CMT Blog: Archive

Aside from my several visits to the Stoli Fountain of Youth, the best part of the Sony BMG boat show during last weeks’ Country Radio Seminar was watching video clips of Kellie Pickler interviewing football players for Jay Leno. Can that girl talk! Her approach is simple: Say the first thing that comes to mind — and then ride the waves. Flirtatious, impulsive and fearless, she reminds me of Dolly Parton, even though she’s yet to match Parton’s skewering wit.

Country music has had lots of great talkers, people who are smart, skilled and self-confident enough to turn a routine interview or press conferences into pure theater. Of these, Parton is the most entertaining. Her mind is so quick and her view of life so droll that all you have to do is give her a mic and surrender. I never met Roger Miller, but those who knew him agree he was country’s undisputed master of one-liners. Legend has it that during his first flush of success, he walked into a room filled with cronies and asked, “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?”

Marty Stuart brings a poet’s sensibility and a historian’s eye for detail to his enchanting stories about the country stars he’s known and the surreal worlds they inhabited. He couldn’t be boring if you put a gun to his head. Kathy Mattea is an elegant, thoughtful conversationalist whose subdued sense of humor is more likely to elicit grins than guffaws. You don’t leave an encounter with her without feeling somewhat improved by it. Vince Gill, as we’ve seen, could have a second career as a standup comic and perhaps a third as an essayist on the human condition, which, he would readily point out, is a study in the ridiculous. He has integrated his patrician background so seamlessly with country music’s blue-collar leanings that he can poke fun at the follies of both — and regularly does.

Tom T. Hall (when he’s in the mood), Harold and Don Reid of The Statler Brothers, the eternally feisty Jerry Reed; ribald Maxine Brown of The Browns; and sly Brad Paisley are all first-rate talkers who rivet audiences with their observations, memories and verbal vamps. So as we rejoice in their music, let us never forget their life-enhancing gift of gab. That’s show biz too.