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Post by rick on Jul 16, 2012 18:33:30 GMT -5
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Post by erik on Jul 16, 2012 18:45:20 GMT -5
You ever get the feeling that we're seeing these "star deaths" happening every other day? Seriously, this is terrible, especially for the country music community (IMHO).
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Post by MokyWI on Jul 16, 2012 19:24:14 GMT -5
"78's to digital downloads", now KITTY was country, unlike Taylor Swift.
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Post by erik on Jul 16, 2012 22:39:20 GMT -5
Quote by mikekoecher:
Yes, but I kind of doubt Taylor even knew who Kitty Wells was...until today, perhaps.
Linda would probably say that Kitty's influence on her is minimal (and in all honesty, Patsy Cline seems to be the childhood influence on Linda in terms of female country singers), but I think that influence can be heard on some tracks on Silk Purse.
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Post by rick on Jul 17, 2012 0:06:17 GMT -5
Quote by mikekoecher: Yes, but I kind of doubt Taylor even knew who Kitty Wells was...until today, perhaps. Linda would probably say that Kitty's influence on her is minimal (and in all honesty, Patsy Cline seems to be the childhood influence on Linda in terms of female country singers), but I think that influence can be heard on some tracks on Silk Purse. Speaking of Patsy, Owen Bradley produced k.d. lang's album "Shadowland." Its closing track was "Honky Tonk Angels Medley" featuring lang with Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee. There is a nice quick snapshot of Patsy toward the end of the video. |
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Post by Richard W on Jul 17, 2012 8:09:40 GMT -5
I actually saw Kitty Wells when I was a child. She was on the Grand Ole Opry bill (along with Jean Shephard) when it came through Des Moines. I went with my mom, who wanted Kitty's autograph. She sent me up to the stage with the only thing she had in her purse to write on -- a book of paper matches. Sure enough, when Kitty spotted this wee, redheaded, freckle-faced kid standing below the stage, she stooped down and signed the book of matches.
Don't know what ever happened to that autograph.
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Post by Tony on Jul 17, 2012 8:40:11 GMT -5
I was never one to hunger after a Kitty Wells record. I saw her in person twice, once on a show with Loretta Lynn, and once at Shoney's in Nashville after attending the CMA Awards. She and her husband occupied a booth and Kitty took her mink stole and spread it across the top of the seat so that she would look like a queen.
There are a couple of references to Kitty Wells in the Ronstadt archive.
In a 1968 interview: "I learned a lot from Kitty Wells and other country singers..."
In a 1969 interview, when asked who are her influences, Ronstadt responded, "Kitty Wells, .." and I thought WTF- I sure don't hear that influence.
But in the Goldmine interview in 1996 when she speaks of the aborted Trio Project, Linda says "I don't mean to demean the girl singers that had been in country music before, but they never appealed to me. I must confess that I wasn't a person who hungered after a Kitty Wells record. With all due respect to Kitty Wells, I was raised as Emmy was; we had a little bit more refined upbringing." And I thought, WTF does Linda know about Kitty Wells upbringing? Kitty always struck me as a very dignified and proper Southern lady, although when my Mom used to play records by her, it would send me out the door.
It sounds like early in her career, when Linda was trying to establish herself as a country singer, she may have misrepresented her true influences to appeal to the rube audience.
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Post by erik on Jul 17, 2012 9:38:22 GMT -5
Obviously since we're talking about a nearly three-decade gap between the Goldmine interview and the ones she gave near the end of the 1960s, Linda's memory may be a tad bit faulty. And as I've said, whatever influence Kitty may have had on her is probably most evident on Silk Purse. But you never know; there may have been times when Linda was tempted to do Kitty's signature song "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" early on in her career.
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Post by rick on Jul 17, 2012 10:44:26 GMT -5
I was never one to hunger after a Kitty Wells record. I saw her in person twice, once on a show with Loretta Lynn, and once at Shoney's in Nashville after attending the CMA Awards. She and her husband occupied a booth and Kitty took her mink stole and spread it across the top of the seat so that she would look like a queen. There are a couple of references to Kitty Wells in the Ronstadt archive. In a 1968 interview: "I learned a lot from Kitty Wells and other country singers..." In a 1969 interview, when asked who are her influences, Ronstadt responded, "Kitty Wells, .." and I thought WTF- I sure don't hear that influence. But in the Goldmine interview in 1996 when she speaks of the aborted Trio Project, Linda says "I don't mean to demean the girl singers that had been in country music before, but they never appealed to me. I must confess that I wasn't a person who hungered after a Kitty Wells record. With all due respect to Kitty Wells, I was raised as Emmy was; we had a little bit more refined upbringing." And I thought, WTF does Linda know about Kitty Wells upbringing? Kitty always struck me as a very dignified and proper Southern lady, although when my Mom used to play records by her, it would send me out the door. It sounds like early in her career, when Linda was trying to establish herself as a country singer, she may have misrepresented her true influences to appeal to the rube audience. Also, Tony (Guest) (am not sure if you are THE TONY PARTRIDGE, or a guest).... in the NPR piece I provided the link to above, it does talk about a) how conservative Kitty Wells was (a polar opposite from Linda), and b) how singers from New York or Los Angeles or other parts of the country had a different experience as women than those in the South. The NPR piece plays a piece of a song about a woman who is divorced (the divorce rate skyrocketed after World War II) and how the woman in the song only saw her child occasionally. It speaks to how powerless women were in the South. Even though Linda grew up in the Southwest, I think her upbringing likely was different from that of Kitty Wells. We all are a product of our where we were from, our upbringing. Some rebel against it, others don't. It doesn't take away from Kitty's artistry, but I can see what Linda was trying to say about her and Emmy's upbringing being different from than of Kitty Wells. Linda and Emmy have certainly been friends long enough to know a lot about each other's lives. One of the nice things for me about the k.d. lang song/video of "Honky Tonk Angels Medley," is seeing someone as right-wing as Minnie Pearl was standing by and watching a clearly androgynous k.d. lang prior to her coming out. At least on the surface, people looked like they had a lot of respect for each other. |
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Post by sliderocker on Jul 17, 2012 13:49:07 GMT -5
There are a couple of references to Kitty Wells in the Ronstadt archive. In a 1968 interview: "I learned a lot from Kitty Wells and other country singers..." In a 1969 interview, when asked who are her influences, Ronstadt responded, "Kitty Wells, .." and I thought WTF- I sure don't hear that influence. But in the Goldmine interview in 1996 when she speaks of the aborted Trio Project, Linda says "I don't mean to demean the girl singers that had been in country music before, but they never appealed to me. I must confess that I wasn't a person who hungered after a Kitty Wells record. With all due respect to Kitty Wells, I was raised as Emmy was; we had a little bit more refined upbringing." And I thought, WTF does Linda know about Kitty Wells upbringing? Kitty always struck me as a very dignified and proper Southern lady, although when my Mom used to play records by her, it would send me out the door. It sounds like early in her career, when Linda was trying to establish herself as a country singer, she may have misrepresented her true influences to appeal to the rube audience. I think it's possible Linda could've gone through a phase early in her career where she may have listened to a lot of country music she had not listened to when she was growing up, in an effort to hone her own country sounds. And maybe she liked some of what she heard for a while but then lost interest as the years passed. I'm sure all of us have liked certain artists at certain periods of time that later on the interest was no longer there and we wondered why we ever liked the artist in the first place. Or maybe her management or record company advised her she needed to do a little name dropping to win over the country audience because they were perceived as being very loyal to the artists in that genre. Country artists rarely had bad things to say about other country artists back in the day. Saying something bad about another country artist could've cost them some of their own fan base. Linda's 1996 Goldmine interview was the same one I believe where she distanced herself from her own past recordings, and I tend to think that dismissal of her own past as well as the dismissal of Wells may have been more of a reflection of who she was at the time - someone who was in her late 40s, and her musical tastes in her 40s appeared to have been different to what her taste in music was like when she was in her 20s. I think Linda saying she and Emmylou had a more refined upbringing than Wells was a poor choice of words as it related to the music. It smacked of being a kind of class snobbery which is something I don't think Linda would've meant as even with a refined upbringing, there are differences in the various life styles and the way one experiences life. Linda grew up in what I would call a stable kind of life whereas Emmylous's father was in the military and always moving around, so even though Linda's and Emmylou's upbringing may have been refined, some of Emmylou's life experiences may have been far different to Linda's. And the time in which they grew up was far different with regard to their life experiences. Wells grew up in a different time (the Depression era of the 1920s and 1930s, just as Linda and Emmylou had grown up in different times (baby boomer generation), just as the country artists (or artists from any of the other genres) grew up in times that were far different to Linda's and Emmylou's upbringing. But, even with Linda's and Emmylou's upbringing being different, their music was also different in sound and production to some of the music Wells released in her lifetime. |
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