Aaron Lewis of Staind: Gone Country

Aaron Lewis of Staind has a new country album "Town Line." CMT says it's this weeks No. 1 country album. This track is called "Country Boy." And it ain't that song made famous by John Denver. In this official video, you'll see Aaron's friends Charlie Daniels, George Jones, and Chris Young. And yes, that's a Gadsen or "Don't Tread on Me" flag flying in the video. Good flag. I just put one of those up here at the Dirt over to your right. Okay, here's Aaron's "Country Boy."

Keep on Cookin' -- Carolyn Martin

Carolyn Martin, previously a vocalist with the legendary western swing group, the Time Jumpers, has a new solo album out, "Cooking with Carolyn." It's got some great western swing tracks. The sidemen on this just knock my socks off. What do you say we melt some butter in a pan...

Don't you want another piece of hot buttered cornbread? Here's Carolyn with the Time Jumpers back in 2007 at the Station Inn in Nashville, a great place to go for good live music in the Music City.

Finally, for dessert, this is an impromptu performance by Carolyn at the 2009 WMA. Yeah, I know. There's some distracting low level background noise, and it's a little rough around the edges. But just listen to these three ladies sing. Sometimes the unplanned, the spontaneous is better than the rehearsed.

Murder on Music Row

Most country music fans are familiar with the famous George Strait and Alan Jackson duet "Murder on Music Row," written by Larry Shell and Larry Cordle. The "murder" in the song was the symbolic killing of traditional country music by modern producers and artists who have murdered the genre by turning it into a pop medium.

In 1989, however, there was a real murder on Music Row. John Clore, music industry worker in the areas of marketing and publicity, at Clore Chronicles provides some information on this event as does Fox News Cold Case Files.


In March, twenty two years ago, Cashbox magazine researcher Kevin Hughes was killed outside a recording studio on Music Row in what some have called an execution style murder. His friend, aspiring country singer Sammy Sadler was also severely wounded in the same attack. Detectives slowly built a case against Richard D'Antonio, who also worked for Cashbox at the time, as the trigger man. The police suspected Tony D, as he was called, and Chuck Dixon, another Cashbox employee, of running a scam operation in which star struck wannabe singers paid them money for pushing their song up the Cashbox rankings. Hughes, who wanted to take a more scientific approach to the Cashbox rankings, either threatened to expose D'Antonio or at the very least resisted their attempts to involve him in the scheme.


The case was stalled for several years but eventually police were able to pressure a known associate of D'Antonio into giving them information about the gun and ammunition used in the attack. Finally, in 2003, Richard D’Antonio, living in Las Vegas at the time, was caught, tried, and convicted of first degree murder (for killing Hughes) and intent to commit second degree murder (the wounding of Sadler). Hughes had apparently refused to take bribes related to the ranking of country songs on his magazine's charts. 


And what happened to Sammy Sadler? An article by Mario Tarradell in the Dallas Morning News, November 14, 2009, provides the rest of the story. The article appears on Sammy's blog:

Mr. Sadler, meanwhile, struggled to regain footing. He was the guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He toured for years after recovering from the shooting, which remained unsolved for more than a decade. When the strain affected him most, he worked with his father in a drywall construction business they still co-own.
Now single, he has no children and lives with his parents on a 58-acre farm in Bonham. He also released Heart Shaped Like Texas, on E1 Music, formerly Koch Entertainment.

Here's a great song from the Heart Shaped Like Texas album--"In America." It definitely sounds like a hit song to me, and in my opinion Sammy Sadler has paid enough dues to earn one. I wish him tremendous success with the song and the album. 

Blood Country: First Press Release, by Outskirts

Nashville’s Rhinestone Mask Exposed in Mystery, Blood Country, Published by Outskirts Press Goodlettsville, TN, February 20, 2011--(PR.com) Outskirts Press, Inc. has published Blood Country: A Nashville Sideman Mystery by Dan Jewell. The author's most recent book to date is a 5 x 8 paperback in the mystery and detective fiction category and is available worldwide on book retailer websites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The web page at www.outskirspress.com/BloodCountry was launched simultaneously with the book's publication. In Nashville, it’s conventional wisdom that if you’re a sideman looking for work in the music business, you’d better have a steady day job. Guitarist Joe Rose has a day job, and his business card reads: “Sideman Investigations, Put Someone on Your Side.” Rose is hired by strung out country music superstar Vern Hamlin to look into his father’s two decades old murder. Hamlin has received an anonymous letter suggesting that the man accused of the crime and who was killed in an escape attempt was not the real murderer. Because of Hamlin’s drug and alcohol problems, his uncle Claude, CEO of Hamlin Enterprises, doesn’t approve of his nephew’s plan to reopen the old murder case; he believes it will jeopardize Hamlin’s present sobriety and interfere with his career. But Hamlin’s personal assistant, Jessica Apple, thinks his father’s death is actually the cause of his substance abuse and that pursuing the investigation will help him get closure. After Rose questions a Desert Storm vet with PTSD, the man is found dead. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? As the sideman searches for the truth, he encounters a violent rogue P.I., Hamlin’s sexy ex-wife, a strange Professor who writes mystery novels, Hamlin’s promiscuous stepmother—now married to the pastor of a Nashville megachurch, and a songwriter with a big gun. In Blood Country sideman Rose rips off the rhinestone mask of the Nashville Music scene to expose a family’s buried secrets. 353 pages in length, Blood Country: A Nashville Sideman Mystery is being aggressively promoted to appropriate markets with a focus on the mystery and detective fiction category. With U.S. wholesale distribution through Ingram and Baker & Taylor, and pervasive online availability through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and elsewhere, Blood Country meets consumer demand through both retail and library markets with a suggested retail price of $17.95. Additionally, Blood Country can be ordered by retailers or wholesalers for the maximum trade discount price set by the author in quantities of ten or more from the Outskirts Press Direct bookstore at www.outskirtspress.com/bookstore. ISBN: 9781432765835 Format: 5 x 8 paperback cream SRP: $17.95 For more information or to contact the author, visit www.outskirtspress.com/BloodCountry.

Contact Information

Outskirts Press Kelly Schuknecht 888.672.6657 media@outskirtspress.com www.outskirtspress.com

Ernest Tubb: The Nashville Shooting Incident

Judging him by today's country music stars, you might think Ernest Tubb was square and old fashioned. But, truth be told, Tubb (1914-1984) had a wild side and was one of the biggest stars of his time. Born in Crisp, TX, ET was inspired to be a singer by the great Jimmy Rodgers. (BTW, Crisp, which is a ghost town now, is a great name for a town to be from, dontcha think?)


Background. In 1941 (the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), his 6th Decca release "Walking the Floor Over You" made him a country music star of the first magnitude. It put him in the same league as Roy Acuff. By today's standards he would have been keeping company with Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw.


Musta been a good singer, right? Nope. Not really. ET even dissed his own voice. According to Wiki, Tubb "actually mocked his own singing. He told an interviewer that 95 percent of the men in bars would hear his music on the juke box and say to their girlfriends, 'I can sing better than him,' and Tubb added they would be right." 


Maybe with average looks and a below average voice, he was one of those stars the average Joe can be comfortable with, like contemporary film star Kevin Costner (at least in the beginning of his career). 


But Tubb's voice was very distinctive, and that was one key to his success. Another key was his penchant for surrounding himself with some of Nashville's best sidemen. The first sideman of note in his band was guitarist Jimmy Short; others were steel guitar masters Jerry Byrd and Tommy "Butterball" Paige.


Jazz musician Billy Byrd (no relation to Jerry) joined Tubbs' Troudadors in 1949. Here's a YouTube video of his most famous tune, "Walking the Floor over You." It was recorded sometime after Byrd joined Tubb's band. Listen as Ernest introduces Billy at the break with his famous "Awwwwww Billy Byrd now." And if you listen closely at the end of the break, you'll hear Billy's famous four note jazzy riff that became, as wiki says, "synonymous with Tubb's songs."

(Parenthetical side-man notes, from Wiki: "Actually a jazz [and classically trained] musician, Byrd--no relation to Jerry--remained with Tubb until 1959.)


One of ET's most famous post WWII songs was "A Rainbow at Midnight." Recorded in 1946, you can see why this song has been a favorite of military veterans since its release; it reached number 5 on the Juke Box Folk chart that year. (This one goes out to my brother Dave, a Vietnam vet, and any other blogger vets who might be tuned in here at the Dirt.)

Probably about now, you're probably saying that you've had enough background, you want to know the story on the shooting incident. Okay, hold your britches. I'm coming to it.


Ernest Tubb's Nashville Shootout. In his book Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubador, Ronnie Pugh says that the great country singer had serious difficulties with alcohol. When Tubb got drunk, he acted like a rock star. He wanted to smash something. He would get so drunk and rowdy that he'd kick the windows out of his limo. This was such a problem, that they hired a big husky country boy named Don Davis to wrestle Tubb down to the floorboard when he got drunk enough to start kicking at the glass. Davis, about 18 at the time, also played steel guitar.


Alcohol was also said to be a contributing factor to his divorce in the early '40s.


And it played a significant role in one of Tubb's most famous dustups, the heretofore mentioned Nashville Shootout.


In 1957 Tubb had some kind of feud with producer Jim Denny. The singer, drunk at the time of the incident, walked into the National Life building's corridor in downtown Nashville and fired a .357 magnum. It must have sounded like a bazooka in that corridor. He apparently went to the building with the intent to shoot Denny. Denny, a big time Nashville producer and the gatekeeper at the Grand Ole Opry, was NOT in the corridor at the time. Tubb, however, thought he saw Denny and took the shot.


Luckily, Tubb's aim wasn't too good, or maybe he was just too drunk to aim the gun properly. Here's Wiki's note on this: "Tubb shot at the wrong man but did not hit anyone. He was arrested and charged with public drunkeness." Drunk and firing a gun in a public place? Whoa. And what about this: you can find very little mention of it in newspapers and magazines of the time. Today, if we were talking about Tim McGraw or Kenny Chesney taking a drunken potshot at somebody, the paparzzi and other bottom feeders would suck on this story for months.


I haven't been able to nail down the nature of Tubb's beef with Denny (if you know what they were feuding about, put your info in the comments, and I'll credit you and add it to the post). But several statements others made over the years about the producer suggest that Denny, a hall of fame member himself and as noted, a powerful record producer at the time, was the kind of guy who had made a few enemies in Nashville as well.


According to one source, "Denny was a hard-nosed businessman whose charismatic personality and devotion to his acts and songs earned him respect and devotion— sometimes tinged with fear— from artists, writers, and others with whom he did business ."

Here's a little background on Denny himself. He was the one who called Hank Williams, Sr. at home in 1952 to tell he was fired from the Opry.


Denny also booked Elvis Presley on the Opry in '54, and after his performance told the young man he wasn't going anywhere and he ought to "go back to truck driving."


To cite another example, Johnny Cash biographer Michael Streissguth reports that Cash had a very humiliating experience with Denny. It occurred soon after Cash's 1956 hit "I Walk the Line" reached #1 on Billboard; "I Walk the Line" stayed on the charts for 47 weeks. This song was on Cash's first album (and Sun's first LP too), "Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar."


Like all country music singers at the time, Cash wanted to get on the Opry. He was riding high on the success of "I Walk the Line," and so he set up a meeting with Denny, hoping to get a booking on the biggest country music radio show in the country to cement his country music superstar credentials. He said he'd dreamed about being on the Opry since he was a kid.


But his encounter with Denny wasn't the culmination of a dream; it was more like a nightmare. First, Denny kept Cash waiting for two hours. Can you imagine that?  Ten years later, Cash would have probably gone in and turned over Denny's desk and broke a lamp or two, and maybe Denny's nose. But those were different times and Cash was a newcomer and didn't want to do anything to jeopardize his career at that point. And Denny was recognized as a very powerful man in the industry.


Finally, Denny let the young Cash come into the sacred chamber of his office. Cash, when talking about this later, said that Denny didn't even tell him to sit down. But Cash eventually took the initiative and sat down, although not invited to do so. Denny was busy with his papers for a few minutes more, ignoring Cash, not even acknowledging his presence. Then he looked up and asked Cash why he thought he deserved to be on the Opry. Cash reminded him of the success of "I Walk the Line," and Denny said, "Be here Saturday night." He didn't ask Cash to come on the Opry, he told him.


That's the way it was. And that's the kind of man Denny was.


Exactly why Tubb tried to shoot him, I'm still not sure. But these other incidents just might hold a clue.