By David Thorpe

Shut up, everybody, because I have HUGE news: Billy Ray Cyrus is teaming up with HomeTown Buffet!

Buffets, Inc.® is proud to announce its latest tie-in with country music, this time with the singer/songwriter/actor Billy Ray Cyrus and his 13th studio album, Change My Mind. Beginning April 11, guests can pick up Cyrus' latest CD at Ryan's®, Country Buffet®, HomeTown® Buffet, Old Country Buffet® and Fire Mountain® for a special $8.99 price, while supplies last. Proceeds from the CDs will support the Armed Services YMCA® for Operation Outdoors, a camp program that assists the children of military personnel during deployment.

Count me in! What could be more sublime than listening to a Billy Ray Cyrus record in its natural habitat, pairing each song with authentic HomeTown cooking? Almost everything! But it's also a fine opportunity to combine two iconic American traditions (doofus pop country and shoveling food into my fat face) into one gravylogged bacchanal of sensual hillbilly excess.

More »

David Allen Coe

By Lauren Wise

I was always one of those metal heads who claimed to listen to all musical genres -- except for country. But in the past year, I've realized that classic country songs, with their imagery and energy, are pretty hard to dislike. Take David Allan Coe's "If That Ain't Country," for example. Listening to this the other night, my first thought was, "Why the hell hasn't a metal band covered this song?"

"The old man was covered in tattoos and scars/ Some he got in prison and others in bars... Sometimes he'd get drunk and mean as a rattlesnake...And if that ain't country, I'll kiss your ass." Yes. (Watch out for the n-bomb, however.)

More »

By Alan Scherstuhl

Editor's note: Alan Scherstuhl sometimes writes about country music for our sister blog at the Village Voice.

Brad Paisley, "Southern Comfort Zone"
Current Billboard Country Singles Chart Position: 10
The Verdict: Holy shit, songs on the radio can still be important!

In this shimmering single whose title buzz markets a godawful no-whiskey whiskey liqueur, we have a black gospel choir belting "Dixie" while a Nashville star shreds his guitar and sings "I know what it's like to be in the minority." (The video is below.) This is the future, people, and it's beautiful.

More »

Ronnie Mack

Long-running Los Angeles roots-rock revue Ronnie Mack's Barndance, held at Joe's Great American Bar & Grill in Burbank, has seen an extraordinary evolution over its 25 year run. From its original 'bold voice in the wilderness' phase to early-'90s top of the heap phase, the Barndance has now reached ornery, grizzled buzzard status.

Always a magnificent crap-shoot, the Barndance was a musical proposition that could deliver thrills of a voltage high enough to fracture your skull, or take a sudden plunge over the cliff into laughably self-indulgent hogwash. But the damn thing was, nonetheless, always fun.

More »

Wait, she had a record this good in her?

By Alan Scherstuhl

This list of the year's best country albums is assembled with two important premises in mind: First: If the people who record and listen to these records consider them country, than they're damn well country. Purists who argue that country should still sound like '68, '76, '84 or whenever are in the interesting position of being more conservative than Nashville radio.

I have nothing against the opinion that Hank Williams -- or whatever other well-marketed figure of authenticity you prefer -- would love to see Rascal Flatts knocked on their J.C. Penney-endorsing asses. But I also accept that that opinion matters much less than those of the few million people who still actually buy CDs.

Second, Taylor Swift is now beyond country the way that Kanye is beyond hip hop or J.R. is beyond Dallas. She simply is. Red would rank highly here if I were to waste a slot on it, but she belongs on more broadly focused lists, like maybe "Best Things in General in Recent Years."

More »

Garth Brooks, four-sided polygon

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Huey Lewis is a dick. It's not hip to be square -- it's square to be square, the thing that the hip will always fight against. Garth Brooks could never be hip, because he's a master of the square. And since as a music-loving society we're ready to admit in 2012 that hip does not necessarily equate to good, that means we're open to square, which is good because Garth Brooks is good.

Of course, we weren't always so open. In fact, Brooks has been savaged -- even by country fans. There's the studio-hack productions and his hiccuppy voice. His has often seemed to be arena rock that didn't scream it at all. At its wildest it covered Billy Joel and Aerosmith, and loved reverb and the soft-loud dynamics that permeated every single genre of the '90s. In these days where Taylor Swift has a record that flirts with dubstep, and Cowboy Troy has challenged genre barriers as well as racial ones, it's amazing to think that Brooks radicalized country at one point.

But he did.

More »

Colin Young-Wolff

The lineup for Stagecoach 2013 has been announced.

It will be held April 26-28, 2013 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

See also:
*Stagecoach Festival: The Fashion Report
*Stagecoach Festival: The Music
*Johnny Cash's Anti-Semitism Touched On In New Documentary

The headliners are Toby Keith on Friday, April 26, Lady Antebellum on Saturday, April 27, and Zac Brown Band on Sunday, April 28.

Other highlights include Jeff Bridges & The Abiders (more than a Lebowski cover band, rest assured), Dwight Yoakam, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

The full-lineup is below.

More »

Production still from "My Father and the Man in Black"

By Peter Gerstenzang

"It wasn't the drugs and arrests and no-shows that broke Saul and Johnny up," says Jonathan Holiff. He's the son of Saul Holiff, the manager of Johnny Cash in the 1960s and early '70s, a time that included the prison LPs, the jail stays, and Cash's reawakened fundamentalism. "It was an ideological battle that really tore the relationship apart."

Holiff is the director of My Father And The Man In Black, which opens in New York on Sunday. (Sadly, no L.A. showings are scheduled.) In the riveting, excoriating documentary he recreates the relationship between Cash and Jonathan's driven, distant dad, who committed suicide in 2005. The agonizing story, which mixes various film stocks, recorded phone calls between Cash and Saul, and some filmed re-creations, gets all the nasty Cash stuff right. The drugs, the divorces, even -- gulp -- hints of anti-semitism.

More »

By Chris Gray

The passion of Randy Travis has been one of the saddest and most compelling musical dramas of the past year. One of Nashville's most beloved and seemingly mild-mannered singers (now a North Texan) has suddenly gone full-on Johnny Paycheck, brawling in church parking lots, popping out to buy smokes while missing his pants, and taking an asphalt nap on a deserted Texas highway. Even when he's nowhere in sight, his truck turns up flipped over in a deserted field.

There's just something so damn country about the whole thing - except, of course, Keith Urban or Dierks Bentley would sooner record a One Direction song than this series of scenarios that were once tailor-made for Music Row. So thank God for Twitter.

More »

If David Allan Coe's "If That Aint Country" comes on after Andy Sheppard has had more than a few Coors Lights (his favorite brand), he'll sing along without reservation to the line: Tryin' like the devil to find the Lord / Workin' like a nigger for my room and board. The 24-year old lead singer of Gypsy River Haunts, who plays ghostly, rollicking Western music, may have incredibly poor taste in the lyrics he quotes, but he's more country than racist.

Both he and guitarist Dustin Hollenbeck are L.A. transplants by way of Idaho. Speaking with them in the upstairs room of the Echo as rockers in cowboy hats jam downstairs, their pastoral roots show. Sheppard, who is small with shoulder-length hair, wears horn-rimmed glasses and jade bracelets, uses words like "spooker" (an affecting song) and writes songs with titles like "Rattlesnake Railroad." He lives in a studio without a kitchen sink and does all his dishes "pup style."

More »