Tom wrote:
>While driving I listen to the radio to catch up on all the latest farm
news
>and hot country and western tunes.
What hot country and western tunes? Contemporary country is mostly pop music, and it's not even good pop. Nashville's been overrun by producers who look at artists' photos before they listen to their demos and session musicians like Pig Robbins, who played piano for everybody in the old days, including Patsy Cline and Bob Dylan, sit around waiting for the phone to ring.
Guys like Garth Brooks,now the biggest selling solo artist ever,get all the airplay and Brooks is hardly country. How can he be when Billy Joel and Dan Fogelberg are big influences? He's a marketing genius though. He studied advertising at Oklahoma State where, according to Entertainment Weekly, he was "hoping to adapt his original music to jingles and creative copy."
A couple years ago Johnny Cash, who gets minimal airplay these days, took out a big ad in _Billboard_ with a famous old photo of him flipping off the photographer backstage at one of his California prison shows. The text said "Johnny Cash would like to thank country radio for all its help."