Path to winners circle paved with belief

The message of this year’s Country Music Assn. Awards was obvious: Believe.

But believe in what?

In bestowing three awards Monday on Brooks & Dunn’s sentimentally uplifting ballad “Believe,” the CMA’s 6,000 voters want the answer to be an affirmation of the power of happy music to make life better.

It’s a theme that runs through much of country music these days and was reflected across various categories, including male vocal winner Keith Urban’s “Better Life,” album and musical-event winner Brad Paisley’s afterlife-anticipating hit “When I Get Where I’m Going” and female vocal and Horizon Award winner Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel.”

But in another sense, the 40th annual award show, held at the Gaylord Entertainment Center in downtown Nashville, gave testament to the power of believing in the principles espoused by the country music establishment, and that for those who do, awards shall be thine.

Entertainer of the year award winner Kenny Chesney believes. Many people felt he was shortchanged last year in that category, in which a performer’s record sales and concert attendance both are taken into consideration. Chesney lost to Urban shortly after Chesney’s brief celebrity marriage to Renee Zellweger unraveled. Not the life image Nashville wants to salute. This year, it was Urban with the personal drama overshadowing his musical achievement, having checked himself into a rehabilitation center last month. But he still came away with his second straight male vocalist win.

Underwood certainly believed, with her gentle twang, full-throttle pipes and “American Idol” exposure more than enough to win the hearts, and votes, of Music City. Of the female vocal contenders, only Gretchen Wilson demonstrated anything resembling subtlety during the three-hour show, and she went home empty-handed.

There’s nothing subtle about the Brooks & Dunn song, written by Ronnie Dunn and Craig Wiseman (who also co-wrote Tim McGraw’s equally philosophically superficial hit “Live Like You Were Dying”). The song stresses the importance of believing even when life doesn’t go according to plan. The underlying assumption is that religious faith keeps the song’s protagonist from giving up despite potentially spirit-crushing life losses, but it’s consciously never spelled out, thus avoiding the possibility of offending anyone, anywhere.

What’s missing is any hint of the uncomfortable but very human feelings of doubt, anger, powerlessness or confusion that most people struggle with under those circumstances. Those are the deep emotions that run rife through Johnny Cash’s posthumous “American V: A Hundred Highways,” an eligible album that didn’t generate a single CMA nomination.

The country music industry, driven by the wants and needs of country radio, in recent years has emphasized making listeners feel good rather than supporting music connected with life’s emotional and philosophical complexities.

That’s the realm of art, and award shows, whatever lip service they pay to recognizing artistic achievement, are inextricably linked to commerce, and none more so than the CMAs, described ad nauseam Monday as “country music’s biggest night.”

What was missing were the words “for promotion and advertising.” Most of the show’s performances weren’t of the songs in contention but of the performer’s current or next single. That creates a feeling less of honoring what’s best -- or even most popular -- in music of the previous year and more about priming the pump for the home stretch of fourth-quarter retail sales.

Where was the heart, much less the soul, that makes country music such a vibrant reflection of human experience?

That came at the end, with Vince Gill’s performance of the socially minded song “What You Give Away,” a track from his ambitious new four-CD set, “These Days,” that hasn’t been released as a single. In that moment, the emphasis was on inspiring listeners to look within and decide whether their beliefs about making the world a better place are truly in harmony with their attitudes and actions.

For a moment, the show was about art rather than commerce or push-button emotion. For a moment, at least, that’s what you could believe.

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randy.lewis@latimes.com