BOB WOODRUFF
Last month’s television broadcast of the Academy of Country Music awards reeked of what it was–a Dick Clark production. It also shed light on which artists get in and which ones get left out of the commercial country-music sweepstakes. In an interview that preceded the show America’s oldest teenager spoke about how pleasurable it was to work with today’s young country stars. He’s right. Many rockers and rappers are unpredictable and often live messy lives, but young country stars are for the most part malleable, manageable, and sober charges. Most are eager to please and loath to speak their minds. And because many of them are disposable–purchased for their looks and youth, created in the studio, packaged for mass consumption–they’re no doubt scared silly. Clark built an empire on his unerring ability to smell fear, and the air at the ACM awards must have pleased him.
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Throughout the evening country music took a backseat to a glittering mix of TV stars. Solid country newcomer Mark Chesnutt and unequaled legend Merle Haggard were presenters along with small-screen actors James Brolin and Jane Seymour. And good people were made to do bad things. The wonderful, commercially ignored singer Kelly Willis somehow managed to retain her charm even as she was put up to traipsing through a faux cafe while lip-synching. Despite her brave efforts, her alterna-status spelled doom, and not surprisingly she lost out to hot new mannequin Faith Hill.
With Ball, the voice is the thing. It’s been a long time since such a formidable vocal stylist has come along, and Ball superbly follows the Lefty Frizzell-George Jones line. The title track off his soon-to-be-released Warner Brothers debut album Thinkin’ Problem rips out of the gate like few songs in recent memory. Ball sings the first few words a cappella, his vocals jetting in a hillbilly arc reminiscent of Jones’s opening plaint on “The Race Is On.” It’s a wake-up call if there ever was one, a high lonesome pitch that sounds as if it’s being hollered off a porch across a mountain ridge.
Woodruff hews to the Hank Williams Sr. school of songwriting, using intensely personal lyrics that occasionally come close to standing as poetry on the written page. Like Hank Sr., Woodruff employs poetic devices, such as the use of the sympathetic landscape, to construct heartrending essays on the human condition. Squarely facing reality, with all the attendant exhilaration and bitterness, has always been a hallmark of songwriters like Merle Haggard. And like that legendary example, Woodruff doesn’t sugarcoat his observations. On “Poisoned at the Well” Woodruff overcomes the song’s trailer-trash setting by peopling it with devastated three-dimensional characters. He sings, “I’ve seen a lot of people die and it looks easy / It’s getting easier to hate you all the time.”
