BR5-49
By Kevin McKeough
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This tug-of-war between tradition and trend has continued into the 1990s. Country has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in this decade, thanks to both “hat acts” like Garth Brooks and Vince Gill and changing audience demographics: the music’s audience is now as suburban as it is rural, and its commercial growth has been achieved by attracting baby boomers put off by most contemporary rock. Accordingly, newer country stars are as likely to perform a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Eagles, or ZZ Top as one by Hank Williams or Johnny Cash. Furthermore, they’re more likely to write mildly southernized rock of their own than to follow the lead of the new traditionalists.
Yet even as country has struck gold by ignoring its roots, a new crop of musicians–among them Iris DeMent, Kevin Welch, Dale Watson, and our own Freakwater–has again embraced them. Lumped together despite their diversity as part of the “alternative country” movement, most of these artists have been shut out by the Nashville-based mainstream country-music industry, relegated to a network of smaller labels (even DeMent, who records for Warner Brothers, got her start on Rounder). So industry watchers took note last summer when Arista, home to superstars like Alan Jackson and Brooks & Dunn, signed BR5-49, a Nashville bar band that mixes faithful renditions of country chestnuts with like-sounding originals. At a time when the genre’s commercial growth, like that of the recording industry overall, is flagging, some traditionalists are optimistically speculating that the band’s rise may signal a mainstream trend–and the accompanying financial support–back toward old-time country.
It ain’t country by any standard definition, but then as Langford sang in “Death of Country Music,” the tradition already lies mangled “beneath the tires of Nashville / In a blood pool of neglect.” The song continues: “We’ll spill some blood on the ashes / Of the bones of the Jones and the Cashes.” They may be pillaging country’s grave, but in the Waco Brothers’ hands, such desecration becomes an act of reverence, a tribal ritual designed to commemorate fallen elders and carry on their work.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): BR5-49 photo by Marty Perez/ Waco Brothers photo.
