Speaking of bluegrass, the Washington Post recently ran a great profile of Eddie Stubbs, the 41-year-old fiddler, disc jockey, and Grand Ole Opry announcer whose midnight-to-eight show on WSM is one of the last preserves of traditional country music and bluegrass in commercial radio.
Which reminds me to tell you–and no, this is not a confession, it’s a boast–that I love country music, though not the idiot kind you usually hear on the radio nowadays. I like the hard stuff, the high-stepping honky-tonk anthems and wrist-slitting laments about adulterers and adulterees that you used to hear on the radio back in the parallel universe that was my youth. On the other hand, country doesn’t have to be old to be good. An up-to-the-minute case in point is Allison Moorer, the warm-voiced, hard-rocking young Alabama balladeer whose new album, a two-for-one CD/DVD live set called Show, is absolutely as good as country gets.
I once gave serious thought to writing a book about the contemporary country scene (I wanted to call it Middle-Class Music, because country is so self-evidently by and for people who work for a living), and even went so far as to pitch it to my publisher. A funny thing happened on the way to the band bus, and I ended up writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken instead, but I still love country music. And Westerns. And cool jazz and abstract art and George Balanchine and Avenue Q. And Chuck Jones. So there.