This is part 2 of some albums I paid money for and listened to in 2010.
Let me put it to you this way, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings are dead and it's pretty dang hard to find any real country music given this unfortunate situation. Of course, country music doesn't mean anything and hasn't for 40 years or so. If your definition of a style of music can include the dearly departed mentioned above and Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Rascal Flatts and Toby Keith then it is as useless as a purse in a gunfight.
However, there are still plenty of rough and ready artists who are making the kind of music that all sensible people recognize as real country.
Jamey Johnson's The Guitar Song is a double album and I was wild about it the first time I heard it. I've cooled on it a little bit but it's still solid and well worth the price you pay if you still pay for music. Lonely At The Top, Can't Cash My Checks, covers of Mental Revenge, and For the Good Times are all the kinds of songs that are so good that in a better world would be instant hits. Well, Mental Revenge and For The Good Times were hits decades ago for other singers but you get my point.
Johnson nails the neat verbal tricks it takes to write a country song on Dog in the Yard, and the title track. The latter is about the experiences two guitars who are stuck in a pawn shop. The former is about how a good woman treats her man.
The best song, the song I've played so much that the wife is sick of it is California Riots. A funny, Southern examination of what could happen if things go bad in The Golden State and what anybody with any sense should do during the cataclysm. It's Luckenbach, Texas with grit.
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You probably have never heard of Elizabeth Cook but she wrote and recorded, Sometimes it Takes Balls to be a Woman and must therefore be feared and respected by all music listeners. Her latest album gets it right a lot of the time with these tunes: Mama's Funeral, Rock N Roll Man, El Camino and a trashy update of Don't Come Home a Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind titled, Yes to Booty. Heroin Addict Sister is the pinnacle of the record and maybe the best (if best means powerful instead of who sold the most units) country song of 2010.
My favorite female country singer of all time, Shelby Lynne, also released an album last year but it wasn't any good and I don't want to talk about it. I hope she nails it next time. While she may never again record something as amazing I Am Shelby Lynne I am hopeful that 2011 will bring on better days and better songs.
