Not Just Nashville Now : Country Woos a New Generation

If you believe everything that’s been printed in our daily journals you’d think show business was down the tubes this summer: dismal ticket sales at movie houses, depressed record sales, dreary concert business.

For some, the sun never shone.

But other journals of truth report nothing but good news about one form of popular entertainment.

We’re talking country.

Consider:

* With 26 million adult listeners last year, country music was No. 1 in radio listenership, ahead of adult contemporary, ahead of rock.

* Another study last spring showed that in all radio markets, country tied with Top 40 music in popularity.

* CBS Television claims 27 million Americans tonight will watch the 25th annual Country Music Awards from 9 to 11 p.m. The show will feature such young faces--the neo-traditionalists some call them; Garth Brooks and Clint Black, for example--who have helped pull country out of its post-”Urban Cowboy” doldrums.

What has turned country into a winner--at least so far this year--is both a victory for modern marketing and for the instant power of television. Marlboro Man has met the Suburban Cowboy.

When country music was young and trying to break into national sales and network radio in the ‘20s and ‘30s, its hustlers had to be inventive. Record companies and radio rarely open their doors to “hillbilly” music. Guilelessly the record promoters paid railroad porters to place country records into the juke boxes of saloons and diners near train stations.

Now the selling job has less guile but a lot more slick. It’s taken a few years, but it’s paying off. Ten years ago, the Nashville Network tried something daring: a cable service featuring country performers and musicians, talk shows like the now-venerable, 90-minute “Nashville Tonight,” dance shows like “Club Dance” and even a cooking show, “Country Kitchen,” featuring “The Brady Bunch’s” Florence Henderson. More recently, Country Music Television started up, like MTV, devoted to music videos.

By getting country music on cable, country’s marketers finally found the teen-agers and young adults that all television programmers lust after.

Some more kernels of truth:

* Nielsen research shows that last year’s Country Music Awards show drew 60% more teen viewers than in the previous year.

* A recent Billboard-Arbitron study indicated strong gains in radio listenership for country music, especially among teen-agers and 18- to 34-year-olds.

* When rock music took over radio in the late ‘50s and ‘60s there were only 65 country radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. Today there are 2,200.

Until country went on cable, almost a whole generation of Americans were lost to country music. The young radio listeners of the ‘60s and ‘70s were largely captured by rock and pop music performers.

The only consistently ongoing country show on TV during those years was “Hee Haw” with Roy Clark and his group of countrified, almost stereotypical performers. Now “Hee Haw,” too, faces reality and is about to undergo cosmetic surgery. More about that later.

The only time country music captured some national audience was in the brief “Urban Cowboy” craze of the ‘70s, a dress-up fad based upon a forgettable movie.

What we have now is country hunk. The lyrics are pretty much the same. The music is a bit more dynamic, a lot more amplified. And the look is clearly more Guess! than overalls. A whole new generation of young artists have become the major record sellers, concert attractions and TV stars, people like Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, Triscia Yearwood and Kelly Willis.

While Willie Nelson was off fighting the IRS, a new generation of performers came along.

People like Ed Benson of Nashville’s Country Music Assn. believe that the new popularity is more than the filling of one void with another musical style. “Like the nation as a whole,” he says, “country music reflects a return to basic values. It’s the most eloquent statement of American traditional values.” It’s a misconception, he and others say, to think of country music as rural. Country’s demographic scientists have research showing that the country-music audience emulates the total U.S. population better than any other form of music: It appeals to all age groups and to all socioeconomic classes.

That’s arguable. There is still a scarcity of minority performers among the traditional (Charlie Pride and Johnny Rodriguez are exceptions) and even among the neo-traditionalists.

The syndicated television show “Hee Haw” has been the most apparent, enduring image of country entertainment. It may even start to reflect basic American audience changes.

The one-hour show has been on television 23 years, the last 20 in syndication. It’s on 52 weeks a year, half live, half repeats.

Its performers and its audience, however, have aged. That’s why next January almost everything about the show will change, according to its longtime producer, Sam Louvello.

In its 23 years, “Hee Haw” has failed to capture new viewers, while holding onto its older audience spread across 205 stations in 187 markets. With the exception of Roy Clark, everything about the show will change. The set will look like a Las Vegas showroom rather than the back 40.

The new performers are all young, mostly new to TV but familiar to regional audiences, such as singer Alice Ripley of San Diego.

“Many are so young they don’t know what an outhouse is,” Louvello says.

And he will have the requisite “hunks.” One is Pedro Tomas, a singer-dancer-comedian originally from Cuba.

Maybe “Hee Haw” is about to show what some of country’s most ardent backers claim: that it truly reflects the demographics of the entire nation.