ACM Fan Voting Opens; “Forever Pete” Campaign Aims to Get Seeger on the Charts; Album Releases

• Sam Adams of the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed a recent Hank 3 show.

• Forever Pete is a campaign to help Pete Seeger become the oldest musician to have a charting single. Check out a video of Seeger’s version of “Forever Young” on the campaign website. 

• Jo Cox of More Than the Music interviewed Gretchen Peters. Here’s an excerpt where Peters talks about her popularity in the UK compared to the States: My first record came out in the US and was roundly rejected by country radio and didn’t work as a country record. I wasn’t Shania Twain which is where they were going. Over here I found an audience that didn’t seem to care about that. Radio didn’t seem to be so concerned about who are you and where you fit. That was enough to keep me coming back year after year and keep touring here. 

• The Kingston Trio has a new record, and they’re offering a free song download.

• Moot Davis was on NPR’s Weekend Edition playing a couple songs from Man About Town and talking about how he first got interested in country music: with a soda commercial.

• Albums from Lucinda Williams, Neil Young, Wilco, and others make up Anthony Fantano’s list of 50 musical “failed first impressions.”

• Neil Young’s album with Crazy Horse, Americana, is set for a June 5 release date. The tracks are classic folk songs, like “Wayfarin’ Stranger” and “Tom Dooley.”

• Thanks to an anonymous donor, folks who can tune in SUNY Plattsburgh’s radio station, WARP, will be hearing more bluegrass.

• Jim White on songwriting and melodies: I’ll tell you what Hank Williams said when he wrote “Your Cheating Heart”. He said to a friend, “I wrote a real good song. It’s called ‘Your Cheating Heart’,” and told his friend the lyrics and the friend said, “Wow, those are good lyrics. What’s the music like?” And he said, “oh, it’s a slow one.” So you don’t really have to come up with 2,000 different melodic templates. You come up with a basic template – like with me it’s verse, prechorus, chorus, verse, prechorus, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, out. That’s a standard template that I use. Then from there, it’s just little accents and chord voicings. I don’t think you have to be a musical genius to write your own songs. You just have to be determined and resourceful.

• Daniel Mullins of Bluegrass Today takes a look back at the Osborne Brothers’ 1969 album Up to Date and Down to Earth.

• Steve Earle’s “Good Ol’ Boy (Getting’ Tough)” is American Songwriter’s Lyric of the Week.

• Taylor Swift on contributing to the Hunger Games soundtrack, where she wrote a song from the main character’s point of view: “Slipping into her mind was such a wonderful break…It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles. It was almost like a vacation to get to write from someone else’s perspective.”

• ACM Awards fan voting for New Artist of the Year and Entertainer of the Year opened yesterday.

• Neal McCoy talks about new album XII and working with Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert, something he felt allowed him access to a higher quality of songs than he’d have gotten otherwise.

• Speaking of Miranda, she’s got one goal she hasn’t achieved yet: I would love to have a song that I wrote by myself to win a “song of the year” award. There is just something special, something that makes you reach deep down into who you are as an artist, when you write a song all on your own. I wrote “Dear Diamond” and “Safe” on “Four the Record” on my own, and I am so proud of those songs.

• Time for a new Quotable Country.

• The 1861 Project is now offering The 1861 Project Live, a concert and documentary.

• Buddy Melton of Balsam Range is still recovering from his farm accident. His ten-hour facial reconstruction surgery was successful, and the surgeons and OR nurse now have lifetime of passes to Balsam Range shows and free CDs coming their way.

• This week’s album releases:

Casey James – Casey James

Lynyrd Skynyrd – Same Old Blues: Live in London, 1975 (DVD)

Various Artists – The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond