Missed Opportunities for Breath of Fresh Air

Sales and quality are not synonymous. That would appear to be a truism, but you’d never know it from looking at the Grammy nominations in the country category.

Faith Hill’s “Breathe” album has sold almost 5 million copies in the U.S. and generated six nominations, including best overall song of the year and best country song, for the hyperventilating title track written by Holly Lamar and Stephanie Bentley. The album even produced a second country song nomination, for “The Way You Love Me.”

In the country song competition, Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers’ “I Hope You Dance” is the class of a weak field that also includes Vince Gill’s “Feels Like Love” and Don Cook and David Malloy’s title song from Billy Gilman’s album “One Choice.”

In a year that offered rich and probing works from Emmylou Harris, Shelby Lynne, Allison Moorer and Johnny Cash, the album category is full of unadventurous choices from big names (Gill, Alan Jackson) or big sellers (Hill, Lee Ann Womack’s breakthrough “I Hope You Dance”). Trisha Yearwood’s “Real Live Woman” is the one nomination that consistently reached deeply enough to warrant a country album nod.

Results are a bit more encouraging in the female vocal category, with three of five choices (Dolly Parton, Yearwood and Womack) going to heartfelt performances. Had academy members listened beyond Hill’s hit singles, they would have stumbled across the one track on “Breathe” worthy of a nomination, her effectively understated vocal performance of Bruce Springsteen’s “If I Should Fall Behind.”

The male vocal category also is a hodgepodge of the predictable (Gill, Tim McGraw), the novel (Gilman) and the honorable (Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakam).