Williams Puts Money Where His Mouth Is

You knew it had to happen, once they got on the networks and hit the charts, Garth and Travis and Trisha, that almost everyone else would want to cozy up to country.

The ebb and flow of the mainstream.

Crossover country.

As sure as Newton’s Third Law, there is now an equal and opposite action to almost anything Nashville.

What we have is a trend on top of a trend, pop and mainstream artists moving South and West.

Deborah Brauner, the associate producer of the cable-TV nighttime talk and variety program “Nashville Now,” and the person who books that show’s guests, says that while the show has always had a mix of country and mainstream acts, the calls are coming in heavily from agents lusting after the audience that watches The Nashville Network.

Paul Corbin, TNN’s director of programming, sees what’s happening somewhat differently. “Country music is mainstream,” he says, “all else is fringe. Passing fringe.”

Singer Andy Williams may know something other pop vocalists may soon learn. He’s moving almost everything he owns to Branson, Mo., the little town that’s rich with theaters owned, operated and performed in by several top country performers.

Williams has sold off his La Cienega office building where his many separate businesses were headquartered, sold his New York residence, and is putting more than $10 million of his own money into the Andy Williams Moon River Theater just off Highway 76 in Branson, is building the W.H. McGuffey (as in reader) “strictly healthy food” restaurant 100 yards downstream (the Moon River runs through the property) and eventually will put up a hotel nearby as well as his home.

He’ll open the Moon River Theater on May 1, will perform his regular two-hour mainstream nightclub act there twice a day, six times a week for six months a year, then book whatever dates remain open.

“I’ve never worked so hard before,” he says, “but I do get one day off each week and there’s a golf course nearby and two tough courses 45 minutes away.”

Williams is the first non-country act to build a theater in Branson, but despite the locale and despite the fact his recent album, “Nashville,” did well although he hasn’t yet heard from the accountants, Williams is not planning to stray too far into country. He’ll do his standards and maybe some of the tunes from his album which he recorded last year with Nashville-only musicians.

He’s not a country performer, he insists, he’s just someone else who happens to be going back to a small town that’s somewhat like Wall Lake, Iowa, where he grew up. He’s not changing the act, the songs or the singer, just his address.

Others may have small-town crossover ambitions too.

Singer Debbie Reynolds may be doing the same, opening a theater in Branson, performing on a scale similar to Williams’ ambitious schedule and opening a museum for her Hollywood memorabilia there.

And magician David Copperfield reportedly will soon be doing two weeks in Branson.

You go where the audiences are and with 5 million visitors a year, Branson has become the Middle America mecca.

“Nashville Now’s” Brauner believes that if the nightly talk show were in Los Angeles or New York it might get more pitches from mainstream performers who tend to live and work in those two cities. But it’s getting its share. The show has attracted Wayne Newton, John Denver, Lou Diamond Phillips and his Pipe Fitters band, Cybill Shepherd, Jay Leno, James Garner, David Keith, Jimmie Walker, Steve Allen and even Yakov Smirnoff, the mainstreamer by way of the Volga.

Even before the current heated activity, country and mainstream artists were known to cross over: Tammy Wynette and the English rap group KLF recorded an album, as did Ricky Skaggs and James Taylor, Buck Owens and Ringo Starr.

One Hollywood music executive indicated that the peripatetic Paul Simon has plans to do Nashville next.

Ken Kragen, whose career serves as a sort of bookend for two country music fads--he represents Kenny Rogers and Travis Tritt--also sees indications of mainstreamers moving where the current action is. But it’s not so much artists crossing over to country, he theorizes, as it is audiences doing the crossing, with the audiences following the artists, whether on two country cable networks or all the way to Nashville or Branson.

And with a reported five movies being developed with country music acts, a lot more audience shifting may be coming up.

Paul Corbin of TNN finds all this Newtonian activity as a sign of general unhappiness with pop songs and a recognition of country’s stability and the directness of its lyrics. He sees an amusing side to all of this activity. Before he moved over to TNN in 1983 he was an executive with various public broadcasting stations, the “resident chip kicker,” as he slurred it.

“I’d go into these meetings and people would talk about broadening the PBS audience and finding new blue-collar, middle-American audiences and I’d tell them you do it ‘through their music, you fools.’ ” It took a lot of persuasion and several years but finally he got the Grand Ole Opry on PBS and then sold the network on the younger-based “Austin City Limits” music show.

Now he’s arranged to bring early versions of that show to TNN starting in April as “Austin Encore” and a new series from that show’s producers called “The Texas Connection.”

With 42 different formats on TNN--including the “Country Kitchen” cooking show hosted by Florence Henderson--that makes one more niche for country followers to fill, the music of down-home Texas.

Maybe Corbin is right. Country is more mainstream than mainstream and everything else is just a fringe in passage.