News Update - Jan 29 08
AND NOW FOR THE NEWS…
Legendary George Jones added to Irish Festival
George Jones has been confirmed as the star attraction for the two day UTV Country-Fest which will take place in Mid-Ulster on the 2nd & 3rd August 2008. The event will see a cast of 50 International, national and local stars perform on 3 stages. Acts confirmed to appear so far: Nanci Griffith, Stonewall Jackson, Gene Watson, Collin Raye, Jimmy Buckley, Mike Denver, Robert Mizzell, John McNicholl, Philomena Begley, Shaun Cuddy, Roly Daniels, Justin McGurk, Tony Kerr, Liam McLoughlin, Leanne and Carrie Benn, Bonnie Stewart, Rod and Tracey McAuley, Louise Morrissey, Sean Corrigan and Country Harmony, Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, Vernon Oxford, Gretchen Peters, Clinton Gregory, Billy Joe Shaver, John Michael Montgomery, and lots, lots more. Log on to www.jwpromos.com for full details.
Slim Whitman talks about reports of his death
Slim Whitman would like to clear something up: He’s alive and doing pretty well despite reports of his death that appeared on Monday January 21.
The country singer, who experienced his first surge in popularity in the ’50s, has no idea how it got started. But e-mails began circulating and next thing you know, a disc jockey was announcing it on the air, a tearful friend performing on stage was announcing it to his audience and online sources reported it in news updates, including Tennessean.com on Monday.
“All of a sudden on Sunday, Jan. 20, I died,” said Whitman, who turned 84 on Sunday. “I knew it was a lie. I kept looking at it. I thought, this could sort of get out of hand here. I thought, oh well, if it gets out of hand, I’ll go on a TV show and show them that I’m not dead.”
Whitman, a Grand Ole Opry guest in the mid-1950s, has travelled the world spreading his brand of country music, enjoying chart success in England in particular. Known for his high falsetto on songs such as “Indian Love Call” and “Secret Love,” Whitman toured last in 2002. But that’s not because of his physical condition.
“The wife is on dialysis, so she can’t go. I would not go back to England and leave her, so I just tell them I can’t go. I take care of her,” he said. Whitman met his wife Jerry when she was 13, and they’ve been married 66 years. She bought him his first guitar and was his announcer as he started in radio. “I would probably not have gone on radio if it hadn’t been for the wife…. She is probably the reason I was in show business.”
Whitman lives on his Woodpecker Paradise estate outside Jacksonville, Fla. He says he’s in great shape. The only medication he takes is an aspirin every other day because his doctor told him to. He doesn’t even wear glasses.
“As a matter of fact I don’t feel anything like 84 years old. …I don’t know why I don’t, but I don’t feel like an old man,” he said. The fact that people recognise him in the grocery store still leads him to believe he doesn’t look like an old man either.
This morning, Whitman spent time on the air for a Jacksonville radio station and he has gotten many inquiries since the news of his death circulated.
“It seems like every 10 years something weird happens like that,” said Whitman. Last decade, it was that the 1996 Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! used his voice as a martian-killing weapon, saving the world from invaders.
It keeps things interesting.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m happy to be alive.”
Currington returns to music after therapy in Hawaii
Country singer Billy Currington is back in Nashville and ready to resume his music career after completing six months of intensive therapy in Hawaii.
In June, Billy began a 30-day trauma recovery program at Arizona’s Sierra Tucson to treat anger issues resulting from childhood abuse. After completing that, he took the rest of the year off to work with two therapists in Hawaii specialising in childhood trauma.
“It was such a bigger picture there,” he says, comparing Hawaii with Sierra Tucson. “It’s hard to explain. It was very intensive and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I just learned so much from these guys, a lot of techniques and tools and different things to take with me throughout the rest of my life that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
“I’m thankful for it. I look back and I really feel like my life was in an unhealthy place. I feel fortunate that I was in the right place to be able to take that short break and look at my inner self to begin a journey to fix what I felt was broken. In a short amount of time, I feel better than I ever have.”
“I can say I’m a better person all around, for sure, in the ways that I respond to different situations. I can’t see it being like it was before.”
This unexpected career hiatus came when Billy was enjoying a platinum album and second No. 1 hit, “Good Directions.” “I still saw my career as having many, many miles to go before I reach a peak,” he says. “I couldn’t have done it any other way. It was just something in that moment in time that I had to do.”
He’s working on his next album and will begin touring in May. “I’m excited about all there is to come for my career in this music industry.”
But now he has a different perspective on his career. “I’ll do things a lot differently, as far as how much I’ll work, who I am surrounded by and even how my shows will be now. It’s going to be so much better.”
He received thousands of letters from fans and those who share similar life experiences. “I’ve read every one of them,” he says. “I took my days when I was in Hawaii to sit down and go through them. It was another way that reminded me of how blessed I am. To my fans, thank you so much.”
Country music manager Johnson dies
Jack D. Johnson, 79, the brash and colourful manager of Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, T.G. Sheppard and others, died January 24 in Nashville after battling congestive heart failure.
Mr. Johnson confronted segregation and presumption in helping Pride to become the first African-American singing superstar in country music.
“What he did took a lot of courage,” Milsap said. “He brought the first black gentleman into mainstream country, and in my case he brought the first blind boy in. Those two things may never be repeated again, and he orchestrated the whole thing.”
Mr. Johnson, named for the prize-fighter Jack Dempsey, was born in Knoxville, and he spent most of his youth in East Tennessee. He graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in journalism in 1958. He and his wife, Edie, moved to Nashville in 1961, so he could pursue a career in the music business.
In 1964, Mr. Johnson founded Jack D. Johnson Talent. After hearing Pride sing, he promised to manage the scuffling ex-ballplayer, and he pitched Pride’s music to labels and producers around Nashville to no real effect. Finally, Mr. Johnson bent the ear of Cowboy Jack Clement, who decided to produce some records on Pride.
“Part of that was the challenge, and part of it was because Jack thought it would be good business,” said Don Cusic, a professor of music business at Belmont University.
Mr. Johnson, whose gruffly endearing manner sometimes reminded those around him of Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, made sure that managing Pride was good business. With Pride, Mr. Johnson founded a successful publishing company, and artists such as Milsap often recorded his songs. Under Mr. Johnson’s business direction, Pride became one of country music’s biggest stars.
Milsap met Pride by chance, and Pride urged the sight-impaired piano player to move to Nashville and to meet with Mr. Johnson. In the early 1970s, Milsap played regular shows at a showroom on the roof of the King of the Road Motel, and Mr. Johnson often dropped by those shows.
“He said, ‘I want to manage you,’ and I signed a contract,” Milsap said. “Then Jack said, ‘Now Ronnie, I can’t make you a star. You’re gonna have to do that on your own.’ I said, ‘Well, why’d I just sign that contract, then?’ ”
Mr. Johnson meant that proper management was only one piece of the puzzle: Milsap would, like Pride, have to deliver the goods onstage and work hard to please the music industry. For his part, Mr. Johnson successfully convinced music business power players that a pianist who was known for singing R&B and rock ‘n’ roll could also sing country. Milsap signed with Mr. Johnson in 1973, and he soon became a major star. In 1975, Mr. Johnson won the CMA’s Producer of the Year award for his co-production of Milsap’s records.
“He played such a major role in my life,” said Milsap, who severed his professional ties with Mr. Johnson in the late 1970s. The two remained friends, often talking about old times over lunches at the Sunset Grill near Music Row. Pride and Milsap recently visited Mr. Johnson in the hospital, at the urging of another of Mr. Johnson’s artists, T.G. Sheppard.
“I was very fortunate to have been one of those people he believed in, for without his guidance I would never have enjoyed the career I have had thus far,” Sheppard said Friday. “I will miss him dearly, for through the years he became more than just a manager to me. He became more like a father.”
Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, Edie Johnson, and four children: Bill Johnson of Nashville; Lisa Miller of Nolensville; Tregg Johnson of Gadsden, Ala.; and Cherie Clark of Thompsons Station. He is also survived by eight grandchildren.
Twisted Sister singer among those vying for country stardom
Dee Snider, the tough-talking frontman for the metal band Twisted Sister, probably won’t endear himself to country fans when he proclaims over a spread of fried chicken and biscuits that he doesn’t like country music on the new Country Music Television reality show “Gone Country.”
But that was before Snider, one of six contestants on the show vying for a record deal, saw Gretchen Wilson plug her guitar into a stack of Marshall amplifiers and rock out.
“I said, ‘Well (expletive), if I can do that … ,’” Snider said Thursday from his home in Long Island, N.Y.
The weekly show premieres Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern on CMT and continues through March 7.
Besides Snider, the contestants are R&B singers Bobby Brown and Sisqo’, pop singers Carnie Wilson and Julio Iglesias Jr., “American Idol” finalist Diana DeGarmo and former “The Brady Bunch” actress Maureen McCormick (Marsha).
Host John Rich, half of the country duo Big & Rich and an in-demand songwriter and producer, will choose the winner and produce a single for them.
Rich pairs each contestant with some of Nashville’s finest writers to help them craft an original tune that they’ll perform on the final episode.
The series was taped over 10 days in October at country star Barbara Mandrell’s former home, a timber-and-glass mansion Brown calls “the biggest log cabin in the world.”
The premiere shows the contestants hopping onto Rich’s tour bus and heading out to the estate, where they ride ATVs, fire shotguns and clean horse stalls for a crash course in “country living.”
Snider and Brown come across as the bad boys, with Snider dropping the “I don’t like country music” bomb over supper with Rich.
“I looked at him like ‘Are you an idiot. What are you doing here then?’” Rich recalled. “He had a real antiquated idea of what country music is about.”
By the end of the two weeks, after hanging out with Rich and Wilson, Snider became a country convert - sort of.
“My opinions about country music were made around the same time I said ‘I don’t like asparagus.’ I was 7 years old,” he said. “But I have discovered a form of country music that I love, and that’s the hell-raising Hank Williams Jr. brand.
“I really did go from having a disdain for it to liking it, but not all of it, just certain kinds,” added the tattooed singer who’s perhaps best known for the ’80s headbanger anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
The other contestants came in with more of an open mind, but that didn’t necessarily guarantee them more success. As Rich put it, if you took a group of country singers and asked them to sing R&B, perhaps one in the bunch could do it well.
Where the “Gone Country” contestants shined, he said, was in their songwriting.
“Every artist wrote an incredibly good song, which really shocked me,” Rich said. “It was incredible to see someone like Sisqo’, a straight up R&B and hip-hop guy, come into Nashville and really dive into the process.”
To pick a winner, Rich looked for the quality of the song and of the performance. But also for things like how the crowd reacted, how they handled themselves and how well they understood the genre and its fans.
He wanted someone who had, indeed, gone country.
DigitalRodeo.com Announces New Features And New Look
DigitalRodeo.com, a leading social network dedicated to country music fans, has launched their streaming video portal. This addition comes as a result of user demand for video upload and viewing capabilities. The network has already compiled a library of country music videos and content and expects to see their library continue to grow as users begin to utilise the service as an alternative to competing video upload destinations. The video network is powered by the popular Adobe FlashT and accepts many mainstream video formats as uploads.
“We are creating one of the leading archives of country music related videos on the Internet. In doing so, we have had a lot of fun and hope to provide an entertaining tool for all of our members, said President, Joel Field. “We encourage everyone to upload and enjoy all of this new exciting content.”
The network has also launched Digital Rodeo tools. Tools are add-ons to a standard profile and allow users to creatively expand on the networking experience. The initial launch of tools includes a classifieds system, a blog application and a contest platform providing artists and users the ability to run contests through their profiles. These tools make DigitalRodeo.com an exciting destination for fans, while being a great promotional tool for artists and companies. Digital Rodeo aims to roll out new tools each week.
Digital Rodeo has also released version three of their home page design; increasing usability and functionality of it’s most popular page. The page features defined sections that allow a user to browse recent activity on particular areas of the network. It also includes a new feature slot and more comfortable advertisement positioning as requested by users and advertisers alike.
DigitalRodeo.com has become one of the fastest growing online communities for Country music fans since its launch in March 2007. Membership to DigitalRodeo.com is free, and offers fans a homepage filled with Country music news, artist features and the opportunity to connect with artists and other fans.
For more information on DigitalRodeo.com, visit www.digitalrodeo.com.
Tim McGraw Co-Writes Def Leppard’s New Single Tim McGraw, a current Grammy nominee as a songwriter for “If You’re Reading This,” co-wrote Def Leppard’s new single “Nine Lives” along with band members Phil Collen, Joe Elliot and Rick Savage. The song is the first from Def Leppard’s forth-coming album, Songs From the Sparkle Lounge.
McGraw initiated the co-write idea three years ago through his long-time tour manager Robert Allen, brother of Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen. The actual collaboration process began a year later when McGraw sat in on their Hollywood Bowl show in 2006.
“We didn’t start with any preconceived notions about the song,” said McGraw. “Each of us brought something different to the table and we drew on each others influence to finish it out. They are simply one of the best rock bands ever and it was a great time working together.”
Randy Kohrs honoured with signature model from Amistar Resophonic guitars
Czech Republic-based Amistar introduced their latest edition, the Randy Kohrs metal resophonic guitar, this past weekend at the winter NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show in Anaheim, CA. A four day event that draws over 85,000 distributors, retailers, and affiliated artists and over 1,500 booths, Kohrs was on hand the whole time to showcase his latest endorsement. According to the Nashville session musician and artist, it received quite a bit of attention.
“I took it around to other booths that were showcasing their metal-body resonators and, among so many other incredible guitars, I’m happy to say I still found my Amistar to not only look the best, but to sound the best, too,” says Randy. The body, made of brass, has intricate designs etched into the top and bottom with a very vintage finish and his name even imprinted on the side. Kohrs immediately had a strap made by well-known maker Bobby Poff of Wyoming, another one of his endorsements, and the detail carved into it was done to match the engravings in the guitar, making it a one-of-a-kind, as well.
Randy Kohrs has long been known as one of the best session musicians in Nashville, having played on over 500 albums ranging from Dolly Parton and Jerry Reed to Dierks Bentley and Little Big Town. His resume of artists with whom he has toured is equally impressive. However, his latest accomplishments have taken him from sideman status to the spotlight as his own recording studio and solo career as a progressive acoustic artist are skyrocketing. With a number one video on CMT Pure for his latest single, “Who’s Goin’ With Me,” from his latest Rural Rhythm Records release, Old Photograph, and a Grammy nomination for singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale’s CD, The Bluegrass Diaries, on which Kohrs produced, engineered, mixed, sang harmony, and played in his own Slack Key Studio, his name will be seen much more in the near future.
Visit www.randykohrs.com for more information on the artist. For more information about Amistar guitars, visit the website of their U.S. distributor, www.vagabondinstruments.com.
Willie Nelson To Come Out With Deluxe Box Set
Willie Nelson turns 75 on April 30th and to celebrate Legacy Recordings is coming out with a deluxe box set. “One Hell of a Ride,” is a 4-CD, 100-song retrospective covering all phases of Nelson’s 50-plus years of making music. It includes rare early recordings that he did in the 50s. The box set arrives in stores April 1st. Legacy Recordings will release a single album of Nelson’s Number One country and pop hits, which arrives in stores April 29th.
MerleFest Update
Merle Watson’s identification with the five-string banjo and the recognition of North Carolina artists developing the three-finger style makes the banjo a popular instrument at MerleFest. To celebrate the festival’s connection with the traditional instrument, MerleFest presents one of the nation’s foremost banjo contests. Registration will be held the Friday morning of the festival
Doc Watson is a legendary flat-pick guitarist and MerleFest honors the musical contributions of the North Carolina native with the Doc Watson Guitar Championship. Guitar players will gather to celebrate their instrument and show off their skills for a chance to perform live at MerleFest. Registration for the guitar contest will be held Friday afternoon of the festival.
Stroll through MerleFest on any of the four days and you will hear a virtuoso of the mandolin. Whether it is Sam Bush, David Grisman, Rhonda Vincent, or someone unknown the mandolin will always make an appearance. MerleFest gives mandolin players the opportunity to show off their skills during the MerleFest Mandolin Contest. Registration for the contest will be held Saturday morning of the festival.
Registration for all contests will be limited. The first place winners of each contest will perform live on the Cabin Stage at MerleFest 2008!
For more information on all contests and activities at MerleFest 2008 visit www.merlefest.org