the parts to my songs, bought a cd recorder when they were 500 dollars , and made my own cd.

Then I put a site on the web to get rich. Kept it going over a year, got lots of hits, no buys.

Then I discovered napster and finally figured out why would anyone buy music of an unknown when all that free music of knowns is available.

Guess thats a little off subject, but as an unknown songwriter:

I always played in country bands, my favorite for more reasons than the music. But, I write songs that vary from country to rock, some even vary with cajun to classical flavor. I was raised at home on country and classical.

It was always puzzling to me how the "Oh Brother" CD was such a bestseller, yet you didn't hear it on the local stations. Then this one station started playing it...without the DJ being fired. :)

I lean more towards bluegrass myself and there are 2 country stations here that play 3 hours each on Sunday (1 station in the morning, and 1 in the evening.) I listen to streaming music on Spinner.com and to those music channels on digital cable.

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