Classic Country Cover week – Day 2
I’ve fallen in love with Dolly so many times over now and for so many different reasons, but the first time I fell in love with her was while listening to the Trio record with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. I played that album and this song so many times and realized how I crave female harmony and how badly I wanted to be singing more at the time. Dolly is a duh for country cover week, but it feels important to me to remember a time when I was only just beginning to dive into her brilliance.

Classic Country Cover week – Day 3
When I listen to the album Redheaded Stranger, I feel like I’m Willem DaFoe in that scene from Boondocks Saints, dancing around to a gunfight in my brain. This album is so crazy. And Willie Nelson is my hero for putting things like this into the world. This song is a particularly beautiful one on the album and is also probably the best song choice I’ve ever experienced for a wedding first dance

Classic Country Cover week - Day 4!
When I first started listening to country music, Loretta Lynn seemed fascinating and intimidating to me. I initially had trouble imagining her world as she wrote these amazingly sassy songs about relationships. I also thought a lot about what feminism looked like when she wrote these tunes vs. what it’s looked like for me. After digging into the context, the videos, the songs, after reading Coal Miners Daughter, it became almost factual to me that Loretta Lynn is SUCH A BADASS - Smart, creative, innovative, so strong - these are the reasons I admire her and play her songs

Classic Country Cover week - Day 5

Lefty Frizzell had this slippery silky way of singing that completely blew my mind when I first heard it. His song “You can go on your way now” has so many notes jam packed into that title line, but the way that he sings it sounds like this beautiful natural massive exhale. I chose this song, however, because Lefty had such a huge influence on the idea of honky-tonk and this is definitely a honky-tonk song

Classic Country Cover week - Day 6
I first learned about Tom T. Hall at a show in Louisville KY where artists played his songs on a collection of his instruments. The stories that came out in his writing were amazing to me. Now that I think about songwriting so often, I’m even more impressed by his unmatched craft in writing great songs. Listen to “the year that Clayton Delaney died” and “watermelon wine,” but this song about going to Memphis grabbed me so fast and I’ve never shaken the need to listen to it

Classic Country Cover week - last day!
If there’s any one person in classic country who I’ve learned about singing from, it’s Patsy Cline. I straight up could not admire her more - So classy, so much skill - she sat so comfortably in such a fusion of styles. Apparently she wasn’t all that fond of this song before she recorded it, but I think she liked it better when she made it her own and turned it into her first hit single. This is the first song I learned when I was preparing to play my first nursing home gig. 2 1/2 years later and I still play it pretty much every single time and I probably always will. Cause I mean, who doesn’t like this song?

as a sidenote – putting together this little series has been enormously fun. I love paying tribute to totally influential musicians and I feel like I got to let out a little bit of my inner fan girl this week. Thank you all for listening!