Pop Goes the Country
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The Nashville Sound, sometimes called “countrypolitan,” was developed in the late 50s and early 60s by a handful of producers, including Chet Atkins, who worked with Jim Reeves, Skeeter Davis, and Don Gibson, and Owen Bradley, who made stars of Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, and Patsy Cline. In fact, though the press materials that accompanied my copy of the album take pains not to mention it, Barnett spent three nights a week through most of 1994 and ’95 playing Cline in the hit musical “Always…Patsy Cline” at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and at times on I’ve Got a Right to Cry, she still sounds an awful lot like her. Owen Bradley met Barnett while she was in the show, and eventually came out of retirement to produce four tracks on her new album. After he died last January, at 82, his brother, guitarist Harold Bradley, and Harold’s son Bobby finished the job.
Barnett’s first album was made for Asylum in 1996 with producer Bill Schnee, who had worked with Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand, and Whitney Houston, and it was an obvious attempt to capitalize on her stage success without offending country radio’s sensibilities. Barnett excelled on the tunes with more complex melodies, such as “Planet of Love” and “Maybe” by Jim Lauderdale, but on the sappy ballad “A Simple I Love You” she sounded woefully at odds with the material. Despite three charting singles and plenty of critical acclaim, the album stiffed, and she parted ways with the label. She was the first artist signed to Sire after founder Seymour Stein relaunched the label as a separate entity from Elektra in 1997. “I’m willing to stake my reputation on Mandy,” he told the LA Times.
In early March violinist Andrew Bird was in New York to record music for the sound track to Tim Robbins’s forthcoming film, Cradle Will Rock, the story of Orson Welles’s attempt to stage a controversial prounion opera in 1937. The score is by Robbins’s brother David, who also contributed music to Dead Man Walking; Bird and the great Cuban saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera improvised on it. In February, Bird and his band Bowl of Fire cut their next album, Oh! The Grandeur, in New Orleans; it’s due August 24 from Rykodisc.
