Country Music may still be about “three chords and the truth,” but writing about it has migrated from typewriters, notepads and Wite-Out to a newer world of hourly deadlines, blogs and video cameras. Each era has its hurdles and shortcuts, its perspective on how to best inform the public about the music it loves. And few representing three distinct periods in Country Music journalism are as equipped to share this knowledge as the trio assembled for this Generations feature.
Cindy Watts, 31, is a staff entertainment writer at Nashville’s hometown daily, The Tennessean. Brian Mansfield, 46, covers Nashville for the print and online editions of USA Today. And Hazel Smith, 75, has been a fixture in Music City since she began work in public relations at Glaser Sound Studios. Famous for coining the term “the Outlaws” in the 1970s, she now writes the “Hot Dish” column for CMT.com, contributes to Country Weekly and reports on Country Music for WFMS-FM/Indianapolis.
How has writing about Country Music changed?
SMITH When I started, I went to all the sessions. I walked in the studio; nobody kept me out. I walked in the offices; nobody kept me out. I knew the first name of every musician and every songwriter. The last issue of CMA Close Up had 45 pictures of artists. I knew two. Where are all these people coming from? I know what has changed the whole scene of the music business is “American Idol.” Carrie (Underwood) and Kellie (Pickler) are two good examples. They did their thing on the show and Nashville signed them and they just let them go out on the road. And more power to them. But there are others, like Sarah Buxton, who just got an album out and she’s waited five years. Josh Thompson is a great act. Are they going to happen? I don’t know. But we can’t write about people that we don’t know.
MANSFIELD The biggest difference I see is the places people get their information. When Hazel started, if you were a Country fan, you got your information from the records, the radio and a few very specific Country Music magazines. The national press wasn’t paying a lot of attention to it. My professional career really coincided with the big explosion of Country Music in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, so there were suddenly lots of places that needed stuff about Country Music. There were all sorts of music magazines. There was always Country Music Parade, Country Song Roundup and Country Music, but then you had Country Weekly, Country America and Country Music Today. You could go into a Kroger in Nashville and there would be six or seven magazines devoted to nothing but Country Music there. Suddenly it was bigger business. Stars were selling more records than they ever had. That’s the way I got work.
WATTS When I got started writing at the Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro, the only computers that had Internet were the computers that were against the wall. You had to wait in line to get to one of the computers that had Internet. If I wanted to call a record label, I couldn’t look it up in the phone book because it (the listing) wasn’t there. So little things like that — being able to look up Arista Nashville’s telephone number for the first time or being able to go online and pull up a bio of somebody you’re not sure about, having the ability at your fingertips to go and read something about them to help you make the decision as to whether or not this is somebody you want to devote your time to writing about, is a big difference.
What role do blogs and Twitter play in your work?
SMITH I don’t blog. I write my column for CMT online. To me, people that sit around and blog all the time ain’t got enough to do. I’ve got everything I can do. I do a TV show in my kitchen (“CMT’s Southern Fried Flicks with Hazel Smith”) and I also report the news daily to WFMS. And you have to tell them the truth because, just like with everybody else, when I say something, they’re going to check it out. But they know they can believe what I say because I’m pretty much right most of the time.
WATTS It’s a challenge to get your job done and learn all the new technology like Twitter and how to do the new Web updates and build photo shows and run all the links so that when somebody Googles Reba McEntire, The Tennessean story on her shows up near the top. The job at a newspaper now is not just about writing stories. It’s about making all those pieces of technology work together to make a product that we can sell.
MANSFIELD I was probably one of the first music journalists in Nashville that was using the online stuff on a regular basis. This was back in the ’90s. New Country was one of the first major Country Music publications to launch a Web site. Today I do a lot with Facebook and Twitter. I look at all of those as part of what I do, as part of my personal “brand,” for lack of a better term.
How much of being a success at what you do is based on writing and research skills, and how much is based on people skills?
MANSFIELD My people skills are not anywhere near as good as Hazel’s. I’m more of a music geek. And I’m a research fanatic. That’s one of the big differences in the ways Hazel and I approach things. She is coming from that love of people, where my approach is more cerebral. When I got into this, I noticed that there weren’t many people writing about Country Music that really understood it from the standpoint that its audience did. There was Hazel, and there was Bob (Oermann), and there was Ed Morris and people like that. But when you got outside of Nashville, you had rock critics who wrote about Country that didn’t really get why it worked for its audience.
WATTS The thing that Miss Hazel does best is that, when she sits down with people, the people she interviews can relate to her — and her readers can relate to her. When I sit down to interview somebody, that’s what I try to do. Country fans are smart people. They can tell when an artist is genuine and they can tell when the person writing a story is full of it.
Who would you consider to be your mentors?
SMITH There was a man named Roger Schutt — “Captain Midnight.” He was a great writer and he knew everything. He was kind of a hero of mine.
MANSFIELD I learned a lot about who the audience is from reading Hazel and watching how she dealt with artists and fans both. From Bob Oermann, I learned a lot about respecting the music form and the history of the music — and really knowing it, not just knowing who’s hot now but really understanding the broader picture. In Country Music, it’s important to know that history, to see the relationship it has with its audience and to see the relationship it has with the culture and how the stories that Country Music tells have changed as America has changed.
WATTS There is certainly more than one kind of music writing. There are two very clear sides. There are people like Brian who dive into it from the component of the music itself versus what Hazel does and what I like to do. I can do reviews and all that other stuff too, but I really want to tell stories. I want to tell Chris Young’s story or Josh Thompson’s story because I think people can relate to their stories. If Country Music fans don’t like the person singing, they’re not going to buy their CD.
Does that element of liking the artist ever keep you from being objective?
MANSFIELD Even if something is really bad, the reader doesn’t want you to go off on it, the way that rock critics have a habit of doing. They feel so protective of the artist. They identify so strongly with the artist that it’s really considered bad manners to just start heaving brickbats at them. That’s one of the challenges, to find that balance to say the things that need to be said in ways that the audience wants to hear. It gets back to your audience. There’s a difference in writing for The Tennessean or Billboard and writing for a fan-based magazine too.
WATTS The Tennessean builds our business on being objective. We have to be objective. But fans love those singers like they are their family members. They aren’t going to be mad at that singer if that singer cuts a bad song; they’re going to be mad at you for writing about it.
SMITH I really pull for people like Kellie Pickler. That young’un has just bought her a million-dollar house and she was raised in a single-wide trailer in North Carolina. I can’t hardly stand it, I’m so proud of her, so I can’t help but to write about her.
As the media in general and music specifically skew more toward digital formats, how has that affected your work?
MANSFIELD It’s still a matter of filtering, deciding what is worth writing about and who you need to talk to. When Country is selling better, it’s easier to get stories placed in bigger publications. That’s one of the things that I love about being a journalist — being able to stand just far enough removed from the industry and watch it go up and down. And reliable sources are as essential as ever for getting behind the story.
SMITH You’ve got to talk to the makeup people. They know everything!
