Bill Silvers' advice is right on the money; your best choices for cheap,
basic coverage of Wills' best-known stuff is the Essential or Vol.2 of the
Tiffany Transcriptions. There are 6 songs that appear on both CDs; the
Essential gives you more - another 14 songs - than the Tiffany CD (8), but
a) some of them are alternate takes and b) some are less essential than the
non-duplicates on Tiffany. Personally, I listen to the Tiffany CD more
than the Essential, except when I'm after the very first version of a song
that appears on both.
I don't doubt that if someone were to ask for the names of 3 male and 3
female artists who, taken together, "represented a contemporary
alt.country esthetic," the nature of the difficulty would be obvious:
there's too much variety for such a small list to accurately capture even
the biggest trends or groupings. The same is, believe it or not, pretty
much true of mainstream country as well. Gill, Strait, Jackson, McGraw,
Brooks & Dunn, Chesnutt, Brooks, Byrd, JMM, Diamond Rio - none of these are
especially hard to distinguish if you spend a little time listening, and
none makes a very good substitute for any of the others as an esthetic
representative (except for maybe Chesnutt & Byrd, and even then, that's a
big maybe). Same on the female side. BTW, though Faith Hill is certainly
a huge star, the notion that she's less pop-oriented than Trisha Yearwood
kind of blows my mind; personally, I'd say it's the other way around.
As for the notion that:
>Hank Williams' work has a greater influence on many alt.country artists
from Rank & File to The >Waco Brothers than on Garth Brooks
all I'll say for now is that this is Alt.Country Fallacy #1, unless
"influence" is being used to indicate something so nebulous and subjective
as to reside primarily, if not exclusively, in the mind of the beholder -
in which case it's a statement about the maker's attitude (informed or
otherwise), not a statement about the music. In any event, Cheryl's notion
about the most fruitful treatment of a time line - that is, the
consideration of country styles, rather than trying to narrow it down to
just alt.country WTI - makes a lot of sense.
Jon Weisberger Kenton County, KY [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.fuse.net/jonweisberger/
