Larry Gatlin And Pal Billy Dean Have A Message For The Jihadis
“An American With A Remington”
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” Country music king George Strait capped off the last tour of his career with an epic, star-studded final performance at the billion-dollar stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play, dazzling an audience of nearly 105,000 people with duet after duet with some of the biggest names in country music.
The attendance shattered the previous record set by The Rolling Stones at The Louisiana Superdome in 1981. More than 10,000 fans alone took in the three-hour show from the stadium floor.
” Oh, man. I tell you what. This is too much fun,” he said.
Known for his honky-tonk style, classic interpretation of Western swing and Texas cowboy get-up, Strait is the undisputed patriarch of a generation of country music stars, none of whom left the stage Saturday without paying homage to or receiving a hug from the country music legend.
” In the early ’80s when I was a young man in Georgia, I was a big fan of `Unwound,'” Alan Jackson said of the 1981 hit that propelled Strait to stardom. “You’re the reason I came to Nashville, Tennessee. God bless you.”
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” 2013 was a great year for the following singles, especially since they all topped the Billboard Hot Country Airplay charts. Here are my picks of the 10 best of the year. To be fair, each country artist is represented only once.At No. 10, is Justin Moore with his upbeat love song “Til My Last Day,” which was the first single to reach No. 1 on country radio in 2013. I love the traditional country side to Moore’s music and his twang.At No. 9, is Randy Houser with his catchy and radio-friendly radio single “Runnin’ Out of Moonlight,” which is a tune that you could listen to on repeat the whole day.
Darius Rucker comes in at No. 8 with his rendition of Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel,” which he made his own. Rucker brought this tune for No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Airplay charts and it stayed there for two weeks in early June of 2013.”
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George Jones, Admired and Imitated Country Singer, Dies at 81
” George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.
His publicists, Webster & Associates, said he died at a hospital after being admitted there on April 18 with fever and irregular blood pressure.”
” Mr. Jones — nicknamed Possum for his close-set eyes and pointed nose and later No-Show Jones for the concerts he missed during drinking and drug binges — was universally respected and just as widely imitated. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk and brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing.”
Rest In Peace Possum
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” Mindy McCready, who hit the top of the country charts before personal problems sidetracked her career, has died. She was 37.
Waren Olmstead, the coroner in Cleburne County, Ark., said in a statement McCready died Sunday apparently of a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound. An autopsy is pending.
Just last month David Wilson, McCready’s boyfriend and the father of her 9-month-old son Zayne, was found dead on the same porch where McCready’s body was found. His death also was investigated as a suicide.”
“DANIELS: I won’t just shut up
and sing”
“Where I come from, a redneck is
just a hardworking man who gets up before the sun does and spends the day working outside, getting the
back of his neck rosy in the process.
I happen to think those folks are the
salt of the earth… – C. Daniels”