The Elephant In The Room

[koganbot]

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and

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[koganbot]

John Morthland in his Best Of Country Music blurbs six Reeves albums - all compilations - which are six more than Kenny Rogers gets.* Morthland probably gives us a reasonably good representation of the sorts of country music that rock critics were likely to like in 1984. But though five of the six Reeves blurbs are substantial (i.e., several sentences), Morthland doesn't really have much to say about the music beyond the adjective "mellifluous" and the quoted description "a touch of velvet," with references to "grainy" and "honky-tonk" and "hard-core country" on the one hand and "countrypolitan" and "schmaltz" and the "Nashville sound" on the other, the latter predominating and not presented by Morthland as too inviting. Morthland does mention (twenty years after Reeves' death) "the Reeves' cult - if a following as large as his can be thus described." And a few sentences later: "his mind-boggling popularity, which continues to grow to this day," presumably referring to the U.S. more than to Africa.

Was Reeves as or more important than James Brown in Ghana and Nigeria or merely more often cited and praised? I'm thinking that Brown's musical structures could be in effect even for people who don't think much about his music (just as the Yardbirds' can be in effect for punks and indie people who've barely listened to them).

*If the index is correct, the single mention of Rogers is to note that The Smithsonian Collection Of Classic Country Music entirely ducks (my word) the sort of music Rogers and ilk made.