Lambchop
That’s not so much a shift as a distillation: Pianist Cramer was the right- (and left- ) hand man of the late Chet Atkins. Atkins has been held largely responsible for the death of country music; few would argue that he wasn’t a prodigiously gifted musician, but some have never forgiven him for injecting his own preternatural mellowness into the RCA country stable in the 1960s, changing the way the music was made for many years to come. The aesthetic he birthed came to be known as countrypolitan, a smooth, urbane (i.e., less hillbilly) strain of country, linked to the mainstream “beautiful music” of Percy Faith and Ray Conniff by soothing tempos and sophisticated instrumentation but still identifiably country by virtue of its lingering–and some would argue intensified–pathos. Owen Bradley, whose recordings for Patsy Cline in the early 60s are archetypes of the style, and Billy Sherrill, best known for his work with Tammy Wynette, aided and abetted.
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Similarly, it appeared for a while that Lambchop had located the exact coordinates where countrypolitan and 70s soul converged, possibly by mapping the movements of the string sections on their favorite records. That amalgam got its most complete airing on their 1998 LP What Another Man Spills, on which they covered Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love” and Frederick Knight’s “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” about a man crying himself to sleep at night because all his friends have abandoned him. That sort of devastating soul dovetails with what Lambchop does, and thankfully it’s part of Is a Woman too. Live, the big band put some funky muscle behind “D. Scott Parsley,” revealing its debt to Archie Bell & the Drells. By the end of it, Wagner seemed to be fighting the urge to get up out of his chair and get down.
