COUNTRY’S NEW STARS OUTSHINED

Are country music traditionalists winning the battle but losing the war?

Sales figures--and Monday night’s 19th annual Country Music Assn. Awards show in Nashville--suggest that is exactly what is happening.

The traditionalists have argued for years that the success of crossover-minded pop-and-country artists like Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Olivia Newton-John was diluting the integrity and heart of country music.

So you can imagine how the back-to-basics crowd whooped and hollered during Monday night’s nationally televised ceremony as most of the key awards went to singers who deal in country’s bluegrass and honky-tonk roots: Ricky Skaggs, George Strait, Reba McEntire and the Judds.

Skaggs was named entertainer of year and his group won top instrumental band honors; Strait was honored for best male singer and best album; McEntire was declared best female singer, and the Judds were saluted for best single (“Why Not Me?”) and as best vocal group.

This added up to more good-old-boy (and girl) color in the acceptance speeches than anything since “Smokey and the Bandit.”

“I hope it never gets to the place where country music stations won’t play country music because if it does, we’re all in trouble,” said Skaggs, 31, in a tearful acceptance speech at the Grand Ole Opry.

Skaggs, whose last album was appropriately titled “Country Boy,” thanked his fans and family but “most of all I thank my Lord Jesus for loving me and making my blessing come true.”

Naomi Judd, the mother in the mother-daughter duo, said, “I’ve never been so happy in my whole life.” She also assured the audience that she and daughter Wynonna had been so nervous about the awards show that they “flossed, shaved and gargled” for the occasion.

McEntire, named top female vocalist for the second year, confided that she likes to “sing better than eat.”

Strait, a former Texas rancher who has the well-scrubbed look of an old-time cowboy hero, confessed after the telecast that his success comes from just “singin’ the songs I love to sing.”

And on and on.

But the celebration was dampened by the realities of today’s country music world.

Annual sales of county records have dipped from the nearly $600-million mark of 1981 to about $430 million last year, and there is little of the charisma or vision among this new group of country stars--however traditional their music--that would generate a sales revitalization.

Skaggs is an earnest, hard-working and technically outstanding musician whose music still reflects the vitality of his early bluegrass training. Still, the most encouraging thing about his victory was that it kept the uninspired quartet Alabama from winning the association’s most coveted award for the fourth straight year.

Skaggs offers little of the character or radical edge of the truly great country figures, from Johnny Cash and George Jones to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.

Strait and McEntire are respectable singers, but their vocal phrasing and choice of material also lack the special artistic vision that is associated with such major country figures as Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris.

The gap between this unspectacular new crop of country talent and the gifted older generation was underscored when Cash, Haggard, Jennings and Nelson teamed up Monday on a salute to Nelson’s songwriting contributions.

But the only one of the four who received an award during the 90-minute broadcast was Nelson--and that wasn’t a CMA trophy. Nelson was saluted by the Future Farmers of America for his role in putting together last month’s Farm Aid benefit concert, which was designed to rally national support for financially troubled farmers.

The issue facing country music isn’t traditional versus crossover, but the absence of exciting new stars.

Could the lack of invigorating young talent be the reason one of the nominees for most promising new artist went--gulp--to 55-year-old Ray Charles?

Though his country albums in the early ‘60s were among the most influential country tracks ever recorded, Charles was apparently nominated for the Horizon Award because he achieved his first No. 1 country single only recently.

The nomination put the association’s 7,500 voters in a dilemma. Would they look sillier if they gave him the award after all this time or if they gave it to someone else? Alas, they did award it to Sawyer Brown, a slick group that vaulted to success after appearances on the “Star Search” TV program.

The bluegrass duo of Flatt & Scruggs was named to the association’s Hall of Fame and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless America” was judged best song.