Fiona McCannconfesses to being a sucker for country music, as she dials Glen Campbell's phone number
Country music - once reserved for hicks, nerds and one's tragically unhip parents - is suddenly, guitar-twangingly, cool again. Stepping proudly from the country closet one cowboy boot at a time, I'm going to take this opportunity to come out. My country roots go way back - after all, I grew up with my dad bellowing "My name is Sue! How do you do?" as he pottered about the house. This early indoctrination led me to sing Rhinestone Cowboy into my hairbrush instead of I Think We're Alone Now.
It's fair to wonder how a genre that produces song titles such as All My Exes Live in Texas; Get off the Stove, Grandma, You're Too Old to Ride the Range; and If She Hadn't Been So Good Lookin' I Might Have Seen the Train can really be considered to have crossed over into cool. (Admittedly, Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks aren't really helping the country case either.) But there's a sweet aching in a good country song that takes some beating, and there's a good reason why it might endear itself to Irish sensibilities: if the legendary Glen Campbell is to be believed, much of what country music is about is storytelling, our national pastime.
"Great stories start with great opening lines. 'I'm a lineman for the county' - what a great way to start a song," says Campbell, who speaks with a slow, sonorous drawl and breaks into song in every second line of conversation. "There's a longing in country music that can soften even the rockiest heart," he adds, remembering that the first time he heard By the Time I Get to Phoenix, written by Jimmy Webb, it made him cry. In fact, it made him so homesick for Arkansas that he got into his car and drove home, which took two days. "That was a long drive," he says, "but I said to myself: 'Any song that makes me cry, I tell you, I'm going to record it.' "
What is it in country music that makes even grown men cry? Campbell can't say, exactly, and he adds that not all of the great "country" hits are even strictly country. "I don't really classify Wichita Lineman as country. Jimmy Webb put more changes to it than what we call three-chord country music. He took it a step farther; he used the lyrics, the hurt, the 'I want to go home', and made it a little smoother."
Whatever he did, it worked, and songs such as Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Rhinestone Cowboy put Campbell in the country-music hall of fame. With four decades of hits under his belt, he can pick and choose where he wants to play, which is why it's all the more wonderful that he's performing tomorrow at the Midlands Music Festival, in Mullingar.
He's joined by a host of top acts, among them Canada's Be Good Tanyas, who have seduced critics across the globe with their soft harmonies. Frazey Ford, one of the band's three vocalists, says she finds the country label curious. "It's almost like, just by accident, I ended up being in a band which gets called country, but I don't particularly see it as country. It's like the way you can't particularly detect your own accent," she says.
She admits that country music has strongly influenced her work, however, despite her best efforts. "I grew up listening to my mom singing country music and singing Emmylou Harris all the time, then I pursued music that was more like soul and trip hop. But when I was in my early 20s and started writing songs, they all came out with this countryish flair - so it was something I tried to get away from and then it came through anyway."
Like Campbell, she is reluctant to bind her music too firmly to the country category. "What is country?" asks Ford. "What is any of this music, when music crosses over in so many places? All this music is tied together."
And she concedes that, despite its being maligned, country has somehow crept over to cool again, helped along by artists such as Gillian Welch - also on the Midlands festival line-up - whose backing vocals for Ryan Adams, the angsty roots rocker, earned legions of converts.
"Maybe 10 years ago you had to really know about country music to know about people like Lucinda Williams and Emmylou. But now they're much bigger, much more popular in the mainstream, much better known by a younger crowd - which is awesome, because their music is great. Anything that stretches away from the mainstream is always refreshing."
As a friend reminded me, when country was last cool, Elvis still had two names. Who knows how long we'll get to hog the limelight this time?
Midlands Music Festival is at Belvedere House, Mullingar, today and tomorrow. See www.midlands musicfestival.ie