Web Posted: 06/04/2006
12:00 AM CDT
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NEW YORK, N.Y. — The American flag behind the drummer seemed to flutter to the beat of the honky-tonk music while a singer in a cowboy hat crooned about heartache and booze to a crowd that could feel his pain.
Except for the yellow cabs glimpsed through the window and the New York Giants football atop a speaker, this could have been a Friday night anywhere in the American heartland.
But the cowboy in question, Alex Battles, frontman for the country band Whisky Rebellion, was crooning at Hank's Saloon, a Brooklyn bar at the heart of New York's surprisingly lively live country music scene. Paying homage to classic country with a distinctly New York twang, Hank's and other bars around the city are fast proving that Gotham is a country town at heart.
New York and country music have a long history. The first country single ever — Eck Robertson's "Arkansas Traveler" — was recorded here in 1922, and when the Grand Ole Opry made its New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1947, its second performance was standing room only. More recently, country legend Emmylou Harris was discovered while living in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s, and Garth Brooks' Central Park concert in 1997 before several hundred thousand fans was the biggest in the city's history.
What's more, New York area fans snapped up 2.6 percent of the 75 million country albums sold in the U.S. in 2005, making it the second largest market after Los Angeles, despite the absence of a country radio station since 2002.
While major stars such as Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw will all play sold out shows at Madison Square Garden this summer, a slew of local bands will appear before standing room crowds made up of hipsters and traditionalists alike at Hank's and other Brooklyn bars, like Freddy's, and Southpaw, and in Manhattan Rodeo Bar and Baggot Inn. Together, these venues make up the epicenter of New York's country scene. In fact, a cursory glance at the calendar of upcoming events around town suggests a scene more robust than New Yorkers themselves would believe.
This local scene received a major shot in the arm when the Country Music Awards came to town last November for a week of concerts.
For example, when Brooklyn musician Dock Oscar of the band Sweet William was asked to put on a showcase of local acts that play everything from bluegrass to Americana to "cow-punk" during last year's CMA week, the event, dubbed the "NYC Opry," proved so popular it's now a monthly event.
Joe's Pub, a prestigious 150-seat cabaret-style venue in Manhattan worked with the awards folks to present its Songwriter Series, modeled on Nashville's legendary Bluebird Café where songwriters behind the hits play live together. It was so popular that another show is scheduled for July, with more planned for the fall. This comes on top of an already-busy summer schedule of country-flavored acts such as Texas-based Slaid Cleaves.
And this September, the third annual Brooklyn Country Music Festival, a one-day showcase of 15 local and national bands organized by Battles and Oscar, will move to a larger venue, the 500-person capacity Southpaw bar in Brooklyn, to accommodate increased interest.
Thomas Cacaci, president of the New York Metropolitan Country Music Association says he is not at all surprised by country's rising popularity in the Big Apple.
"Traditional country is true to life, so New Yorkers can relate to the drinking songs and the heartbreak," he said.
Kevin Abbott, general manager at Joe's Pub, felt the uptick in interest long before the CMAs came to town. "We've been booking country forever," he said, pointing to shows by Harris and Dolly Parton several years ago. Every country show there in the past year and a half has sold out, proof for him that "country music is more accepted in this city."
When, in 1970, country legend Buck Owen sang "I Wouldn't Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Dang Town)," he could not have foreseen what a country hotbed the city would become.
New Yorkers like their country traditional and raw, says Battles, so they don't always embrace mainstream country preferred by rural and suburban fans. That's because its "Nashville-ness, hyper-sentimentality and hyper-patriotism ... doesn't speak to the urban experience of New Yorkers," says Battles. And this being New York, one finds bands with names such as Blue State Band and Citigrass.
Though they tend toward traditionalism, New York's country bands are leaving their own imprimatur on the genre.
Jack Grace, a local musician known as the Martini Cowboy and the impresario for the Rodeo Bar, the city's top venue for live country for the past 16 years, says that New York-style country is "intimately rooted in classic country, but mixes with other genres, like punk and jazz." One Brooklyn band, critical favorite B-Star, inventively fuses hip-hop with country.
Uncle Leon, another popular singer, says, "There is much more respect for the outlaw movement," embodied by Willie Nelson, than for what he calls the "over-produced crap" of mainstream Nashville acts.
Battles, a 36-year-old music publisher, believes the city itself subtly influences his songwriting. "The heart of the city is the subway," said the Ohio native, finding similarities between the rhythms of trains that give local country its classic sound and those of Johnny Cash's music.
But the New York country scene's deference to the classics sometimes hinders creativity, warns banjo player Matt Whissler. The 31-year-old Pennsylvania native, who works at an investment bank, fears "New York country is too rooted in nostalgia."
With Nashville's Music Row a thousand miles away, local country musicians harbor no ambitions of snagging record deals, because, Grace says, scouts and record labels completely ignore New York.
Dock Oscar agrees. "It's pretty grassroots. We're not connected to record execs. That's not the point anyway; we're doing this for the fun of it," he said.
For Battles, getting one of his songs published and recorded by an established country act is the extent of his ambition to "make it."
Besides, with college radio being the sole outlet for country music in New York, it's hard for local acts to garner attention beyond their core base of followers.
For now, though, New York country fans can look forward to a busy summer schedule in their own back yard and to hearing Battles plaintively sing over a melancholy fiddle of yet another heartbreak, "It's raining hard in Brooklyn on the day you're leaving town ... "
