VMP Magazine

It was six years and 11 solo albums after the release of Dolly Parton’s solo breakthrough, Coat of Many Colors, that she sat down with Barbara Walters on ABC Evening News on December 6, 1977. After guiding Walters and the camera crew through her tour bus while gushing about the wonders of a life on the road for a restless woman from humble beginnings, she wielded her nylon-string guitar and serenaded Walters, and the American public, with an intimate rendition of the album’s opening and title track.

The vision of Willie Nelson that exists in the popular imagination — the shoulder-length braided ponytail, the weed, the Outlaw on the fringes, the Zen leader of the Tao of Willie and, again, the weed — is not present on his, say, first 15 studio albums. Sure, Willie’s songwriting was strong from his debut on (the best, really), but look at that album cover. There Willie is on ...And Then I Wrote, looking less like the guy who’d change the sound, themes and mythology of country music and more like a nice young man who’d love to see you inside of a new Chrysler. Things loosen up on his third LP, Country Willie, but he’s still clean shaven, wearing bib overalls and looking like someone your square grandpa would listen to in 1965. On his eighth LP, Good Times, he’s playing golf; on the cover of his 10th, Both Sides Now, he’s wearing what looks like business casual; and it’s not until his 12th, Willie Nelson and Family, that you even get a hint that Willie isn’t like the ham’n’egger country singers who dominated the genre in the ’60s, guys who sang big-chested ballads and dressed like they were on their way to the supper club.

And it’s not until his 16th album, the one that brings us here today, that Outlaw Willie emerges: cocoon-like, ready to break every rule of country stardom. He was fed up, and done doing things like he had been told to do them, done playing by Nashville’s rules and done being forced into the Countrypolitan sound as dictated by his producers at RCA. He absconded to Austin, Texas, bro’d out with a new generation of country songwriters trying to get back to what’s real and pondered his next move. At 39, he considered retiring, saying to hell with it and heading off into the sunset.

What he’d do next would change country music forever, and help launch an entire movement. It’d make him a star, and into the Willie Nelson we all now know and love. And it started with Shotgun Willie.

“I’ve never had a show — before or since — that went as seamlessly as that one at Carnegie Hall. And even though New York City isn’t exactly known for having much of a country fan base, the crowd that night was as receptive as any I’d ever experienced. I still wouldn’t live there if they gave me the whole damn town, but that night sure changed my mind about not wanting to play there.” — Buck Owens in Buck ’Em! The Autobiography of Buck Owens

“If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.” — Frank Sinatra, “New York, New York”

Photo courtesy of gramparsons.com

When Gram Parsons finished recording Grievous Angel, he called his sister Avis to tell her how proud he was of his latest work. “GP’s OK,” he said of his first record, as Avis recounted in Ben Fong-Torres’ Parsons biography, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons. But Grievous Angel, the singer-songwriter told his younger sister, “is a lot more like what I want to accomplish.”

Our next three Country Records of the Month, which you’ll receive if you sign up for VMP Country for October, November and December, feature albums from country stars and legends from three different eras. Read below to find out more:

In the early 2010s, country music’s affinity for formulas had hit what sounded, to many critical listeners, like an all-time high. The ascendance of so-called “bro-country” and its attendant jacked-up trucks with beer can-filled beds and nameless, cutoff-clad female passengers seemed like the final form of the evolution of the genre’s trademark simplicity into grating, meaningless clichés.

The banality of country’s radio hits became so overwhelming that it spawned a whole subgenre of YouTube video, in which savvy critics spliced identical-sounding songs and hollow lyrics next to one another as evidence of how self-evidently dull it all was. “The formula works!” as songwriter Gregory Todd stated in his version of the video, which had six different contemporary country songs playing simultaneously — the result sounded like one seamless track. All but two of the songs he featured reached the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Country chart.

VMP is honored to feature Emmylou Harris’ breakout album, Pieces of the Sky, as our Country Record of the Month in September 2021. Pieces of the Sky is Harris’ solo breakthrough, and an album with a heart-breaking story behind it, which you can read more about in the album’s Listening Notes.

With a career spanning over 50 years, Pieces of the Sky is merely the telltale beginning of a career that would go on to influence country music, and music at large, for decades. From solo albums that hold their weight against her stunning breakthrough to collaborations with some of the biggest names in country music, Harris’ catalogue is beyond worthy of some focused listening. We put together this primer so you can widen your understanding of the context surrounding her Record of the Month and further explore some of the many heights her work reached following Pieces of the Sky.

“You have to grow up, start paying the rent and have your heart broken before you understand country.” — Emmylou Harris to The London Times, 2008

Spin Emmylou Harris’ breakthrough album, Pieces of the Sky, just once, and it’s tough to even imagine a voice as free as hers coming from someone who’s ever had a single reservation in her life.

Photo from the 2015 film ‘Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors.’

“Influential” is not a big enough word for what Dolly Parton has come to mean to us all — the woman who not only has a theme park, Dollywood, but also recently made a million-dollar donation to fund coronavirus vaccine research and updated her enduring hit “Jolene” to encourage vaccination (“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine / I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate / Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine / ’Cause once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late”). In light of this, it’s not an understatement to say Parton is doing her part to try and save the world.

Her advocacy for public health is not a surprise to anyone who has followed the career of this larger-than-life star: Since her solo breakthrough, Coat of Many Colors, Dolly has been telling us to care for one another.

Johnny Cash once said country music is “three chords and the truth,” which, provenance aside — who knows if it was Cash who said it first — is about as good a definition of the music that exists. But what that actually means is that the subject matter and songs are often straightforward, and even tipping into certainty. Johnny shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, Dolly asked Jolene not to take her man, Willie wrote about 10,000 songs about how he lost her and she’s never coming back. This is what made them great, that truth, that certitude that life sucks, or it’s great or your cheatin’ heart will make you weep one day. But taken to its extreme, there is often little room for uncertainty in country — and for popular American music in general, for that matter — no room for matters of the metaphysical.

For the first time ever, we’re sharing the next three VMP Country titles coming for members of VMP Country. These are the albums you’ll receive if you sign up for VMP Country in April, May and June 2021. Read below to get the scoop:

Sometime in 1878, a construction worker laid the first stone for what would be one of the most brutal institutions of the American Carceral State and the recording locale of the most important country album to be committed to tape. Located along the American River, some 20-odd miles from downtown Sacramento, California, Folsom State Prison was completed in 1880, and from the beginning, was created to house convicts without much regard for their personhood. They were put behind steel doors, and in cells with no natural light, left to rot in darkness and wonder what they could have done differently.

Meant to house 1,800 inmates, but often housing more, Folsom was known in the penal system for its poor food and water quality and the brutality of its guards and environs. Folsom eventually got lights — it was the first prison in the entire world to have electricity — but its reputation as the most feared lasted until at least the 1930s, when Alcatraz surpassed it in notoriety. But Folsom, the second-oldest prison in California, opened 30 years after the state was accepted into the U.S., retained its ability to break men down to nothing.

Nearly four years after launching our last new subscriptions, March marks the launch of the fourth VMP subscription: Country. New subscribers are able to sign up here now, and current subscribers who want to join the VMP Country wagon train can join by adding Country to their subscription or by switching one of their Tracks to VMP Country (the titles will come to Swaps, if they don’t sell out, in future months to ensure people who want to sign up for the new sub can do so).

The first-ever VMP Country Record of the Month is widely considered as one of the best Country albums of all time: Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. VMP’s edition has been remastered by Ryan Smith, and plated at QRP and comes on exclusive color vinyl. It, like all Tracks starting in April 2021, comes with a unique Listening Notes booklet, and people who join this month will receive a limited Vinyl Me, Pardner bandana with their subscription to VMP Country, to honor the name we had for the subscription internally. Below, read why we picked this record, and why it made perfect sense to do this as the first VMP Country title. Also, get the skinny on when you can expect to learn the next VMP Country Records of the Month.

Our next three Country Records of the Month — which you’ll receive if you sign up for VMP Country in July, August and September 2021 — feature three of the reigning queens of country music, each in their own right. Read below to find out more:

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Reba McEntire’s For My Broken Heart, our July Country Record of the Month, Reba spoke with us about the tracks, videos and impact of her 1991 album.

The most enduring hit off of For My Broken Heart is — like “Fancy” before it — a pitch-perfect cover of a song that had already been enormously popular: “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia,” a gruesome murder ballad with a disarmingly upbeat (and catchy) chorus. Reba revived the tune with dramatic flair and effortless technique, and hers has slowly burned into becoming the definitive version of the single, going Gold nearly 30 years after its release.

It also fits well with the contemporary, non-musical perception of Reba, an endearingly kitschy country elder whose compelling hint of edge never erupts into full-fledged controversy. What’s taken her from small-town Oklahoma girl to mononymous star is a kind of specifically country combination of no-nonsense attitude and humble good humor.

Merle Haggard started running before he was 10, around when his father died, and basically didn’t stop till he left his mortal coil, age 79. He spent, give or take, close to 70 years in various stages of lighting out of town, of barnstorming, of riding the rails, of killing them and leaving. You know that 10,000 hours thing? Merle put in more than his 10,000 hours on the run. As such, with the exception of Jack Kerouac, Merle Haggard was the poet laureate of the road, that symbol of endless possibility, endless adventure and endless strife. Merle’s songbook is a testament to that running, the feeling like you just escaped some trap, the feeling that you don’t know what’s next, but you know goddamn well it’s not behind you. He’d later become famous as some political voice, yet another thing he felt shackled by (more on this later), but Merle Haggard’s lasting impact on country music cannot be overstated: Merle captured and defined, better than anyone before or since, that attitude of escape in country music. The music was always going somewhere, and Merle was able to mine that voyage over the course of a nearly 50-year career.

Haggard’s — and his band, The Strangers’ — breakthrough LP, and his fourth overall, I’m a Lonesome Fugitive, lays all these themes out bare, giving him not only a career, but something to run for.