Sunday Under the Covers: Laura Cantrell Covers Roger Miller
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While some of you are in Baltimore at the Virgin Festival and others are in Jersey City at All Points West, my wife and I parked the baby with a friend for a couple of hours last night and went to see the lovely Laura Cantrell and her band at Jammin' Java in Northern Virginia. Laura told the "crowd" of about 50 people she has a baby daughter, so hasn't been touring very much the past couple of years.
Here's a Roger Miller song off her 2008 EP, Trains and Boats and Planes. If you are lucky enough to have her visit your town, go see her. As they say, she could "sing the phone book" and it would sound good.
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Comments (4)
I think I'd have to agree with you.
by Laura Cantrell Folks, if you know me, you’ve heard this rant before. There is one fact that bothers me to death - the dearth of female artists in the Country Music Hall of Fame. I worked at the Hall of Fame and Museum as a tour guide right before I went to college. It's the place where my interest in country music shifted from a casual familiarity with the sounds of my home town (Nashville born and bred I am) to a more meaningful consideration of the people, history, and evolving styles of country music. On quieter days when there were few tourists, I would walk through the hushed Hall of Fame room and read the plaques for its members. It dawned on me then how few women there were, at that time a very small number, Patsy Cline, Maybelle and Sarah Carter, Kitty Wells and Minnie Pearl may have been the only women members in the mid 1980's. Presently there are 14 female members out of a roster of 105, and two of those women are not artists, but businesswomen who promoted commercial country music. It still smarts to look at those numbers in black and white, I cannot accept that of all the great artists of Country Music history, only 13% are women. A long time ago I wrote a letter to Nick Tosches praising his book Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock and Roll, and asked him why there weren’t any female artists in his book. He wrote me a very respectful reply that concluded, “Write your own book.” While I have yet to do that, I have moved beyond whining about the Hall of Fame and its limitations and tried to address what I feel is a general gender bias that minimizes female artists contributions throughout music history. Another music writer whom I admire called the women of the classic blues and their music “the bygone finery of another era.” Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues," sang “Give me a pigfoot and a bottle of beer …” and died in a car accident while on the grueling Deep South chitlin circuit. She deserves for her music to be better remembered and understood than just antique finery. It's powerful stuff. Sure, the records are scratchy, but that doesn’t keep people from loving Charlie Patton's music. You get my drift? I started playing records on the radio at WKCR while at Columbia University and continued with the Radio Thrift Shop on WFMU in the mid 1990's. When I started I just wanted to be a female version of the Hound, who played all kinds of greasy, scary, and great American Music, but I knew that I would always have to give more space to women artists great and small - the superstars and those who’d been passed over by the history writers and taste makers. Singers like Mildred Bailey, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Memphis Minnie, Lilly May Ledford, Molly O’Day, Jean Shepard, Skeeter Davis, Melba Montgomery, Ola Belle Reed, and Connie Smith. This list could go on forever. I believe these now lesser known artists (some of whom were very commercially successful in their day) are a greatly significant part of the connective tissue of the music itself. They are the threads in the fabric, the nurturers, the caretakers, the teachers and the muses. Many artists had careers limited by family obligations, the lack of recording opportunities or commercial prospects, and social conventions. Even if they just made a record or two, why not remember them and honor their contributions? I could go on and on about this topic. It has been a rant of mine for a long time, and woe to the unsuspecting party guest or band member trapped with me on a long distance drive. I’ll save some for the next time we meet, but I'll give you folks a few things you might want to take a listen to. If you like them, pursue a little further. Go buy a record, or a download, and enjoy the music.
Whoa, Jeff! You are from Nashville originally? And what a cool job!---i was just sent here...it is 2 years later.
Oh, and thanks for sending me, Funoka! She's great!