Country Music People February 2020 - 50 Years Anniversary Special

contents Editorial CMP FEBRUARY 2020 Features 10 | Tammy Wynette Jack Watkins has an admiring look across the 1970s records of the Heroine of Heartbreak. 16 | 50 Years Of Country Music A timeline of the last 50 years of country music. 20 | 50 Years Of Country Music People The last 50 years through the eyes of past editors and contributors. 54 | Okie From Muskogee A look back at a classic album that was number one when CMP was first published. 58 | Faron Young Duncan Warwick looks at the career of one of his favourite singers and revisits a Bob Powel interview from issue number one. Reviews 32 | Reviews 41 new albums and EPs reviewed Regulars 4 | News 8 | Tour Guide 30 | The David Allan Page 53 | Americana Roundup 58 | Corner Of Music Row Charts 64 | Americana, Texas & UK 65 | Country Charts Billboard Country Charts Courtesy of Billboard Inc. THIS MONTH’S COVER TAMMY WYNETTE Picture featured on the back cover of her Womanhood album (If you have George Jones & Tammy Wynette you have one of our special commemorative covers limited to 500 copies) I know we are apparently going through a period when “country music is hot right now,” but looking back at the first CMP and the excitement that was building for the second Wembley Festival it is hard to compete with that. Names like Lynn Anderson, Roy Acuff, Don Gibson, Loretta Lynn, legends in the true sense of the word. Looking at the line-up now I think it would have been Charlie Walker I’d most like to have seen, but there’s a man who liked a shuffle! All this was going on before I was a country fan, or before I knew I was anyway. I heard Rose Garden on the radio, and I remember Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich being on the UK pop charts. I knew it was country music and I liked it, but I liked lot of other stuff as well. I had a couple of Waylon albums in my teens and I can still recall being blown away by Willie Nelson performing Always On My Mind live on UK television but I wasn’t a country fan. I bought albums by Ronnie Milsap and Alabama but I wasn’t a country fan. My mum loved Jim Reeves and my dad loved Johnny Cash but I wasn’t a country fan. I’d even hear Bob Powel’s Sunday morning country show when my parents had it on. Maybe all these things helped in making me a country fan, but it was the moment I heard Dwight Yoakam that I became a country fan. Then I heard Randy Travis, and Steve Earle, and Ricky Van Shelton and I wanted to hear more. I wanted to hear this Buck Owens who had been such an influence on Dwight, and I wanted to go back and try and hear all the records I might have missed. Even now, the things which delight me most are discovering a new record that I like or a “new old record” that I missed the first time around. Over the last 35 years I have listened to very little music that wasn’t country music and I like to think that I caught up pretty well. I became a sucker for a honky tonker and fell in love with Ray Price shuffles and Western Swing, but in that time the conclusion I have drawn is that the period between the mid 1960s and the early 1970s is the best ever for country music. Ironically, the period when lush strings became all the rage. Billy Sherrill is probably my all-time favourite producer and his work on those Tammy and Charlie Rich recordings still rate as some of my favourites ever. I think that makes it easier for me to appreciate the excitement there must have been around the publication of CMP. I also like to think that I have tried to maintain the core values of the magazine during my tenure. It’s a magazine I admired before becoming a contributor. Fiercely independent and with strong opinions were the qualities that stood out most, but the first time I ever met Craig Baguley (a Little Texas gig in Clapham Junction) I would never have imagined myself as editor. I consider CMP to be a real treasure. A treasured item if you will, one that has been handed down over the years, but only to someone in the family. Someone who recognises the importance of country music not only in the lives of you the reader, but in their own life. I’d like to think that passion shows and I think that readers would spot it a mile off if it was insincere. Every CMP editor since day one has had that passion and I’ve known all of them to varying degrees. But ultimately it is the readers that make CMP what it is. The loyalty so many have shown through the years is truly heartwarming. You care, and I think you like it that we care. I won’t stop caring either, but I make no apologies for being dismissive of some of the rubbish that some people out there claim is or has some connection to country music when it clearly doesn’t in any way whatsoever. Here’s to country music!

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