Poll – Grammy For Best Country Song

First, if you haven’t yet voted for Best Country Collaboration or Best Duo/Group Performance, click the respective links to do so!

Here we are, my last poll on the Grammys! This is for a biggie: for Best Country Song Of The Year! Past winners include “Where’ve You Been” (Kathy Mattea), “Love Can Build A Bridge” (The Judds) and last year, “Before He Cheats” (Carrie Underwood).

This Grammy is mainly for the songwriters, but for simplicity, I just included the artist in the poll. Since it’s given to the writers, I would say that writing is probably the major criteria to look at for these songs, not the performance or sound- but I would take into account the overall effect of the song, if that makes sense.

Make sure to post why you picked your choice!

Album Review: Gene Watson – Reflections/Should I Come Home

Gene Watson is one of my all-time favorite singers, so I was delighted to learn that two of his late 70s records were going to be re-released on a two-for-one CD: Reflections, from 1978, and Should I Come Home, from 1979. I already had an old LP of Reflections, which I bought used, and loved, but I’d never been able to get hold of Should I Come Home, so that was almost like having a brand-new release to listen to. These were Gene’s fifth and sixth releases respectively, on Capitol, and the first four were re-released in similar fashion a few years ago by the same label, Hux Records.

Gene Watson was never one of the best-selling country artists, although he deserved to be. He only ever had one number one hit in his entire career (’14 Carat Mind’ in 1981), but he did manage a number of top 10 singles. His voice has a beautiful honeyed tone to it, but his approach to music is very solidly country. He was never a songwriter, but he had a knack for picking some very good songs to record.

I mentioned above that Reflections is a favorite, but I hadn’t listened to it in a while because I didn’t have it in a convenient format. Coming back to it, I notice how cohesive it was thematically, almost to the point of being a concept album – virtually all the tracks are about failing relationships, where the couple is still more or less hanging on, but the love has almost completely drained away. That includes the big hit single from the album, ‘Farewell Party’, which feels rather like a prequel to ‘He Stopped Loving her Today’ – a frankly rather bitter lyric with the protagonist stating that his wife will be happy when he’s dead, but he’ll “go away loving you”. Although it wasn’t his biggest hit (it made no. 5), it came a few years into his career, and it wasn’t even a new song (the copyright date is 1959). This was Gene’s signature song, and he named his band after the song. Joe Nichols recorded a cover of it on his Revelation album a few years ago, but failed to reach the heights of the original.

The other singles were ‘One Sided Conversation’, which has the great line, “one sided conversations with a narrow-minded wall”, and is again about a relationship which is really dead; and the slightly different ‘Pick The Wildwood Flower’, a drifter’s regretful reminiscences. I really like all the songs on this record, and Gene is in great voice. Deserving special mention are ‘I Know What It’s Like In Her Arms’, a cheating song which is a view from another angle of the failing-love theory, with the protagonist this time the wife’s lover. There is one very strange song choice – ‘Mama Sold Roses’, written by Dallas Harms. This is quite bizarrely similar to Gene’s earlier hit, ‘Paper Rosie’, by the same writer. That had been Gene’s greatest success so far, so was it some kind of attempt to repeat the success with something virtually identical?