A Country Way of Life

Having listed the acts Bubbling Under the UK Country Festive Fifty, it’s time to get into the countdown proper. When necessary I’ll link to a piece on the site that profiles a gig, EP or album.

Firstly, let’s run down the acts from 50 to 21.

50 Neeve Zahra. With appearances at Buckle & Boots and Live in the Living Room, Neeve is building a fanbase thanks to her tunes full of promise. There are sundry acts that follow the Taylor Swift route into country music: Catherine McGrath started as a teenager as did…

49 Katy Hurt. Perhaps only Twinnie is a more accomplished entertainer than Katy Hurt, who this year slipped out another track from her forthcoming debut album, the assured What Have You Got To Lose, and also returned to Buckle & Boots.

48 Ben Selleck. Essex has already given us UK country acts like Lisa Wright, Holloway Road and Louise Parker, and it was a delight to see Ben Selleck play some songs in Balham back in April at the Live In The Living Room Gives Back event. He also headed down to Portsmouth for Country on the Coast. There was no new music in 2023 but Ben’s expertise convinced me to add him to the lower reaches of the Festive Fifty.

47 Donna Marie. Part of the Songs & Stories Collective which played at both Buckle & Boots and Country on the Coast, Donna Marie has been busy this year singing with the stage show A Country Night in Nashville. She put out new music too, with Come Home To You sounding rich and full of melancholy.

46 Mr Paul Adams. One of the acts who played both Live In The Living Room events (he’s also the voice of the Youtube channel), Mr P celebrated 30 years doing country music in October. He recently released an assured version of Chris Stapleton’s song Was It 26.

45 Preston D Barnes. David Barnes from Preston records as Preston D Barnes and was one of the Live In The Living Room headliners in April. He also performed at Buckle & Boots.

44 Bob Fitzgerald. Bob’s been everywhere this year: the West Country festival in Devon, Country on the Coast in Portsmouth and, closer to home, the South Wales festival.

43 Alan Finlan. At long last, the boy from Portsmouth who in March went up to Glasgow for Country on the Clyde then played his home festival Country on the Coast in April has new music, which accounts for his position in the Festive Fifty.

42 Laura Oakes. Every year I expect Laura to be the superstar she deserves to be. This year, she played two festivals in one weekend in June – Black Deer and the Silverstone country event – and has just celebrated her wedding. No new music alas!

41 Joe Martin. This man never stops touring. Every week it seems he’s in a new bit of Britain promoting his debut album Empty Passenger Seat, which came out in May. He played a fringe event at Country2Country as well.

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40 Robert Vincent. He’ll be a lot higher next year, given that he’s got a new album out soon on the indie label Thirty Tigers. A regular on the UK Americana scene, Robert played Black Deer over summer and has some dates booked in for February 2024. The video to first single The Insider, produced by Ethan Johns, starred David Morrissey.

39 Jess and the Bandits. With Jess Clemmons raising two babies in Texas, it is testament to her love of her former home of the UK that she came over not once but twice in 2023: once in March for Country2Country and a second time over summer, where she played the new Hot Vox festival in Essex. As ever, because the rest of her band is British, they make the UK Country Festive Fifty.

38 Backwoods Creek. After years threatening to release the best music of their career, ‘them Creek Boys’ returned with the one-two punch of Cryin’ (with no g!) and Lucy. Both got an airing at Buckle & Boots and at a gig to support Jessica Lynn in London, before being released on record in the autumn. The band’s Southern Rock’n’Roll keeps winning them fans, and they’re due to headline the country stage at next July’s Rock n Ribs festival, held at Wincanton Racecourse in Somerset, on the Friday night.

37 Robyn Red. Just as Alan Finlan travelled from Portsmouth to Glasgow, so Robyn went from Glasgow to London for the spring Live in the Living Room event. She also played the South Wales festival in November and Buckle & Boots in May, taking her excellent voice and songs (and merch modelled by her mum!) around the UK. She put out two singles in 2023: the singalong When The Sun Sets and the fierce kiss-off Luke Jackson.

36 Foreign Affairs. The Bristolian brothers had a London date at the Green Note in October, which followed a performance at the Long Road. They put out Maybe He Already Knows in March, which has the acoustic feel of Dermot Kennedy and is a departure from their blues-rock sound.

35 Damien Lewis. Having lost his wife to cancer, Damien has rediscovered his passion for music and put out a creditable album. Gigs at Omeara and Black Deer have promoted the project.

34 Lauren Housley and the Northern Cowboys. A mum of two and wrangler of her band of Northern Cowboys, Lauren played Black Deer and went on an autumn tour of social clubs to promote her excellent brand of UK Americana. A four-track EP called Something More came out to coincide with the shows, with three retro-soul originals and a cover of Come and Get Your Love by Redbone who, fun fact, were made up of Native American musicians.

33 Luke Flear. Gary Quinn’s protégé, the multi-instrumentalist has this year played Country on the Clyde, Buckle & Boots and the West Country festival. He put out his debut album Looks Country To Me in 2022, which was very promising.

32 Tennessee Twin. Winners of the competitive ZimagineD scholarship, Geoff and Victoria form half of the Songs & Stories Collective which played Country on the Coast, Buckle & Boots and the West Country festival.

31 Paris Adams. The former Adelaides singer has gone solo and played her songs at Country2Country and The Long Road. Three singles, all produced by the legendary Femke Weidema, have been released: First Time Flyers co-write Gold, punchy Stupid with U and the quirky Alien (‘your love is alien to me’.

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30 Megan Rose. I was rather spoiled in spring when I saw this Essex singer in London, Portsmouth and Stockport at, respectively, Live in the Living Room, Country on the Coast and Buckle & Boots. She also headed down to the West Country in August, performing songs from her catalogue including Cowboy with Wings, a tribute to a family friend which came out in March.

29 Megan McKenna. The only way is gigging for Megan, who put out dozens of songs in 2022 but released zero new tunes in 2023. She performed at Country2Country, The Long Road and Blackpool’s British Country Music Festival, getting music in front of thousands of people. That’s rather reem.

28 Matt Hodges. To coincide with the release of My Kinda Cocktail (good title), Matt went on a joint-headline tour across the UK with Ruthie Collins. He could also be found at Buckle & Boots and The Long Road, and has one of the finest voices in the UK scene.

27 Eleri. Anyone who funds, records and releases an album has my respect, and Eleri Angharad did so recently with The Carnival, which was produced brilliantly. She played Buckle & Boots and Country in the Afternoon

26 Simon James. Another act who played Country in the Afternoon, Simon announced that his new album State of Mind is to be his last. Bette Midler, Cher, Barbra Streisand: all have said they were retiring before backtracking. Let’s hope Simon does the same, because he’s too good not to give the world his sounds.

25 Liam Cromby. The former singer from the rock band We Are The Ocean has shifted across to UK Americana and on December 1 released his debut album What Can I Trust, If I Can’t Trust True Love. Kenny Foster co-writes one track, which Liam performed on a tour to promote the album. He’d introduced himself at Black Deer festival in June and Country In The Afternoon in November. There’s an interview on the site due on Friday.

24 Far From Saints. Talking of rockers, Kelly Jones took a break from fronting The Stereophonics a while back and, at long last, was able to release a fine album he recorded with duo The Wind and the Wave. The trio played Black Deer and enjoyed an extensive UK tour which ended with two London dates and an arena show in Cardiff. To their credit, they don’t play any of Kelly’s rock stuff, though they do cover Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around and American Girl.

23 First Time Flyers. Four solo acts joined forces for a project which debuted at Country2Country. A steady stream of seven releases, all self-penned, ensured that fans knew what they would perform on their September tour. They also open for Twinnie at her Bush Hall Christmas show.

22 Eric & Jensen. I caught the Smith brothers opening for 49 Winchester in London and beaming widely at Country2Country. Stalwarts of the UK scene, they also played Buckle & Boots.

21 Jade Helliwell. Jade is the darling of the BCMA wing of UK country and, indeed, is engaged to the chair’s son Luke Thomas. Talent conquers all and Jade does, thanks to her 2022 EP Woman and her new song Heroes & Heroines. Written with Jess Thristan and produced by Alyssa Bonagura, it is anthemic and very on brand. Jade played Country on the Clyde, Buckle & Boots and the Blackpool British Country Music Festival this year, and she remains a fine performer and songwriter. An album must be on the way in 2024.

Flatland Cavalry – Wandering Star

Texan band Flatland Cavalry (henceforth ‘Flatland’) put out their album Wandering Star at the end of October, which has been licenced to Interscope. It’s produced by Dwight Baker, who is currently touring the UK as part of the trio Far From Saints, which is fronted by Kelly from off of Stereophonics.

Flatland’s main songwriter Cleto Cordero is one of America’s best kept secrets, so I applauded the Country2Country bookers when the band came over to play the 2022 festival as part of the Luke Combs package that year. They were touring Welcome to Countryland, an excellent album whose tracks I often included in my Arc Radio shows profiling music from Texas and Oklahoma.

Flatland will play two December dates at Fort Worth, Texas’s famed Billy Bob’s venue to help launch this new set of songs. They’ve also got a date at the Ryman in Nashville booked for February, once more proving how receptive Music City has been to the Red Dirt scene. I hope another UK visit is on the cards when they aren’t earning money playing sundry US festivals over 2024.

Better still, Flatland feature on the soundtrack to the new Hunger Games prequel, offering a song called Wool. The album, produced by Dave Cobb, includes contributions from Billy Strings, Sierra Ferrell, Molly Tuttle and Charles Wesley Godwin. How exciting for these acts to make an impact among the 14-25-year-old demographic. Knowing that Flatland acolytes will lap up the Hunger Games OST, and knowing that the band has thousands of fans around the world expecting more of the same, what can a teenager enjoy about Wandering Star?

I think they’ll dig how it sounds like it was played by real people in a room, rather than with computers in a box manipulating drum sounds and vocals. The Best Days, for instance, is Flatland by Numbers: Cleto singing of being ‘lucky to be alive’ and enjoying the ride, Wesley Hall providing fiddle lines in between the verses, Jason Albers banging the drums on the two and the four and Reid Dillon clanging away with a double-tracked few bars of guitar before the final chorus.

The album gets its title from the rather astral track Spinnin’ (with no G!), where a pedal steel solo replicates the mystery of the universe and the environment of the dancehall where the song is set. I bet the kids will love it, and they’ll cry along with Cleto’s desperate narrator on the weepie Don’t Have To Do This Like That, where a break-up seems inevitable despite his pleading. The kids will get the allusions to the metaverse, ‘cryptocoins’ and billionaires going to the moon on New American Dream, which is in the lineage of songs by Tom T Hall and Brad Paisley.

Teenagers won’t know who Will Hoge is, but the elder statesman of country-rock in Nashville co-wrote the melancholy Last American Summer (which is a Will Hoge songtitle if I’ve ever heard one!) and Oughta See You (The Way I Do), a bluesy love song. The young people likely also won’t have heard of Randy Rogers, a master craftsman of Red Dirt music who co-wrote Let It Roll, which begins with the line ‘throw a shower cap over a smoke alarm’ and continues in a fun, frolicsome vein.

Only Thing At All and Mornings With You were both written with Ashley Monroe. The former is a triple-time song about moving on from heartbreak where Cleto sounds a little like James Taylor; the middle eight made me go ‘ooh’ because of its chord palette. The latter is a tableau of a relationship that talks of angels and devils; aptly it features harmonies from Cleto’s wife Kaitlin Butts, as well as some lush diminished chords for extra heart-tugging.

There’s plenty of honky-tonkin’ toe-tappin’ rock’n’roll too. Smartly, Flatland place The Provider at the top of the album, and bookend it with A Thousand Miles An Hour (‘just to get back to the start’) and the anthemic Burned Out Flame (good title) near the end. The latter is already part of their tour set and it sits snugly beside those songs from Welcome to Countryland.

The album ends with Forgotten, which I think a teenage Hunger Games viewer or soundtrack listener will find comfort with. ‘Going far from your problems…won’t solve them,’ sings Cleto over an acoustic guitar, much as how Zach Bryan does on his albums. Zach has just had a US number one and a UK top 20 hit song. It will be a very good thing if Flatland can follow him, Combs and Wallen into the charts, but chart positions aren’t necessary to support the talent of Cleto Cordero and his band.

The Wilder Blue – Super Natural

Zach Bryan was just named one of the top ten acts of 2023 by Billboard magazine. So was Morgan Wallen, and so was Luke Combs. Given that two is a trend, it is so easy to do what music journalists have done since the first composers of polyphony emerged a millennium ago: group them together and form a genre. Let’s call it Saviours of Country Music (SCM).

The Wilder Blue used to be known as Hill Country, which is rather hard to search for online so they changed their name. The quintet release their music on their own imprint, which is called Hill Country Music, and are following up their self-titled 2022 album with Super Natural. It cannot fail to elevate them into a higher stratosphere, because of three men: their singer and songwriter Zane Williams; the album’s co-producer Brent Cobb; and, rather brilliantly, Luke Combs himself.

In its melody, lyric and dobro-assisted arrangement, Break Even just sounds like a Brent Cobb song, and there are worse people to steal from! I’m sure his presence in the booth, and in front of the mic on the album’s title track, helped avoid a lawsuit. The other producer of the album is Oran Thornton, a protégé of several producers including Mike Wrucke, Jay Joyce and Frank Liddell.

All three of those men have worked with Miranda Lambert, an undersung part of the SCM genre; indeed, Cobb wrote the song Old Shit for Miranda. Brent is, of course, the cousin of Dave Cobb, producer of Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton, two big singers of the just invented SCM genre. If I were a betting man, I would think The Wilder Blue will sign to Miranda’s new Big Loud Texas imprint, although maybe Luke Combs would want them with him on River House Artists.

Having been turned on to the band by the blog Saving Country Music, Luke is bringing them out on the road with him for a dozen dates, and by ‘the road’ I mean stadiums. His appearance on a cover of Seven Bridges Road will entice his hundreds of thousands of fans to click through to this album. The band apparently had to wait six months for the superstar to be free to record his part on a song which brings back Laurel Canyon harmonies in a big way. Steve Young wrote it in 1969 and it has been recorded by country bands including Ricochet, Home Free and the Eagles.

Opening track Bless My Bones (‘underneath the lights we’ll come alive again’) is an update of Charlie Daniels’ story about the devil with a shuffling beat and a cameo from Townes van Zandt. It immediately draws you into the project, especially with the banjo plucking away deep in the mix. A mandolin shimmers throughout The Line, which has a wordless chorus that fans of The Avett Brothers will love. Never Found You is a very adult love song where the narrator has learned his lessons from a previous love in order to be a better man for the ‘you’ of the title.

Zane Williams knows how to arrange his songs in a country-rock manner and, as I’ve written before, songs like this will never go out of style. True Companion (‘sweetest refuge I have ever known’) is lovely, with three-part harmonies and a great chord palette. Roll Betty Roll (‘she’s a hot, hot mess’) has a wild coda that might be extended when the song is performed live, while Ogallala Rail is a kinetic traveller’s song which Charlie Worsham fans will appreciate. I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing what the minute-long interlude Excuse Me is about, but I wish more albums had actual punchlines in them.

The album ends with Sometimes Forever, where a dobro solo cuts through an otherwise acoustic number sung by Zane that sounds like a crackling fire. As the nights draw in and Seasonal Affective Disorder rears its head, dispel the cold and misery with this quite outstanding piece of work. And if Luke Combs likes them, you will too.

Christmastime is about tradition, and the Country Way of Life tradition is to wrap up the year in UK country music by trying to place the top artists into some sort of order. Who will top this year’s UK Country Festive Fifty?

In 2021 and 2022, Yola was at number one but, rather fascinatingly, there is no place for her in 2023. Nor is there a place for the act at number two, since The Shires are currently busy with their lives outside their career. This means there will be a new top three, which might well include those acts stuck at three and four in the Festive Fifty 2021 and 2022, respectively Kezia Gill and Ward Thomas.

Last year’s top ten featured Ferris & Sylvester, The Wandering Hearts, Elles Bailey, Morganway, Jade Helliwell and Twinnie, who have all been active in 2023 and have appeared on stages around Europe and, in Twinnie’s case, Nashville, Tennessee.

I’ve also been impressed by the strides, and the albums, made by Ags Connolly, Robbie Cavanagh and Eddy Smith & The 507, while Brooke Law has been consistently ace in the singles she has released.

As ever, the rankings are subjective and objective. If I like the act and their music, they will land higher up the chart, although naturally those with albums, tours and festival appearances will be placed highly without any personal preference.

The Festive Fifty 2023 includes a well-known thespian, at least four married couples, two pairs of brothers, two pairs of twins, a smattering of teenagers and a band led by a lady from Texas who came to the UK on two separate occasions this year. The eclectic mix of UK acts means that there are representatives in the Fifty from Derby, Batley, Halifax, Liverpool, Preston, Omagh, Swansea, Portsmouth, Bristol, Leeds and Essex.

At least three acts have lost their father in the last five years, while others have played Bush Hall, the O2 Arena and the Royal Albert Hall. A few have been to mainland Europe this year with gigs in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Liechtenstein.

Plenty have been profiled on this wee site, so feel free to click through to pieces about them whenever you see a hyperlink.

One band in the Fifty did not exist this time last year. First Time Flyers debuted at Country2Country and collected together four solo artists whose band now supersedes them. There is thus no place for Vicki Manser, Jake Morrell, Tim Prottey-Jones or Poppy Fardell in the Fifty this time out.

Other big departures include Essex County, Louise Parker, Wildwood Kin, Lady Nade and Harley Moon Kemp. This is not for want of trying but because the field is so competitive this year. Four acts who played the recent Country In The Afternoon festival also miss out: The Blue Highways, Terri Leavey, Emily Faye and Raintown, the last of who played their first London show this decade. Paul and Claire are preparing to release an album in March and will thus be in the mix for the Festive Fifty 2024.

Throughout 2022 I put together charts filled with 40 acts who were bubbling under the Fifty. Lauren Housley topped the list last autumn and is back on the 2023 chart thanks to her autumn tour and awesome EP.

Those acts who would be in the fifties if the chart was a Festive Sixty include acts who have also played festivals this year. Jess Thristan was one of a quartet of girls to have trotted around the UK back in February for the Girls Night In tour: her fellow lasses Kezia Gill, Jade Helliwell and Demi Marriner can all be found in the Fifty.

Jess also went up to Glasgow to play Country on the Clyde in March on a bill which included Shea Rafferty, who also appeared at the Blackpool British Country Music Festival. Adam Brucass is doing great work shining a light on supporters of the UK country movement via his Facebook feed, and he gave a confident performance full of power ballads like Forever and If I Didn’t Know You at this year’s Buckle & Boots festival.

Adam was due to perform high up the bill on Saturday night at the BCMA festival in July, with Lisa T due to open the main stage on the Sunday. As I wrote about at the time, the festival was pulled less than a fortnight before it was due to occur.

We’re now into the sixties, acts that would sit between 75 and 61 on a notional Festive 75. The Jackson Line have had a busy year gigging in their native Essex, putting out four new songs including Brave, and head to Camden’s Fiddler’s Elbow in early December. I recommend listening to an extended interview with main songwriter Keith on Phoenix FM’s Nightshift show presented by Maddy.

A couple of duos also just miss out on the Fifty: father and son duo Jack & Tim, whose three 2023 releases included Church On Sunday; and friends Jack and Rob aka Holloway Road, who are supporting Remember Monday at the end of November on their return to live performance after a wee sabbatical. Jack’s beloved West Ham United have won an FA Youth Cup and a Europa Conference League since they last put out music, so their return is welcome.

In April, a visit to Portsmouth for Country on the Coast gave me a stunning cold but also entertained folk with music. Olivia Lynn and Georgia Nevada both offered fine songs and boisterous performances but, again, they can’t quite make the Fifty this time around. I’ve also listened to tracks by plenty of the acts who played the recent Live in the Living Room afternoon at The Bedford in Balham, three of whom have made the Festive Fifty 2023.

It was a delight to attend the spring event to get a feel for the carousel of country music with a smattering of ‘wow!’ moments. Amazingly, the November line-up was 90% different from the one in April, showing both the competition for places and the thoroughness of the half-dozen folk who put the show together: LITLR head honcho James Vince, Matt Clewes, Dom Crooke, Rachel Sellick from Scarlet River PR, Danny Coffill-Brown aka DC Brown and Linda Conway.

Though they haven’t put out any studio recordings, The Rising have had an incident-packed year that has been well documented on their Facebook feed. A new album is imminent. Their fellow duo Tu-Kay & Ryan brought their fun, positive music to the event in both April and November. Ditto James Dunne, who put out an impressive EP in May and followed it with a live version of his song Austin. Happily, his voice would suit a cover of the Blake Shelton classic of the same name.

Leaving Overmorrow had been due to play the November event after impressing in April. The quartet would surely have performed recent harmony-soaked single Lover’s Heart. They are from Yorkshire and so is Jackson Lake, who has been prolific this year: two songs a month throughout the summer and a brand new tune called Rain timed to coincide with his appearance in the closing round at the November LITLR event.

Equally prolific has been Jackson’s fellow Leeds lass Tricia Longford, who has put out nine songs in the last 18 months. The hooky Waiting On The Rain is number ten, and comes out this Friday (November 24). There’s are clips of this song and the equally catchy Hard Times on Tricia’s Instagram taken from her Live In The Living Room appearance, with Jackson on guitar. I know Batley and Halifax gave us Jade Helliwell and Jess Thristan, but Leeds is an equal hotbed of UK country talent.

Somerset-based Andy Hewitt surpasses both Jackson and Tricia, with NINETEEN releases across 2023. The heartbreak song Close Your Eyes has the biggest listening figure beside it on Spotify, which might make it a live favourite too. His first release was When I Sing Our Song, about music’s role in helping fight dementia.

To cap off their own busy year, Wood Burnt Red have just released 18 Stone, which has a key change and was part of their recent support sets for Two Ways Home and Emilia Quinn. They also played Buckle & Boots, as have a couple of acts on the November LITLR bill in years past. They include Reya Jayne, who has a sweet voice and demeanour, and Taynee Lord, whose song I Don’t Want Flowers was a kiss-off to a thirsty fella.

James White & The Wild Fire (not to be confused with Drake White & the Big Fire!) came down from Saffron Walden in Essex. Their 2023 release was the song Little Maggie, a toe-tapper with a bluegrass feel. Duo April Moon returned with Part of the Game, which sets a sombre lyric (‘you told me you were leaving me’) to a jaunty chugging tune.

A couple of acts put out their debut singles in 2023, which takes us into the slots between 90 and 76 of a notional Festive 90. Leanne Brumfitt’s song Work of Art is about a femme fatale, while Devil Behind Your Eyes shows off her voice. Guy Surtees made English Country Boy (‘and my music brings me joy’) his self-explanatory debut offering, following it with three songs including the supercharged meet-cute Cowboy Bar.

Laura Beckwith is, according to her recent single, Sick of the Movies, which has a pop/country production. Luke Edney looks a bit like that Oliver Anthony fellow and put out Neon Lights (You Look So Good) in July, a bluesy meet-cute about finding a girl at the bar ‘wearing sunglasses inside’. Just last Friday (November 17), Ria Hanley put out her new song Heart to Break, which is immaculate in every way: lyric, vocal, emotion, arrangement and production. One to watch for 2024 and I bet she’s learned a lot at LIPA, the music college in Liverpool patronised by Sir Paul McCartney.

Thomas Kavanagh also released new music last week. Find Your Way is an air-punching track with a personal lyric about keeping on keeping on. This is what all those acts Bubbling Under the UK Country Festive Fifty should be doing: writing even better songs, working on their vocal delivery and getting their music in front of more people both on record and in the room. It has never been a better time for UK country.

The UK Country Festive Fifty begins next Monday (November 27) with the countdown from 50 to 21, and concludes on December 4 with the top 20.

Emilia Quinn – Wanderlust & Breaking Rules

Six months ago, during an emotional performance on the main stage of Buckle and Boots 2023, Emilia Quinn trailed the release of her debut album. Those six months have passed and at long, long last, and following three EPs, Emilia’s full-length release is upon us.

The album was recorded over two days and I suppose I should consider how well the tracks reflect the title. Where is the wanderlust and what rule is Emilia breaking? It is relevant than Emilia is married to a woman, her photographer Tami, which breaks the rule of heteronormativity; ditto releasing her music with w21Records, the indie label run by Pete Woodhouse and Emilia’s manager Donna, who has also helped mastermind the career of Kezia Gill.

Emilia opens the album with the song River, breaking two rules at once: she starts with the chorus (like Dancing Queen or Jolene) and sings it a cappella (like Bohemian Rhapsody) to focus the listener on her voice. The rest of the band are brought in at the 40-second mark, and it is a remarkably assured vocal performance.

The album’s other pre-released tracks have been Magpie, a celebration of her partner that has more than a touch of the Kezias about it, and the boogie blues of Nothing To Lose, which begins ‘Oh Lord, please help me…I let a number define my soul’. The guitar wigout in the coda is a highlight of her live show, and Emilia prepares us for it with her throaty wail on the line ‘through my veins’.

Mr Shame continues in the same (sorry) vein, and it is full of what Emilia will be tired of being told is sass and attitude. I only says what I hears! The opening line of Daddy’s Girl, another chunky bit of rock’n’roll, gives the album its name. The narrator of On The Run heads out into the country, seeking salvation and ‘trying to make things right’, as Emilia sings on a fantastic chorus. I like how the song begins and ends with a big band fanfare in the key of E.

In My Boots has stomping percussion over which Emilia sings of being 5 foot 4 but with a ‘6 foot 5 attitude’, a decent t-shirt slogan. It’s another electrifying moment when the band come in after the second verse, adding blues harmonica and plenty of cymbal crashes.

Mountains is a piano ballad where the narrator wants to ‘scream until my lungs give out’. Rosary Beads (come on, her surname is Quinn!) has an acoustic guitar running underneath some confessional songwriting; ‘playing detective in an old dusty house’ is a good metaphor. The album ends with Backroads, which marries introspective lyrics about wanderlust to a piano-led arrangement that is interrupted by a crunching guitar solo.

There’s plenty of promise on these ten songs that build on the tracks Emilia has released in the last few years on those EPs. The voice is there and she has a great team behind her. Now that she is married and has the first album done, it’s up to Emilia where she takes her listeners next.

Megan Lee – Origin EP

I remember seeing Megan Lee as by far the youngest performer at the first Buckle & Boots festival in 2016 fronting Blue Genes, a family band. Now she has reached the tender age of 20, which brings out the Louis Walsh in me. ‘Yer only 20! And you remind me of a young Laura Oakes!’

Much like Robyn Red, Megan Lee is an astonishingly talented young person and this five-song EP should push her to the front of the queue for festival appearances in 2024. Four of the songs were written with her mum Kay Lee (do you remember?).

Now You’re Gone (‘I ain’t gonna miss you’) is a kiss-off which says goodbye to someone in English, Welsh, German and French, which might get her booked on the continent! The words ‘pity party’ make me wish she somehow was able to mash this up with the Little Mix song No Time For Tears, which also has those words in the lyric.

Light of the Moon, as far as my ears can tell, includes the word ‘fishwife’ in the chorus and has a funky arrangement. Lost Boy is a new spin on the story Kelsea Ballerini told in her song Peter Pan, while the ballad Hey Danielle is a plea to a friend to do the right thing and let her beloved go free. Church on a Sunday, a solo write, runs through a week in the life of the narrator and ends with choral harmonies.  

To promote the set Megan Lee is on a five-date tour alongside guitarist supremo and producer of the EP Tom Wright; if you’re in Brighton, Nottingham, Liverpool, Blackpool or Wrexham, pop along. In the middle of that tour, she is opening for Jade Helliwell in Glasgow and Newcastle next week. Jade is on the same label as Emilia so it’s a busy month for Donna, Pete and the ZimagineD team.

There’s plenty of potential on the EP; as with Emilia, now we have the origin, let’s see what path Megan Lee decides to tread.

I stopped reading the New Musical Express once I realised it wasn’t aimed at me. The then editor Conor McNicholas once said that his audience was a teenage kid of 17 or 18 living in somewhere like Middlesbrough who longed to get out of the North-East to somewhere exciting. I was a middle-class kid from Watford doing A-Level Latin.

I am also not the typical audience for a country music superstar. The five nominees for Entertainer of the Year at this year’s CMA Awards provide a useful quintet from which to draw conclusions about where record labels are going to make their money in the next few years. But first, the science.

About 15 years ago I realised that marketing was about selling stuff to people who don’t give a stuff. How do you make people care about a musician? In country music, it comes down to the songs and the musicianship, but then why is Vince Gill not selling millions of concert tickets around the world?

There are four quadrants in any popular product: the young, the old, the male and the female. Let’s look at Morgan Wallen, who makes music that is in tune with the hiphop-loving kids but has the deep vocal style to pull in fans familiar with rock’n’roll. Men want to hang with him, and so do women.

Luke Combs? Sips Jack Daniels and Coke onstage, has started a family with his sweetheart and has deep respect for acts who came before him.

Lainey Wilson? Great voice, great twang, great role model, singer of great songs with depth and passion.

Carrie Underwood? Country music’s ‘girl-singer’ whose Vegas show pulls in an older crowd and whom younger folk have been exposed to as host for several years of the CMA Awards.

Chris Stapleton? The guy with the beard who did that song Tennessee Whiskey, father to five with his soulmate Morgane, the eldest of whom is called Waylon. As it happens, Stapleton’s fifth album Higher was released last Friday (November 10), perfectly timed to be the tentpole Music City release a week before Dolly Parton takes over every billboard, playlist, radio station, TV show and TikTok feed. And two weeks before Garth Brooks does the same with his new Lower Broadway bar. It is notable that no Music Row releases are scheduled in either week, although the latter is Thanksgiving weekend which is typically left fallow.

Let’s look at Higher in the context of this essay. How have Mercury Records put together an album whose tracks will be played in arenas and stadiums around the world in the next 18 months alongside Second One to Know, Whiskey and You, Tennessee Whiskey, You Should Probably Leave and Broken Halos? It is, once more, Produced by Dave Cobb, which is like saying water makes you wet.

Chris has been opening his recent sets with White Horse, a rumbling rock song with ‘cowboy’ in the chorus co-written with Dan Wilson, who wrote Not Ready To Make Nice with the Dixie Chicks, Someone Like You with Adele and Closing Time for his band Semisonic. He also, lest we forget, wrote Chris’s song When The Stars Come Out. The song sits as track eight on this 14-track set, starting off the album’s notional second side.

Chris closes his shows with Outlaw State of Mind, because he’s an outlaw, you see, from Kentucky via the writers’ rooms of Music Row. You can’t make him a sex symbol like Tim McGraw, because he won’t pose with his shirt off. You can’t send him on a radio tour because he is painfully shy. He can certainly be the musical guest on The Tonight Show or Saturday Night Live, and take part in skits, but he can’t be the host like Wallen could. Unlike Carrie or Luke Bryan, Chris couldn’t perform the opening monologue of the CMA Awards, but that host could throw over to him to play a Song of the Year contender or, as happened this year, give a rollicking rendition of White Horse.

So what is Chris Stapleton the brand? Much like Vince Gill, it’s competence: great songs, performed by a great singer and instrumentalist. That has always made money and it makes no difference whether you are old, young, male or female. To generalise grossly, male fans of blues will love aspects of the album, while women will treat his voice as a nice warm bath.

In her always droll live commentary on last week’s awards, where Stapleton won his seventh CMA Male Vocalist prize, Natalie Hemby wrote ‘God made Chris Stapleton to remind us that we have hair on the back of our neck’. Nobody in town has a voice like his, although it helped Combs and Wallen that their throaty noises have followed in Chris’s wake.

In country music, whoever you are, songs have to come from truth and be believable as expressions of the singer’s inner state of mind. Trust, for instance, is a gentle thinker of a song where Chris’s weathered voice sings of true love. It reminds me of his song Millionaire, so it is on brand. Family man and dutiful husband Chris loves his wife Morgane, who as well as being his ‘eternal collaborator’ also gets a production credit on the album. For more on his appreciation for his life partner, listen to It Takes A Woman (‘who sees the best part of me’).

The Fire is suitably smouldering in lyric, arrangement and vocal, while Think I’m In Love With You (‘making me lose my mind!’) is a 100%-er that picks up where You Should Probably Leave left off. In fact, if I were putting together a setlist I’d segue one into the other. Interestingly, Weight Of Your World was written with three Swedes. It’s an update of You’ve Got a Friend by Carole King (‘give me your darkest hour, give me your deepest fear’) but with more pedal steel and the typically Swedish way of making sure each line has precisely the right syllabic number, what is known as ‘melodic math’. This reminds me of Chris’s track Friendship.

Also on brand is his help from female co-writers. Miranda Lambert helped Chris write the album opener What Am I Gonna Do, a heartbreak song which would have fitted on her own Marfa Tapes project, while Carolyn Dawn Johnson was in the room for The Day I Die. A Canadian writer of Chris’s vintage, she opened up for Alan Jackson in 2002 and headlined a tour with Keith Urban. The song is none more Stapleton, with a hummable major-key melody, pedal steel swoops and a lyric about how his eternal his love for Morgane will be. I hope people latch on to it and hug their loved ones tighter when Chris plays it live.

Twenty years ago, Jack White’s love of black bluesmen from the pre-rock era gave the artform a new audience. Five albums into his career, Chris is known as a bluesman too, so there will be a mix of fans of country, rock and blues at his London show next year. South Dakota has a soft middle section and, thanks to his knowledge of publishing, Chris gives his bandmembers JT Cure (bass) and Derek Mixon (drums) compositional credit on both this and Crosswind.

This is a truckers’ song, assisted by Paul Franklin’s timeless pedal steel, groove with a great title that fits into Chris’s brand as an outlaw. His narrator is riding the roads feeding his five kids (Stapleton has five too, remember) while missing your wife at the wheel of a truck, ‘white knuckling the wheel just to survive’. There’s imagery too: cheap motels, ‘truck-stop showers’, Jesus Saves signs. We believe Stapleton could drive a truck, just as all those old rockers in the 1970s could have done.

The title track, whose title word is sung in falsetto, will draw applause every night on the road, and smartly it is followed by The Bottom, which Chris wrote with the incomparable Lee Thomas Miller. The pop/rock arrangement helps bring out the lyric (‘love is a mystery’) and there’s a Them Bones chorus where each line follows the other. It’s proper Music Row songwriting that reminds me how country music is as much studied craft as ineffable art. The genius of Stapleton is to make you forget about the sweating in the writers’ room.

Stapleton’s pal Kendell Marvel, who wrote and recorded Tryin’ To Untangle My Mind that appeared on the From A Room set, gets a co-write on Loving You On My Mind. The guitar part is run through a swampy pedal and there are plenty of seventh chords to increase the breezy nature of the song. Grady Smith will tut at the line ‘that thing you did last night’, ordering Chris to tell us what his beloved did!

Mountains of My Mind takes the solo acoustic plucking of Whiskey and You and resets it to a lyric where the narrator accepts his lot: ‘Don’t worry I’ll be fine’ is the shrug after three verses that detail his loneliness. The first verse has the rhyme ‘destination/revelation/salvation’; the second has the word ‘circumstances’, which only a man who has been writing songs for 20 years could write; the third verse contains the image of ‘a well-worn wooden chair’, perhaps a barstool on which Chris can sit ‘where no one knows me and no one even cares’.

Again, you believe every syllable, and that credibility is what helps Chris play enormous venues. I daresay Zach Bryan, who sat in the front row of the audience at the CMA Awards, has been taking notes. Unlike Stapleton, whose version of Tennessee Whiskey got as high as number 20 and who has popped up on tracks with Taylor Swift, Pink and Justin Timberlake, Zach Bryan has a number one Hot 100 single.

Like Stapleton, however, Zach is able to exist within and without country music: an independent act whose albums, distributed by Warner, are full of songs that rock and roll and make you ponder life, love and being a better human being. Would you not love to hear a Bryan/Stapleton duet some time soon? Think of the brand synergy!!

Come early and come often has been the credo for US acts trying to break the UK. Cody Pennington, a qualified lawyer who junked the office for the stage, came over this autumn for the second time in 2023. His only London show on this visit came as the headliner on Saturday’s line-up for Country In The Afternoon.

Buoyed by the response to this year’s slate of shows – amazingly he has just sold out two dates at Glasgow’s Oran Mor this past weekend – Cody has announced an extensive UK tour for 2024 spread over two visits in Spring (April and May) and in July. His next London date is May 19 at Islington Assembly Hall, a big old venue that he will surely sell out. He promises ‘cover versions and Cody originals’, which is what we got in Putney on a chilly November day. Tickets for Cody’s 2024 shows are here.

The covers were effortlessly crowd-pleasing. I could have launched into Chicken Fried, as Cody did, and basically sat back and let the audience bellow along. His medley of five country classics – 9 to 5, Ring of Fire, Folsom Prison Blues, The Gambler and Man! I Feel Like A Woman! – was straight out of Lower Broadway’s tourist traps and none the worse for it. A well-placed cover of the Stapleton song You Should Probably Leave, third in the set, had Cody admitting that this was done to hook people so they would stay for his original songs.

This tour celebrated the release of a seven-track mini-album called Downtown on his WCP Music imprint (his given first name is William). The toe-tappin’ title track was the first to be rolled out back in January, complete with its line about girls ‘singing the wrong words to Jolene’. It’s designed to be sung with a drink in one’s hand, as is Cowboy Sitting At The Bar, which has a major-key melody and a minor-key lyric (‘drinkin’ away a broken heart’).

Losing Her, meanwhile, is about the beautiful pain of fatherhood and will be a song Cody sings even when his toddler Ophelia does ‘pack up her car, load up the things’ and leave the family home. There’s also How Bout Kentucky, a song Cody said was about the modern housing market. Perhaps this accounts for his interest in this side of the Atlantic: why buy dirt when you can play shows in Britain twice a year!

In August and September Cody put out the three tracks on the album that were co-written by Gary Quinn. Be A Man is a Cody Johnson-type song about keeping on (‘how much have I got left before I break?’). Fire is an anthemic list song with the sort of chorus that alternative rock acts used to bellow in 1994 but with added vulnerability from the narrator. Memories of You is, as the title suggests, a reminiscin’ song with off-kilter phrasing and Cody’s throaty bellow.

He finished his set, and the afternoon’s entertainment, with the ultimate crowd-pleaser: Take Me Home, Country Roads. Raintown took the (country) roads down from Glasgow, setting off at 3am to make their 3pm set where, nine years after Writing on the Wall, they at very long last announced that the follow-up was ready for March next year. They have a good excuse, having become parents to two kids since 2015.

I remember being impressed by the couple’s showmanship when I saw them at Buckle & Boots – they paused for about ten seconds during Nineteen Again, which was edged out of their London set – and by their friendliness when I chatted to them about their life and career in 2017 or 2018. They were ably assisted in Putney by bouzouki/guitar player Stevie and fiddler Fiona, and the four of them made a big noise despite playing acoustically.

Old favourites Right Here With Me and Writing On The Wall have not dimmed in impact, nor has woah-ful set closer Shut the Front Door. They will be back in London soon to plug the album, and I don’t know whether to spoil the identity of the brilliant cover, which was in the UK charts exactly 21 years ago this month, or to wait until the tracklisting is announced. I can say it contains ‘country beats’.

I can also confidently add that the song A Day in the Sun is a great addition to their set, with its Celtic feel and imagery full of storms. The opening line of My Whole World, a tribute to a woman who lost her fiancé in a tragic accident, is astonishing: ‘Wedding dress for sale, brand new’. It ought to have stopped the crowd in their tracks but, shamefully, a few in the audience couldn’t give the song the respect it clearly deserves. This is their career song, and Claire sung it magnificently. Bring on the album.

Former We Are The Ocean vocalist Liam Cromby is putting out his debut solo album on December 1. He categorises his music as ‘Country/Americana/Soul’ but UK Americana or Black Deer Country would also be a suitable place to put him, given that he made his debut at the Black Deer festival in June. Indeed, in the evening he was opening for fellow UK Americana act Demi Marriner in Hungerford, and he warmed up with a short solo set at 2pm in Putney. As he will be at album launch shows in Essex, Kingston-upon-Thames and Liverpool, he was accompanied by WATO guitarist Alfie Scully and Shawn Sanderson, who shook a percussive egg and sang harmonies.

I spoke to Liam before the show and will put up a profile closer to the album release date, but I can tell you that at least one of the songs in his set, which is not one of the five pre-released teasers, will be a Song of the Year contender at the 2025 UK Americana Awards. The album’s title track What Can I Trust If I Can’t Trust True Love was the best of a brilliant bunch, and the set was received well by the packed Half Moon.

For an opening act who hasn’t released a note of music, Terri Leavey also filled much of the room. She was in the studio on the Wednesday before the gig laying down some vocals for her debut recordings and, though the original material isn’t quite ready just yet, Terri’s voice absolutely is. She has had support from many quarters of the UK country scene: Gary, Karl and Laura at Buckle & Boots, Georgie at Tennessee Fields and Gavin and Christine Chittick from Country In The Afternoon.

With a singing voice like Elle King’s but a speaking voice that could belong to a cute Miss Universe contestant, Terri offered a half-dozen covers of familiar songs with her voice booming over a backing track. She opened with the Morgan Wade tune Demons and closed with Patty Griffin’s song Mary, where she realised it was better to sing the song that try to explain its importance to her, which threatened to make her cry.

In between those two tunes, Terri boldly interpreted Tennessee Whiskey and Purple Rain, two singer’s songs where she nailed some tough notes. On Jolene, she even threw her voice like Dolly Parton, and she was pretty much note perfect on her cover of Little Big Town’s Girl Crush, reprising her performance in the same venue in 2021.

Best of all, she captured the spirit of Ashley McBryde’s narrator on Girl Goin’ Nowhere. It is to the credit of both Terri herself and the UK country movement that she is (to coin a phrase) going somewhere. Next year promises to be an enormous one professionally and, what with her midsummer wedding to her fiancée, personally too.

The second day of Country In The Afternoon is headlined by The Blue Highways, with an undercard of Emily Faye, Tim Gerard and The Handlers. Tickets are here.

London, Cheltenham and Wakefield are the three stops on a short honeymoon tour for Lewis and Isi aka Two Ways Home. After six months of wedding prep that followed a few weeks gallivanting around the UK in spring with their Round Up nationwide tour, they filled the Water Rats venue just up the road from Platform 9¾ at Kings Cross station. At this point I should say something about magic and wizardry, but this would be to undersell the duo’s offering.

Wood Burnt Red (or 60% of them) opened up with lots of ballads, a song about day drinking that morphed into Mmmbop by Hanson and their brand new single 18 Stone, which has a key change. The venue filled up for the headliners and I noticed a woman singing along to the set. It transpired that she was called Whitney and had helped pack out the venue with her friends to celebrate her birthday. The band knew she was coming so they baked a cake, a red velvet one, and they led the crowd in a singalong to Whitney.

Since I met them at the first Buckle & Boots jamboree in 2016, I must have been to a dozen of their Round Up events which have brought together country songwriters who are encouraged to play new and unreleased material. With Lewis and Isi MC-ing, it has been one of the most fun nights in any UK country gig calendar. In August 2023 they took it to The Long Road and it should become a fixture of the festival if Baylen Leonard, a longterm supporter of the duo, makes it so.

This London show was almost cabaret, with plenty of audience interaction that sometimes picked out individual fans. It was also full of surprises.

Surprise One: After playing Prove Me Wrong, they reached right back to their first EP for the similarly bluesy No Longer Mine, where Isi used a fun percussion instrument to mimic the rainfall of the lyric. Isi would pick up the mandolin for several tracks and…

Surprise Two: Lewis reached for the bass, which I have never seen him play before. He used this for…

Surprise Three: I couldn’t name the track with the lyric ‘I don’t wanna lose your love tonight’ because I’d never played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It was Your Love by The Outside, one of the British new wave bands that had success in the US thanks to MTV. There was also a note-perfect reading of the Kip Moore song Beer Money, and an interpolation of Need You Now by Lady A at the end of their own song Polaroid Kids.

That track was one of three singles from their recent setlists that got an airing, along with Waiting on Luck and Feet on the Asphalt. All three had punchy choruses which prove the duo’s way with melodies. Reliable set opener Closest Stranger and encore songs Just for Now and Push and Pull are like Friends reruns: always there, always reliable, always there if you need more pep in your step.

From their crowdfunded album Break The Silence, which was released in February 2020(!), came the jaunty Broken Hearts Club, the impassioned Speed of Anything (once Isi remembered the opening line) and two magnificent ballads Tattoo and Nostalgia, which Isi sang with poise and gusto.

This is the kind of song the band usually omit from their shorter festival sets but I would not be upset if they omitted it henceforth. They were accompanied on both songs by…

Surprise Four: Pianist Michael Clancy, who stayed on the stool for Don’t Give Up On Me Tonight. If Lewis is a good man, then Clancy is the best man, as he was at the pair’s recent wedding. He spent most of the set anchoring the songs with his rhythm guitar playing, then was set free with solos that showed his virtuosity.

Lewis and Isi promise new music in 2024, in a rockier vein and perhaps letting Clancy show off even more. Their future as Mr and Mrs Two Ways Home is bright. The more acolytes, the merrier.

Commercial country music is about money. The more money it makes, the more money can be ploughed into stage shows, A&R (finding and developing acts and matching them with the right songs) and promoting the genre around the world. The UK music industry has the BRIT Awards, the USA has the GRAMMY Awards and the country music world has the Country Music Association Awards.

Instead of guessing which act will pick up a trophy on Wednesday night, which is actually a result of many backstage machinations and back-scratching, I will attempt to chart the history of country music via ten-year intervals. Starting in 1973, which was the seventh ceremony, I will see what Nashville was trying to project to country fans as ‘the best’. What did country music sound like in ’73, ’83, ’93, 2003 and 2013 and today, 2023?

1973

Entertainer – Roy Clark Male – Charlie Rich

Female – Loretta Lynn

Song – Behind Closed Doors

Tulsa-born Roy Clark hosted the variety show Hee Haw, so was one of the era’s visible faces of country music. He is one of a few dozen people who became both Opry members and Country Music Hall of Famers. Loretta Lynn is another, although it took Roy until 2009 to be awarded the latter honour.

The song that sums up country in 1973 is a sex jam sung by Charlie Rich in his deep rumble about how his beloved ‘makes me glad that I’m a man’. It was a top 20 hit in the UK the following year, proving that country ballads were also a hit in the working men’s clubs where the showbands played.

1983

Entertainer – Alabama

Male – Lee Greenwood

Female – Janie Fricke

Newcomer – John Anderson

Song – Always On My Mind

Dolly and Kenny took Islands in the Stream to number one in the American pop charts in 1983. It was written by the brothers Gibb, who were Not Of Nashville. Perhaps this is why Nashville opted to turned in on itself in 1983 and for the next 15 or 20 years. This is why Garth Brooks didn’t have a Hot 100 hit until he invented Chris Gaines.

John Anderson’s high lonesome sound was displayed on the Single of the Year (and Song of the Year nominee) Swingin’. It put him in the traditional mould of Alabama, the top country group of the era who are due a full appreciation today and, having played CMA Fest this summer, are also due a UK visit. The latest girl singer off the Music Row production line was Janie Fricke, who was the Chosen One between 1981 and 1986; Dolly was before her, Reba was after her, then Shania, then Faith, then Carrie, then Miranda, and now Lainey. In 2023, though, nobody plays any of Janie’s number ones today. Ditto Lee Greenwood, who had two number ones in 1983 and would release God Bless The USA the following year.

They do play Always on my Mind, though. The Song of the Year was a top five hit for Willie Nelson and won the GRAMMY Song of the Year as well. Some readers may know that it had also won the 1982 award for CMA Song of the Year, which must have irritated a lot of songwriters who were in with a shot in ’83. Indeed, one of the runners-up was Thom Schuyler’s 16^th Avenue, a song about songwriters.

Nowadays, you can get nominated for a song written in 1988 (Fast Car), although there is an 80% chance that a seventh woman will take the award home this year. Renee Blair (Wait in the Truck), Megan Moroney (Tennessee Orange), Trannie Anderson and Lainey Wilson (Heart Like a Truck) might well lose out to the reclusive Tracy Chapman herself. I’d bet on Wait in the Truck.

1993

Entertainer & Male – Vince Gill

Female – Mary Chapin Carpenter

Newcomer – Mark Chesnutt

Song – I Still Believe In You

The year of Vince, perhaps to give people a break from Garth and to give another Okie his due. The Song of the Year was another wedding song where our narrator wants ‘the chance to prove’ he can be a good guy, putting the woman on a pedestal. It was Vince’s third Song of the Year in a row, and he had to beat four songs which are still on rotation in 2023: Chattahoochee, Boot Scootin’ Boogie, Seminole Wind and Ain’t That Lonely Yet.

In 1993, Mary Chapin Carpenter was nominated for Song of the Year and also won Female of the Year. Passionate Kisses did gatecrash the Hot 100, peaking at 57, so perhaps name recognition helped her out. Mark Chesnutt was actually nominated for Newcomer in 1991, but he was still new enough to win in the year three of his eight number one songs came out; the eighth was the country version of I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, which you do still hear today.

2003

Entertainer & Male – Alan Jackson

Female – Martina McBride

Newcomer – Joe Nichols

International Artist – Dixie Chicks

Song – Three Wooden Crosses

International Broadcaster – Pat Geary, Johnnie Walker and John Laws (shared)

I note the international broadcaster for two reasons: 1) yes, that is the former pirate DJ and Radio 2 host Johnnie Walker and 2) the Country Music Association had finally woken up to the rest of the world. The same year that the Dixie Chicks were pulled from radio, they won a CMA Award for their ticket sales overseas.

Randy Travis took Song of the Year with the tale of the dead farmer, teacher and preacher (and the surviving fourth victim of the crash). I reckon Brad Paisley didn’t even both preparing a speech in case Celebrity won, although the Darryl Worley song Have You Forgotten would have been an equally worthy winner in a post-9/11 world.

Hot, sexy Joe Nichols was enjoying radio success with Brokenheartsville throughout 2003 and he kept having hits for another decade. Martina McBride won the third of four Female prizes, beating Dolly Parton and Patty Loveless, both of whom are now in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Alan Jackson has been a Hall of Famer since 2017, befitting his status as a man who looked back while pushing forward, although he still holds a grudge against the UK. Come back Alan, all is forgiven! After his stream of consciousness Where Were You took Song of the Year in 2002 when he also won Entertainer for the second time, Alan went to Jimmy Buffett for help with one of the finest songs about nothing ever written. It was inevitable that Mr 5 O’Clock Somewhere would take the top prize, beating a great field that included Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and Brooks & Dunn. Toby Keith too, but that wouldn’t have been good for the brand given his antagonism towards the Dixie Chicks.

Thanks to his gargantuan ticket sales, Chesney would win Entertainer of the Year in four of the next five years.

2013

Entertainer – George Strait

Male – Blake Shelton

Female – Miranda Lambert

Newcomer – Kacey Musgraves

International Artist – Taylor Swift

Song – I Drive Your Truck

International Broadcaster – Bob Harris

The same year that Taylor Swift had a Hot 100 number one from her pop album Red, she won a CMA Award for her ticket sales overseas. She had won Entertainer in 2009 and 2011 and, rather awkwardly, remains the last woman to win the award despite Carrie Underwood being nominated five times. If you want an easy win, bet on Carrie to make it sixth time lucky this week thanks to her Vegas residency. I am sure Combs and Wallen will win elsewhere, and it’ll be good PR for the CMA to give it to Carrie, who hosted the ceremony for so many years.

Blake and Miranda were selling magazines and having hits, and Miranda won her fourth of seven Female Vocalist awards in 2013; two years later their marriage ended. George Strait came back with a bang and it looked good for country music to reward him with the big prize the year he officially retired (until he un-retired). Nominated 19 times for the Entertainer award, he had only won twice (1989 and 1990) and this might have been the CMA’s last chance to chuck him the award.

I Drive Your Truck, one of the most uplifting songs in all of country music, beat two fluffy songs (Pontoon and Wagon Wheel) and two songs written by Kacey Musgraves, Merry Go Round and Mama’s Broken Heart. Perhaps as a sop to her, as well as rewarding her brilliant debut album, Kacey won the Newcomer prize. Her biggest UK fan took International Broadcaster, coincidentally the same year that he was MC for the first Country2Country.

Conclusions

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Good taste, for one: not one act didn’t deserve their award. In every year ending in a 3, the Song of the Year has been a ballad; indeed, so are all five nominees for the 2023 award. (Humorously, two of them are about trucks and one is about a fast car.) The Newcomer isn’t necessarily brand new; indeed, of this year’s quintet only Megan Moroney can call herself that. (Put money on Jelly Roll, who has moved across to country after a decade in the rap sphere, although it would be the story of the year if Zach Bryan, a man who said he doesn’t want to be considered for a CMA Award, takes the prize.)

The Entertainer of the Year is a live act award, while International Act is a sort of ambassadorial one; thanks to their UK shows Combs, Wallen and Kip Moore are in with a shot for the latter one this year. And good luck to Ricky Ross, who is up for International Broadcaster and won it in 2014.

Using these five years ending in a 3 as a sample, I think the CMA Awards are about country music showing its face to the world, whether to celebrate traditional values like having fiddles in the band (Alabama) or putting on a terrific live show with a crack band (Alan Jackson). In some cases, they seem to reward crossover success (Mary Chapin Carpenter, Taylor Swift) or a song that is better than any of this year’s crop (Always On My Mind). In the case of Vince Gill, it must be because you are Vince Gill, the pilot light of Nashville and unofficial Mayor of Music City.

Bill Anderson won’t be around forever and the CMA realised early on that they had a man who could be their fella, their totem pole. Vince, lest we forget, travelled to the UK to play in that first Country2Country festival. The headliner on the Sunday that year? Carrie Underwood.

Give her the damn prize.

The 2023 Country Music Association Awards take place on Wednesday evening and a digest of them airs at 9pm on Thursday night on BBC Radio 2. Highlights of this year’s CMA Fest are available on BBC Sounds now.

Hannah White has been plugging away for years and years. She and her husband Keiron set up The Sound Lounge in their hometown of Sutton, funded by arts grants and charitable donations, which still thrives and hosts a wealth of talent every month.

Five weeks after Eddy Smith & The 507 and a fortnight before Emilia Quinn, Hannah put out her fifth album Sweet Revolution, the first with the label Last Music, whose roster is quite astonishing: Chris Barber, Andy Fairweather Low, Maria Muldaur, the late Dr John and The Hot Club of Cowtown.

The eye is drawn to Ricky Ross, the featured vocalist on the closing track A Separation. In 2022 Hannah opened for the Deacon Blue frontman as he toured his memoir around the country; this autumn she gallivanted around the UK with Paul Carrack after playing festivals including The Long Road, Black Deer and Glastonbury, where she played (and I don’t believe this but it must be true) five stages. She’s also doing a week’s worth of instore performances to coincide with the release.

First, though, there was a launch show at Bush Hall on a chilly Friday night, supported by Danny George Wilson from UK Americana stalwarts Danny and the Champions of the World. I was impressed with his chutzpah at playing a half-hour set straight through, where every song was in the key of G and where at one stage he reinvented the first verse of Thunder Road. Confidence and experience in a performer whose job was to warm up the crowd for Hannah and her band.

As well as Danny, Ricky and Paul, Michele Stodart of the Magic Numbers is a mate. She also brought out an album this autumn and played bass on Sweet Revolution, which she also produced. Michele reprised her bass-playing at Bush Hall and offered supporting backing vocals throughout, including on the elegant Ordinary Woman (‘I’m nothing special’).

As with the 49 Winchester gig a few weeks ago, the keyboard player had an organ set up at right angles; at Bush Hall it was the turn of Lars Hammersland, a member of Hannah’s erstwhile collaborators The Nordic Connections, who flew in from Norway to reprise the parts he had played on the album. He was forced to vamp for three minutes while Michele fixed a technical hitch during the song Clementine, where ‘being a woman in a man’s world is an act of revolution’. Hannah’s mission seems to turn the female experience into song, and it’s very hard to criticise such an aim, especially when it is so melodic.

An older song dedicated to Hannah’s father featured the audience on backing vocals, reacting to Michele and Hannah’s son James raising their arms to create a warm choir. James, who also played guitar onstage, was being watched by aunts, cousins, his sister Molly and his grandma, Hannah’s mum. I wonder if he’s a barman at the Sound Lounge and if one day, my son, everything the light touches will be yours.

Molly was the ‘secret’ subject of Hannah’s song Rosa (‘out of nothing comes nothing at all’) which Hannah said was written in response to Molly telling her mum about teenage pressure and namecalling. The album centrepiece River Run sounds like a lullaby and is another song from a maternal perspective (‘holding out for work since the babies were born’). Keiron, ‘the poor man’s Ricky Ross’, took the bloke’s part on A Separation, which like Islands in the Stream changes key between verse one and verse two.

One Night Stand, a sweet song whose chorus contains the word ‘rendezvous’, came out just before the album did and sounded great at the gig. It contrasted with the muscular Hail The Fighter (‘brave objector’) which may have been inspired by Hannah’s humanitarian work; indeed, all profits from the album launch would be given to UNICEF.

I was suspicious of the musicality of the lady sitting next to me during the a cappella finale of the aforementioned song to Hannah’s father. It turned out that she was Daisy Chute, who headed to the stage door near the end of the show so that she could tune her banjo before joining the band for the final two numbers including One Foot, a song about keeping on keeping on, and the album’s first single Chains of Ours.

This closed the set with a flourish; people were literally and rightly dancing in the aisles! Amid the tender ballads and introspection, there were some other raucous uptempo moments. Right On Time is a humungous pop song to rival the power-pop of The Magic Numbers; there’s a proper middle eight as well. The Aftershow is even better thanks to its rapid chord changes and raucous chorus. I especially liked the long pause before the final part of the song, which showed confidence among the band who were in control of their material and thus the room.

I did not expect a hootenanny at a Hannah White show, but then I should have known better. Alongside husband/tour manager Keiron, Hannah is a fine songwriter and ambassador for live music in the UK. She deserves to be celebrated and can only pull more people into her tent, thanks to her brilliant fifth album.

I think I’ve figured out why Carrie Underwood has never won the CMA Award for Entertainer of the Year. It’s because she doesn’t belong to Music City, not entirely at least. She won a TV singing competition and signed to 19 Management, partnering with Arista Nashville (if it’s middle of the road, it’s got Clive Davis pulling the strings). She is now signed to Capitol Nashville and is extending her Las Vegas residency to 2024, which prevents her from coming back over to the UK.

The more engaged country fans in the UK really want Cody Johnson to come over. He’s due to play a sell-out Vegas show of his own in December, and he will headline the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville in February. Yet he’s a Texan fella, an outsider who partnered with Warner Music to give him a boost outside the Red Dirt scene. Following his impressive double album Human from 2021, his new release Leather emerges during the lead-up to the CMA Awards, where he will not win Male Vocalist of the Year. I am sure he is flattered to be nominated but even he must realise it has to go to Combs or Wallen (or Carrie!).

Til You Can’t, the carpe diem song of the decade and the CMA Single of the Year 2022 (a production award), got all the way up to number 18 in the Hot 100 and gave CoJo his first number one at radio. He doesn’t really need radio, though, as a capital-A independent Artist who pulls people into his church. His new album, produced once again by Trent Willmon, helps his cause, and we have been promised another 12 cuts in 2024.

This is an old-fashioned Music Row album where the song is king. In fact, the only thing ‘CoJo’ about the album is the voice and the hand that forms the cover art. If anything, Leather is a celebration of the writers’ room. Cody had no input whatsoever into the tracks aside from selecting which ones of the hundreds of demos to cute.

As with Human, where only four of the 18 tracks were CoJo compositions, the decided dozen have some familiar names in the credits. Hardy was in the room for Jesus Loves You, a song with a lyric completely at odds with its title that I won’t spoil; Devin Dawson co-writes the party jam People In The Back, which unites performer and crowd far better than Aldean has done on half a dozen occasions in his catalogue; Ashley McBryde collaborator Benjy Davis was there for big single The Painter, a love song that is far too good to sit beside inferior bits of fluff on country radio.

That song was one of four which trailed Leather. On opening track Work Boots Cody’s narrator orders his footwear to help him get the girl (‘I can’t have you dragging our feet!’). The state tourist board will appreciate That’s Texas, one of many hundreds of songs written every year about the American equivalent of Yorkshire. George Strait gets a namecheck, as he always does, and so does Robert Earl Keen, who gets fewer of them. You’re having such a good time you forget it’s all a string of clichés; perhaps we’re all mesmerised and hypnotised by the lap steel solos.

The power ballad Watching My Old Flame was written by Clint Daniels as a way to work through his own divorce. It’s a writers’ round song that Cody treats with sensitivity and he communicates the lyric with sorrow and pathos. The title track was written by Ian Munsick, Rivers Rutherford and Jeremy Spillman, and is the type of song where the narrator wears his heart on his sleeve tattoos. Munsick’s last album was called Coyote Cry and he joined Cody on the song Long Live Cowgirls; both of these facts must have subconsciously influenced the cowboy chant of ‘yippie-kay-yay’ in the middle part of the song.

CoJo got help in the studio from two acts on the very same day: Jelly Roll, who is hot right now, is on the meditative self-help ballad Whiskey Bent (‘I’m trying to straighten out what whiskey bent’); and Brooks & Dunn appear on the anthemic Long Live Country Music, which takes its title from Cody’s acceptance speech at the CMT Awards in 2022. It’s perfect Country2Country montage music, in case anyone is looking for it.

Double Down (‘One sip at a time I’m gonna make you disappear’) is a bit of Combs-ish filler where Cody’s narrator uses drink to help him forget, but Dirt Cheap is anything but average. It’s a 100%-er with music and lyrics by Josh Phillips, who should invest his money wisely. Josh wrote an Instagram post offering background to the song’s composition: he and his wife pooled their savings, wedding gift money and garage sale profits into buying a farmhouse built in 1904. They originally intended to sell it on, but the memories they had made and the family they had started made it impossible. At his wife’s nudging, Josh sent it to Cody who connected with it and stuck it on his album.

In case of emergency, call in Jessi Alexander and Connie Harrington, who won Song of the Year when they gifted I Drive Your Truck to Lee Brice. They do the same on Make Me A Mop, bringing in Allen Shamblin to sprinkle the magic dust that helped create two more evergreens, The House That Built Me and I Can’t Make You Love Me. ‘If breaking a man just makes him better, do what you gotta do’ shows how subservient Cody is as God’s pilgrim. He’ll be singing this song for the rest of his career, perhaps segueing straight into Til You Can’t to close out a set fit for stadiums.

The song ends the album on a Christian/gospel note, which is very on brand as Cody is a practicing Christian who attends church. It also shows that you don’t need to steal another song and write new words over the top of it. There is still craft in Music City, and there are still vocalists who can do the song justice. I wonder what the next 12 songs on the project have in store for CoJo Nation.

Eleri – The Carnival

Eleri Angharad Wood-Bevan is now mononymical, going by her forename for her second album, the follow-up to her 2019 debut Earthbound which she released as Eleri Angharad. She’s a Welsh lass and has played Buckle & Boots, Glastonbury and The British Country Music Festival.

Among the 13 songs are plenty of gems and, throughout, stunning and contemporary production. Blue Skies A Comin’ is a musical representation of its title (‘through all the madness I’ll keep you warm when it gets cold’), with some smart choices in the arrangement which will calm any agitation. Opening track Magic (‘I always make magic with you’) frames the album with cheers and Eleri literally introduces herself. Her vocals tumble out breathlessly.

There is spikiness as well as hookiness on Heels To Hell, the insistent Live Wire and Good For A Girl, although the last of these is a bit on the nose with its criticism of ‘average white guys’ (leave us alone!!). Heads I’m Yours (Tails You’re Mine) and the power-pop kiss-off Calling It could be sold by a country girl band or vocal harmony group like Remember Monday.

Karaoke, which is a lovely word to say in a South Wales accent, is both a driving song and a reminiscin’ song with a fantastic chorus that, as has been common in recent years, namechecks plenty of singalongs. When We Collide is not the Matt Cardle cover of the Biffy Clyro song Many of Horror but a gothic love song that could merge seamlessly into Zombie by The Cranberries live; or, given the political content of that song, the Stiltskin number one and jeans advert soundtrack Inside.

Four of the 13 tracks are collaborations, one of which is Good For A Girl. Snake Like You crams plenty of syllables into its accusatory chorus (‘selfishly waiting for a fool!’), perhaps to prepare the listener for the rapped middle eight from Millie Blooms. Leon Stanford joins Eleri on Burn The Candle Down, a lover’s tiff, while Paige Wolf is drafted in on Bang Bang (‘finger on the trigger and I’m gonna count to three: run!’). I reckon there is an obvious homage to the middle bit of Love Shack, the ‘bang bang bang on the door baby’ part, which made me smile.

Every Road, a celebration of one’s hometown with a jubilant chant, ends the album with a flourish.

Simon James – A State of Mind

I once shared a cab with Simon James and his friend Sam Coe at Millport Festival, having heard him record a live version of his song Rose and the Ribbon in the cathedral. I knew he was a fine songwriter with a weathered voice, but he leapt up in my estimation when he revealed he briefly lived in the next village over to where I grew up.

Born in Bradford, Simon was the singer for the band Hutch in his younger years and has become a sensitive singer/songwriter whose presence on the country scene makes him one of the handful of blokes. At the beginning of the year, however, Simon had written that a distribution company had posted his music to the wrong artist. ‘Big fail and lots of money wasted’ was his sigh.

With this missive on Facebook, perhaps fuelled by the difficulties surrounding the distribution (Ags Connolly also had them with his new album), the career of Simon James seems to have come to a stop: ‘New album out in a couple weeks. Hope you like it. Been playing since I was 13 years old. Been in bands all my life. Think I’m probably done after this. The music industry has changed. It’s so challenging now.

‘I still love writing and playing. But I think the whole dream thing is done x thanks to everyone who ever came to see me, bought my music and supported me. Lemme know if you like the album. It’ll make the investment worthwhile x.’

If he’s going out, it’s a fine swansong. The album is produced by the songwriter’s songwriter Boo Hewerdine, who wrote Patience of Angels for Eddi Reader which has, I always remember him saying ‘a middle two’ instead of a middle eight. Boo gets a performing credit on the closing ballad Afterwards, a reminiscin’ song that sounds like a Lloyd Webber showstopper (sorry, Simon, if this is sacrilege!).

There’s a guest appearance from the great Heidi Talbot on The Breakers Song, which shows the respect in which Simon is held by fellow musicians. There’s even a melancholy harmonica in the middle of the song, a great musical moment and one of many on the album.

There is plenty of emotional depth in opening and title track, where fiddle and female harmonies surround Simon’s pained vocals. Fragile has a mandolin too, which is fitting for a song of that title, while The Man In Me has a piano and guitar line working in concert with Simon’s narrator, who keeps on keeping on. Spiders is driven by a bass which thunks along with his reminiscences of love from long ago.

Humans is a rockier tune with a great message, ‘love is the answer always’, that would work as a musical number over the end credits of an uplifting British indie film. With its resonant guitar solo, Rock You To Sleep reminds me of the work of Tom McRae or Ed Harcourt, acts who made grandiose music perfect for churches like Union Chapel or Oran Mor. I’d love to see Simon James in this kind of venue, or perhaps Green Note in Camden.

The music is elemental and so are the titles. Blood Runs Over ends with a repeated dedication that Simon’s narrator will ‘be here for you, love’, while there’s a brass fanfare in the middle of The River to match the hope of the chorus: ‘You’ll be the one that brings me to shore.’

I’ve Moved On has the same descending chord sequence as Jackson Browne’s These Days, as Simon tells his former beloved’s new man to watch out that the same thing doesn’t happen to him. I’d love to credit whoever did the string arrangement as it elevates the track. It’s the best song on the album. I really hope Simon makes another. If he doesn’t, then we might as well all pack up and go home.

Lisa McHugh – Watch Me

I remember being impressed by the enthusiasm and tunefulness of Lisa McHugh when I saw her headline The British Country Music Festival in 2021. I fondly recall her version of Dolly Parton’s Why Dya Come In Here and the Primal Scream song Country Girl.

Born in Glasgow but now based in Ireland, Lisa has been dribbling tracks from Watch Me to streaming services for the past few years. She collects them all in one place in case fans want to take home a souvenir from a live show. In fact, her last album came out back in 2017 so this is a sort of anthology of her singles released in the last six years, which I will take in order of release.

Country Mile: released in May 2019, poppy and well-placed as the album’s opening track

Watch Me: self-empowerment song with an anthemic beat and a chance for Lisa to show off her voice

The Scandal: shiny pop/rock masking a lyric about the effects of rumours and gossip

Bad Idea: what’s the male equivalent of a femme fatale? Lisa has met one here but, she says, ‘I kinda like it’

Dynamite: an outside write plucked off a shelf by Lisa which is all about durability and not letting an ex inveigle his way back into her life

I Choose You: a wedding song with a spectacular melodic shape

About Last Night: a fluffy meet-cute detailing the effects of Cupid’s arrow

Now I See: catchy power ballad written with Connor Christian from The Southern Gothic

I Quit: anthemic, a sort of woman’s version of Take This Job and Shove It

Think About Me: Shania-esque self-empowerment (‘hashtag blessed life!’)

Four new tracks round off the Watch Me project.

Unattached: ‘free drinks and no-strings’ only get you so far from loneliness, with a great vocal performance, and a key change

If These Walls Could Talk: Lisa gets down to the depths of her range to weep at her circumstances. I like the ‘faster/plaster’ line which only a UK country act can use

Stop & Listen: pleasingly anthemic pop with the hook ‘I wanna live right now’

Magnetic: the track that closes the album, a meet-cute where Lisa’s narrator says she is ‘maybe irresponsible…but this is just unstoppable’

You may notice a preponderance of ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ in the descriptions. This is country in the Shania/Carrie mould, and Lisa sells the tracks with panache. The album is a showcase for her live work: she can coo the ballads and add glitz to the uptempo tunes. I hope she voyages across the Irish Sea to Great Britain in 2024, because she would be perfect for an afternoon warm-up slot in the Big Entrance stage at Country2Country.