Sunday, December 28, 1997

NEA to turn in country music direction

By Joseph Spear

Bill Clinton swiftly and deftly dispatched one of the major problems of the past decade this month when he named William Ivey, director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, to head the National Endowment for the Arts.

Just like that, we went from the age of Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley to the age of Alan Jackson and Reba McEntire. I remain ambivalent about government funding of art, but if we're going to do it, better to subsidize the heart than the libido.

The Ivey appointment could also spark a resurgence for country music, which has been suffering from lagging sales.

Mind you: No one is playing a dirge. Country music is still a huge business. Annual recording revenues exceed $2 billion.

More than 40 percent of all the radio listeners in the nation tune in to country music at least once a week. The country music radio format is top dog in half of the nation's biggest cities. Two of the most popular television cable networks -- The Nashville Network and Country Music Television -- are devoted to down-home music.

The fact is, aficionados will hasten to tell you, country hasn't really been country for a long time. The audience is button-down, educated and relatively well off. Many of the performers attended college. Garth Brooks, for example, is a graduate of Oklahoma State University; Mary Chapin Carpenter graduated from Brown; Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar; Suzy Bogguss has a degree from Illinois State; Lyle Lovett went to Texas A&M; Trisha Yearwood went to Belmont College.

Indeed, NEA director-in-waiting William Ivey is a product of the University of Michigan and Indiana University. He has several degrees (in history, ethnomusiciology and folklore), and is a specialist in Southern folk ballads. He taught music at Vanderbilt University and Brooklyn College, collects country music recordings and readily acknowledges he is an Elvis fan.

So, you see: That throbbing, grungy, one-note punky stuff is declasse. Country is the high-brow stuff of the '90s.

I've often wondered why country music seems to stir the souls of so many. In my case, the answer is simple. My mother was a "hillbilly" music fan, and I was weaned on honkytonk piano and the mellow, melancholic voices of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb.

But what about the millions who did not have this experience? The authors of several recent books and numerous magazine articles have pondered the question and have speculated that country music, with its themes of love and broken hearts and hearts on the mend, is really the sound of the swelling suburbs, tangible evidence that grown-up boomers want grown-up music.

I don't believe it's all that complicated. I think most fifty-somethings grew up with melodic rock; got shunted to harder stuff by force of fad, fashion and vogue; and have returned, through heightened sense of self and the confidence that maturity brings, to the sounds most similar to what we grew up with.

If you cut your teeth on Elvis, where are you going to turn for enjoyable music today? To the Spice Girls and Puff Daddy?

No, you're going to listen to music that evokes memories of good times and young love. If you swayed with your sweetie to the sounds of the Everly Brothers, Carl Perkins, Billy Grammer, Ferlin Husky, Bobby Helms, Jim Reeves and the incomparable Patsy Cline, then you are going to be drawn to the music of Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakum, Marty Stuart, and especially to the swarm of emerging female talent -- Deana Clark, Kim Richey, Matraca Berg.

If your tastes are more traditional, you'll lean toward the extraordinary Patty Loveless and a new kid on the block, Sara Evans. If this big-voiced woman somehow misses super-stardom, you can bet God is a rapper and there truly is no country heaven.

So here's to William Ivey. May his reign be a peaceful one.

And here's to country's comeback. Not that it ever went away.

Newspaper Enterprise Assn.