alt.country
Lucky Londoners can stroll along to the Union Chapel tonight to hear singer-songwriter and Nashville resident Beth Nielsen Chapman. She's written songs for the likes of Faith Hill but hardly gets any airplay herself as most of the 2,000 country music stations in the US shy away from any kind of music that's challenging, and concentrate instead on filling the ether with bland, boring, lethal schmaltz.
The Chapman gig is just part of a London series organized by the Barbican Centre called "Further Beyond Nashville" which aims to show that there's more to country than the tepid Garth Brooks or the toxic Toby Keith. The latter famous for the summer hit "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", which declared: "You'll be sorry that you messed with/The US of A/'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way."
No, Beth Nielsen Chapman belongs to what some now call "alternative country". Fellow travellers include singers Lyle Lovett and Laura Cantrell, and bands Lambchop, memorably once described as producing "orchestral country-soul", and the tremendously exciting Calexico, appearing in London with a Mexican mariachi band. And all these artists, by the way, are part of the Barbican programme that ends tomorrow.
Away from the commercially defined Nashville sound, there exists another music, a traditional American mode of expression that the likes of Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle have given dignified voice to over the years. The seven million copies that the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? sold shows that hillbilly, bluegrass music has an audience.
