On May 17, the day of its grand reopening in a stunning new building, I toured the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. There’s much to quibble with inside regarding omissions and emphases, but maybe that’s just how it is when you’re dealing with something as rich and varied as country music.
Mostly, the museum gets it right. You can’t stroll past its largely chronological displays without understanding that country music, which in stereotype is presented as nostalgic and backward-looking, has been moving forward — changing — all along. You can’t get from Ernest Stoneman and Sara Carter to Steve Earle and Shania Twain any other way. If Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow hadn’t embraced the possibilities of change, they would’ve remained Jimmie Rodgers imitators instead of creating the distinctive voices now honored with plaques in the new hall’s church-like rotunda.
Indeed, without profound synthesis and innovation — and the persistent work of presenting these changes as links, rather than breaks, in an ongoing chain of tradition — there would be no country music today for Jimmie Rodgers to be the father of. There would be no story for a museum to tell.
When I left the building that afternoon, BR549 (yes, they’ve dropped the hyphen) was playing out front for 75 or so people. The crowd included country music fans who were young and seemingly hip, and many more who were old and seemingly not. Yet together they greatly appreciated the band’s revved-up honky-tonk and hillbilly boogie.
BR549 was the perfect antidote to that morning’s dry-as-dust opening ceremony, which, if you’d stumbled upon it accidentally, might’ve been mistaken for a bank dedication. What’s more, the band’s energetic performance neatly summarized much of the twangy, swinging, rocking, high-lonesome past recounted in the building behind us.
As I turned to go, singer Gary Bennett broke into the opening lines of “Psychic Lady”, a number written by James Hardie McGehee from the band’s swell new album, This Is BR549. The song’s melody sounded like it had arrived via time machine from 1947; its fiddle and piercing pedal steel were on loan from 1953, its guitar licks from a few years later. Yet the song’s amusing lyrics, about a doomed slob who’s hounded by a TV fortune teller, left me thinking not about country’s past, but its future. And as much as I enjoy BR549′s music, the future is one thing it has little to do with. BR549 is an important part of the country story, but they don’t advance the tale.
Of course, that isn’t necessarily a problem BR549 should be concerned with. In fact, as far as the quality of the band’s music goes, it’s not a problem at all. This Is BR549, the band’s third studio album and first for Sony imprint Lucky Dog, finds them working the same old-school styles by which they first made their name, playing for tips on Nashville’s downtown strip Lower Broad.
As usual, the basic template here is to whip up the mid-twentieth-century sounds of once-state-of-the-art masters such as Johnny Horton and Webb Pierce with the bigger beats country incorporated in the decades after rockabilly altered the music for good. There are bands all over nowadays plowing similar musical rows, but nobody harvests more out of those fields than BR549.
That’s not to say the band simply mimics the past. Frontmen Bennett and Chuck Mead, as well as standup bassist Jay McDowell, drummer Shaw Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Don Herron, all grew up in a world that was post-Elvis, post-Beatles, even post-punk, and each of these influences show up around the edges of the music they make.
An example is the thrilling romp that opens the disc, “Too Lazy To Work, Too Nervous To Steal”. Mead shows off his marvelously humorous lyrical dexterity (“Early next morning we were driving east/Headed for the big city where I felt at least/We could enjoy the weather as long as we didn’t talk”), while sounding during each chorus and bridge like Jason Ringenberg doing an Everly Brothers impersonation backed by the Roy Orbison studio band in “Oh Pretty Woman” mode.
Or consider another of the album’s finest moments, “The Game”. For the most part, the song’s delicate country arrangement could’ve been devised ten years ago, or thirty. But songwriter Bennett pulls the tune’s down-on-your-luck working-class theme into the 21st century (“I applied/I’m denied/but you can have a good life if you qualify”), and during the bridge, the band briefly adds unexpectedly contemporary power chords and nearly ambient fiddling.
On a cover of “The Price Of Love”, they borrow the Everlys’ 1965 arrangement, except they replace the original’s harmonica fills with Herron’s blistering pedal steel. Their version of Nick Lowe’s “Play That Fast Thing One More Time” removes Rockpile’s punk-drummer intensity, and what’s left is a charming sawdust boot-scooter. The band is expert at gussying up vintage outfits with fresh accessories; but always the overriding vibe, musically and lyrically, is of hillbilly music decades gone.
Granted, in comparison to the likes of Big Sandy, Dale Watson, Wayne Hancock, Paul Burch, the Derailers and other acts heavily invested in the past, BR549′s subtle modifications can feel downright modernist. (The 49ers also make better records than their peers, due in part to major-label recording budgets but also to an understanding that the best records are more than just strong live performances caught on tape.)
What the band seems to share with those other outfits, though, is a belief in what amounts to a musical version of the end of history — a feeling that everything important has been settled, and all that’s left for humans to do is either replicate the past or rearrange it into new but still utterly familiar patterns.
Which is to say that BR549 is, for the most part, not a traditional country act at all. They’re a retro band, and a great one. Nothing wrong with that. Yet it’s worth noting that the country tradition lasted long enough to become a tradition in the first place not by repeating itself, but by keeping its past connected to new and different futures. True traditionalists — Bill Monroe and Buck Owens, for example, or Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton; just about any member of the Hall of Fame will serve as well — didn’t just accept the past as destiny. Over and over, they extended the tradition by profoundly changing the music.
My favorite cut on This Is BR549 is “A Little Good News”, a 1983 Anne Murray hit that finds Bennett wishing for a news report with something happier than poverty and war. Lyrical references to “the fighting in Jerusalem” make clear this wish could be taking place right now, but the moving music that surrounds its gorgeous lilting melody moves back again through the years. What’s most affecting about the song, and the hard twang in which Bennett delivers it, is the helplessness of its narrator: In his mind, there’s nothing to do with this sad world but accept it, even though he still wishes a change is gonna come.
But if we want peace and justice, or a love that’s true, or anything else that makes a future worth having, we can’t just wish for it. We have to invent it. Similarly, if we want the country tradition to remain vital deep into the new century, we can’t only inherit it. We have to create it, too.
