So I missed the CMA’s this year, just like the year before, and all years previous. Of note, though, was the nomination of “Wagon Wheel” by Darius for Song of the Year and Single of the Year, although it won neither.
What did win those awards were “I Drive Your Tuck” by Lee Brice and “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line. If you haven’t heard either song, you aren’t missing anything; they’re both clichés through and through.
“I Drive Your Truck” is the cheap sentimentalism cliché about a guy who drives his dead brother’s pickup, and the song strongly hints that the brother was a vet. Please stop me if you haven’t already heard something overly similar many times over.
The other winning song, “Cruise,” is a song about cruising in a pickup and I forget what else.
On one level, I certainly sympathize with the sentiment. Anyone who hasn’t wandered aimlessly on country roads with a bunch of friends is leading a distinctly incomplete life, but the logic doesn’t follow that a song about doing that is automatically good. If anything, the song makes cruising seem somehow contrived, or maybe that’s just the song.
And both songs suffer from being overly loud. If I want to get yelled at, I’ll track mud on the living room carpet.
Evidently, the current recipe is to take a rock song, add a fiddle and/or steel guitar in the mix, add a reference to pickup trucks or back roads or something rural, and make sure the singer wears a cowboy hat. That’s pretty much it.
There are still some good traditionalists out there like George Strait and Alan Jackson and Jamey Johnson, a personal favorite, but they usually get crowded out by crap.
And while Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel” a bit too polished, such is the nature of the beast; nothing gets put on the airwaves of a country station that hasn’t been processed to death, and so it’s been for decades.
For an example of a recording that isn’t overly processed, check out the superior (and thus far definitive) version of “Wagon Wheel” recorded more than a decade ago by Old Crow Medicine Show, an old-timey string band from North Carolina.
Listen closely; it actually sounds more real, more natural, and more moving.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gX1EP6mG-E]
And it was a cover when Old Crow Medicine Show did it, sort of. As the story goes, one of the members of the band, Chris “Critter” Fuqua, had a Bob Dylan bootleg with a song sketch titled “Rock Me Momma.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTsYfjBcuQ]
The sketch was recorded during the sessions for the soundtrack to “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” a classic western directed by Sam Peckinpah starring Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid and James Coburn as Pat Garrett. Also appearing in the film was Bob Dylan as a character named Alias, which meant that Dylan didn’t have to actually act. It is a truly great film and features one of Dylan’s best songs, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”
Anyway, this song sketch basically only had a chorus, so Fuqua’s friend (and later bandmate) Ketch Secor wrote the lyrics to go with the chorus and melody, and that is why the songwriting credits for “Wagon Wheel” go to Secor and Dylan.
Who else’s scraps could be so productive? Dylan is revered for very good reason.
Perhaps Lee Brice or Florida Country Line or any of the other generic performers who call themselves country artists should invest in some Dylan bootlegs; it sure couldn’t hurt.