As usual this year’s Country Music Festival in Grant Park offers the only consistently themed block of music programming during the Taste of Chicago. But within the broader genre the lineup is as big a hodgepodge as any in recent memory. The Petrillo Music Shell (Columbus and Jackson) headliners are pretty much all Nashville assembly-line products, with the notable exception of Loretta Lynn. There will be a few quality acts performing on the Taste Stage (at Balbo and Columbus), while Sunday’s program is being billed as an “Afternoon of ‘Old’ Country.”
Dayna Malow earned a degree in jazz vocal studies from the University of Miami, sang with the Chicago jump blues act Speakeasy Swing, fronted the Milwaukee cover band Orphans, and performed in an a cappella musical called Klub Kokomo. But on her debut album, Anywhere but Here (Jabberwocky), she’s singing bland pop country. Throw enough darts, one of them might stick.
4:15 PM SHANNON RAYE & THE DIAMONDBACK BAND
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According to her bio this singer from Crown Point, Indiana, “has a more contemporary country music style that contains influences from traditional country music, pop, rock and classical music.”
While this mystical Texan has written a few classics, such as “Dallas” and “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown,” I appreciate him best when he’s applying his ethereal warble to tunes by others–provided he can remember the words. Like George Jones, he can transform a song just by singing it, imbuing it with different shades of meaning every time he so much as bends a note. On his most recent album, One Endless Night (Windcharger)–a gorgeous piece of work masterfully produced by Buddy Miller–his voice is one of the most beautiful sounds in all of American music.
The greatest living female singer in country music got a booster shot of exposure last month when the White Stripes enlisted her to open a New York gig. But Loretta Lynn has nothing to prove to anyone. She’s led a legend’s life, working her way up from the one-room log cabin where she was raised in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, to become country’s most popular singer for several decades. Her 2000 album, Still Country (Audium), isn’t her best, but she delivers the songs with fighting spirit and sass. “Working Girl,” a tune written by Matraca Berg and Randy Scruggs, challenges media-driven notions of female beauty–“Well, they say they represent me / In the fashion magazines / Well, honey all I see / Is these girls don’t look like me”–with candor that recalls Lynn’s blunt originals in the late 60s and 70s. Whether throwing down against a drunk louse on “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” getting feisty with a female interloper on “Fist City,” asserting her independence on “I Wanna Be Free,” or celebrating the freedom of birth control in “The Pill,” she’s never been anyone’s pawn in Music City and she’s followed no one’s rules but her own. As she insisted on a 1971 hit, “If you’re looking at me / You’re looking at country.” It’s too bad so few artists in Nashville have the gumption to follow her lead.
1:45 PM GIN PALACE JESTERS
