>
> Your first sentence sparked a few thoughts - alt.country seems to be music
> for we aging baby boomers as opposed to alt.rock or new country which seems
> to target the teen to twenties crowd. In a sense, alt.country is our
> nostalgia as much as a repackaging of "70's Metal Greats" or any of those
> compilations you can see advertised on TV. New ground isn't really broken
> inasmuch as being a crow pie sampling of styles which in some cases would
etc. etc. -- from Tera
This stuff confuses me, as does the idea that a "movement" evolved around
Uncle Tupelo and Tweedy/Farrar. A lot of folks, including a lot of
"elderly" people on this list, have been listening to what's currently
encapsuled in the alt.country category, for up to 30 years, and even
longer. Nothing started with Uncle Tupelo, except for a stampede of
non-Austin rock-n-rollers deciding to twang it up for awhile, and,
thereby, making it a lot more difficult for people like me to pick the
wheat from the chaff in the catalogs and record stores. So while there
may be a lot of 40-year-olds gravitating toward the alt.country category,
there's a lot of us who were hanging around listening to this stuff before
Jeff Tweedy was out of short pants. -- Terry Smith
ps enjoyed reading the transcripts of the A-list Nashville session
musicians, from the 50s to early 70s, in the Journal of Country Music. I
was wondering how much of those guys' nostalgicizing about the way things
used to be, and about how the session business has changed, is
understandable romanticizing, and how much is on point. One point they
made was that these days session guitar and keyboard players don't have
recognizable styles, while in the "old days" players had a signature
sound, and if they didn't, they were in big trouble. (Thanks, Jon, for the
issue.)
