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Country

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Singer-songwriter Jelly Roll and his wife Bunnie XO are fast becoming one of country music’s biggest power couples — and now, the social media personality and host of the popular Dumb Blonde podcast is ready to show their fans some love.
On her Instagram Stories, Bunnie revealed that when Jelly Roll launches his 2023 Backroad Baptism Tour later this month, she will be hosting meet-and-greets, featuring Bunnie, Jelly Roll, and their entire crew.

She noted that Patreon followers get first dibs at meet-and-greet opportunities, and attendees will receive “Bunnie bundles” filled with gifts. “I love you guys. I can’t wait to touch all your butts and give you big kisses on tour,” Bunnie told fans in her video.

Bunnie first teased the meet and greet package in a TikTok video last month, where she said that she had seen fans wondering where she was at her hubby’s latest shows. “So, every night that J has a concert, I get a lot of you tagging me upset that I’m not there. Just want you guys to know that your girl is preserving her energy for the next four months.”

She also noted that those who purchase meet-and-greet packages must also have a ticket to one of Jelly Roll’s tourdates. “Without one of these tickets in hand, you cannot come to the meet-and-greet,” Bunnie noted. Jelly Roll’s tour will features openers including Ashley McBryde, Chase Rice, Struggle Jennings and Elle King.

Jelly Roll, known for his No. 1 hits including the Country Airplay chart-topper “Son of a Sinner” and No. 1 rock single “Dead Man Walking,” was recently featured on the cover of Billboard’s Country Power Players issue. As part of the story, Jelly Roll discussed the incredibly positive impact Bunnie, whom he married in 2016, has had on his life, including helping him to get custody of his daughter. Jelly Roll calls her “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he told Billboard. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”

Check out Bunnie’s TikTok below:

Nearly three decades ago, on July 17, 1993, the group Little Texas released “God Blessed Texas,” what would become one of the band’s signature songs, reaching the top five on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart.

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The tune, written by the group’s lead guitarist Porter Howell and keyboardist-vocalist Brady Seals, appeared on the group’s second album, Big Time. Tim Rushlow provided lead vocals on the track.

Now, a slate of artists from the Lone Star State are teaming up to celebrate the song’s 30th anniversary by offering a revamped version of the hit. Randy Rogers, Casey Donahew, Josh Abbott, Aaron Watson, Rodney Crowell, Kevin Fowler and Pat Green each contribute their own styles to the revised version of “God Blessed Texas.”

“This song made me proud to be from Texas,” Rogers said in a press release. “I discovered my love for country music right as this song was released, and I watched the video a thousand times. So this is truly a full circle moment for me.”

“Like many other Texans, this song is part of my DNA,” Donahew added. “I wish I had written it. What an honor to be asked to collaborate on the new version. I have toured all 50 states and I can say one thing for certain, God definitely blessed TEXAS!”

The new version of “God Blessed Texas” was recorded at The ER Studio in Nashville with musicians including Mark Matejka, Duane Propes, Corey Wright and Dane Bryant. 

The new version will be available Friday, July 14. Until then, check out the original Little Texas classic below:

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Even before he turned 90 two months ago, Willie Nelson was one of America’s most recognizable personalities.
Now that he’s a nonagenarian, he has entered territory associated with the likes of Betty White, Jimmy Carter, Bob Hope, George Burns and Carol Burnett — loved by nearly everyone and pretty much beyond reproach. So messing with one of Nelson’s signature songs is hazardous; it won’t harm Nelson, but the artist who plays with it is taking a risk. Thus, Jake Owen admits he felt nervous about recording “On the Boat Again,” an interpolation that twists Nelson’s crossover classic “On the Road Again.”

“You never want to tarnish something that was always great,” he says.

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But he also liked the challenge it represented, and it didn’t hurt that when he reached out to Lukas Nelson, Willie’s son gave it a thumbs-up and passed it along to his dad, whose publisher worked out a royalty agreement with the writers. Likewise, Owen had some history with interpolations: “I Was Jack (You Were Diane),” which borrowed from a John Mellencamp classic, topped the Country Airplay chart five years ago.

“It was like, ‘It’s going to be dangerous,’ you know, but I then understood the point of it,” he remembers. “And it was a great point in my career.”

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“On the Road Again” has done well for Nelson. He wrote it on the back of an airbag during a flight with movie producer Sydney Pollack, who needed a song about the touring life for the movie Honeysuckle Rose, in which Nelson starred. Nelson earned synch royalties for its use in the picture, performance income from country radio and other formats after it crossed over, royalties for other interpolations and corporate revenue from its use in several commercials.

It was likely one of those ads that inspired this latest wrinkle in the song’s story. Songwriter Blake Pendergrass saw that spot and thought it would be good for a laugh to rewrite it as “On the Boat Again,” and when two different writing appointments were scrapped on Music Row in June 2022, the four writers who were still around got together for an informal, no-pressure Friday session. All the participants — including Devin Dawson, Rocky Block (“For What It’s Worth,” “Broadway Girls”) and host Kyle Fishman (“Down to One,” “Small Town Boy”) — wanted to keep it light, and Pendergrass dropped the “Boat” idea on them. The original is repetitive enough that revising the chorus was a snap; “making music with my friends” quickly became “drinking cold beer.”

“Once you say, ‘On the boat again,’ that’s three of the four lines,” notes Block. “You know what the melody’s going to be, so it was just about finding two hooks, and that ‘boat’ rhyme with ‘float’ — once we got that, that’s all you really had to do for the chorus.”

After the first chorus, the second and third occurrences expand from four lines to eight, with the “Boat” version including a slight melodic change, dropping the final note in the “float” line for a slight variation.“I can’t say that that was purposeful,” Block says. “It may have just been an oversight, but it just kind of felt like what it needed to be.”

But where Nelson’s original starts with the title, the interpolation needed new verses to work properly, holding the familiar part of the song back to create an “aha” moment. “It’s a nice situation to just leave it to the imagination until the chorus gets there,” says Pendergrass. “It draws you in when the chorus hits, and then I think people get hooked on it after that because it’s so familiar.”

The lower-pitched verses feel a bit like an Ernest Tubb melody, with the song’s humor showing itself at the outset. A blue-collar worker pines for a weekend escape, only to be stuck in traffic on a trip to the lake. But it’s worth it when he gets out on the water with the same revelers from the previous weekend. At one point, the writers played with the phrase “tie one on” — alluding to both beer consumption and the dock — but when it didn’t work in the verses, they retrieved it for a climactic bridge.

“This is what the beauty of co-writing is,” Dawson observes. “I think I said, ‘Lord knows it won’t be long ’til I go and tie one on/ On the boat again.’ I said ‘on’ twice, you know, and then Kyle was like, ‘Just say “on” once, and go into the chorus.’ It just rolled perfectly.”

The whole thing was completed in roughly an hour, and the guys pulled together a quick work tape with vocal and four guitars. Their initial targets were Owen and Luke Bryan, and since Block writes for Big Loud, he took it to producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, HARDY), who recognized it would be an interpolation simply from the title. Once he heard it, he thought it was ideal for Owen.

“There’s no in between,” notes Dawson. “It’s either going to be a single, or it’s just never going to get heard. So we got lucky.”

Owen didn’t know it incorporated Nelson’s song until he heard it, but the way it was built pulled him in.“It just made me smile,” he says. “And quite frankly, it’s a life that I’ve lived since I was 10 years old, just being on boats back in Florida.”

They recorded it in the fall at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio with drummer Jerry Roe, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, keyboardist Dave Cohen and guitarists Ilya Toshinskiy and Derek Wells. “We couldn’t let it take itself seriously — people would mock us to death,” says Moi. “It just had to smile the whole time, and it had to have that kind of summertime beach feel that Jake has without totally leaning on beach/aquatic musical clichés.”

Wells’ slide guitar parts and Cohen’s circus-like use of a pipe organ tone to accompany the bass gave it a woozy feel similar to Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.” “Originally, the solo section that we had, we were having way too much fun when we were tracking and we made it way too goofy,” Moi says. “We had a bass solo and a [Hammond] B-3 solo. We had this four-instrument solo fight going on. I opened it up a couple months later, when Jake was coming to sing, and like, ‘Oops, we might have ran a red light on cool.’ We ended up cutting it back, and I had Derek come back in and write a new solo.”

During the process, Owen made the connection with Lukas, and Sony Music Publishing worked out the copyright issues, allegedly giving Nelson’s team half the royalties, according to two of the composers. “As a writer, it’s cool to have our names beside Willie,” says Pendergrass, “even if it was in a Frankensteined, kind of piecemealed way.”

Owen and the label had several options for the first single from his Loose Cannon album, released June 23, but a radio executive insisted “Boat” was the one. “They’re like, ‘Jake, stop ignoring the obvious,’ ” recalls Owen.

Released to country radio via PlayMPE on May 25, it sails to No. 41 on the Country Airplay list dated July 8. Owen would love to see the song emulate the chart run of his Mellencamp interpolation.

“Willie just turned 90,” he reasons. “That’d be so cool, he’s out here with a song on the radio that goes No. 1 and he’s a writer on it. That’s pretty awesome.”

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Toby Keith returned to the stage over the weekend, performing two full-fledged concerts at Hollywood Corners in Norman, Okla. — with each clocking in at more than two hours in length. The shows mark Keith’s first performances since announcing his stomach cancer diagnosis in June 2022, when he revealed that he had spent the past […]

On July 5, the Country Music Association releases its first feature-length film, CMA Fest: 50 Years of Fan Fair. The documentary, available on Hulu, offers the stories behind the festival’s five-decades of connecting fans and artists, and along the way building the signature country music festival’s ever-strengthening global impact. These stories are told through the eyes of multiple generations of artists, as well as key music industry members, including the CMA CEO Sarah Trahern.

CMA Fest: 50 Years of Fan Fair looks into the festival’s beginnings as Fan Fair in 1972, when it drew 5,000 fans to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, and chronicles the festival’s evolution into a festival that now draws more than 80,000 fans a day across four days, with attendees from not only every U.S. state, but also nearly 40 countries. The 75-minute doc features interviews with an array of artists, including Bill Anderson (who has attended nearly every Fan Fair/CMA Fest since in 1972), Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert, Frankie Staton, Lainey Wilson, Carrie Underwood, Vince Gill, Wynonna Judd, Sawyer Brown’s Mark Miller, Dolly Parton and Jeannie Seely.

As the past several years have become what some would consider a “golden age” for music documentaries in general — with a plethora of documentaries on Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga, P!nk, Britney Spears, Shania Twain, Joan Jett, music mogul Clive Davis, producer David Foster and multi-hyphenate Quincy Jones, just to name a handful — we look at a non-comprehensive list of 20 additional country music-centered documentaries.

These documentaries span from multi-part, history-encompassing docs, as well as documentaries that tell the stories of the industry that helps bring the music to the masses, and documentaries that center on the stories of individual artists ranging from Luke Bryan and Jelly Roll to Guy Clark, DeFord Bailey and Linda Ronstadt. Check out our list below.

Luke Bryan: My Dirt Road Diary

Lily Rose plays Fishing for Answers at Billboard’s Country Live event. Lily Rose:What’s up, y’all? I’m Lily Rose, and I’m going Fishing for Answers with Billboard. First celebrity crush? I think it would have to be Nick Jonas. In a crazy turn of events, it’s Nick Jonas. The best concert I’ve ever attended? I’m not […]

Dolly Parton says she’s reluctant about the notion of artificially living on as an AI hologram after her death, because she doesn’t want “to leave my soul here on this earth.”
According to The Independent, the country star discussed during a London press conference whether she would ever consider creating a show utilizing a hologram version of herself. The Country Music Hall of Fame member and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee replied, “I think I’ve left a great body of work behind. I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved [with] because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this earth.

“I think with some of this stuff, I’ll be grounded here forever … I’ll be around — we’ll find ways to keep me here.”

According to the U.K. publication, the country icon also laughed that “everything” about her — and that includes “any intelligence” — is fake anyway.

Parton, who co-hosted the Academy of Country Music Awards earlier this year alongside Garth Brooks, is promoting her upcoming debut rock n’ roll album, appropriately titled Rockstar, which will release Nov. 17. The album features Parton in collaboration with several rock music icons, including Steven Tyler, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Fogerty, Debbie Harry and Heart’s Ann Wilson.

During the press conference, Parton also spoke of trying to get Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger to perform on the album with her. Parton said that much of her upcoming Rockstar album was inspired by her husband, Carl Dean, who loves Jagger’s music.

“I wanted [Jagger] to sing on ‘Satisfaction,’ but he wanted something new and different, which I don’t blame him for that, so I wound up singing that with Pink and Brandi Carlile,” Parton said. “We kept looking for the right song and he was doing an album in [Los Angeles], and he did some stuff in Nashville, and I kept missing him everywhere. I ran him around like a high-school girl.”

Country artist Lauren Alaina reveals five things you didn’t know about her at the Billboard Country Live event. Lauren Alaina:I’m Lauren Alaina, and here are five things you may not know about me. Lauren Alaina:I don’t have any secrets. I’m … OK. Let me think I have the gene for having twins. So please pray […]

When Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” reached No 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart (dated July 8), it marked several firsts. 
The song, a remake of Chapman’s 1988 classic, became the first remake of a pop hit to reach No. 1 on the chart in 15 years, since Blake Shelton topped Country Airplay with his version of Michael Bublé’s “Home.” It was also the first time in 24 years that a cover of a song that originally reached the top 10 of the Hot 100 — Chapman’s tune peaked at No. 6 — summitted on the Country Airplay chart. The last to do so was Mark Chesnutt’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing,” which led Country Airplay list in 1999, after Aerosmith’s original topped the Hot 100 in 1998.

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But most significantly, it becomes the first song with a Black woman as the sole writer to top the chart. In fact, it marks only the second time since Country Airplay’s debut in 1990 that a Black songwriter has reached No. 1 credited as the only writer on a track. And like with “Fast Car,” the only time it has happened before was on a cover of a previous hit: For the chart dated Aug. 4, 1990, Dan Seals’ remake of Sam Cooke’s “Good Times,” penned solely by Cooke, reached No. 1.  Cooke, who released the song originally in 1964, took his version to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100.

As Rolling Stone first noted, three Black women have reached No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart as co-writers: Allison Randall was the first to do so, as co-writer on Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s & OOO’s (An American Girl),” which hit No. 1 on the chart dated Aug. 10, 1994.  In 2021, Lady A took “Champagne Night,” co-written by Ester Dean, to the summit — while later the same year, Dan + Shay reached No. 1 with “Glad You Exist,” which Tayla Parx co-wrote.

A number of Black and biracial male artists have taken songs they have co-written to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart, including Darius Rucker, Kane Brown, BRELAND and Jimmie Allen. Additionally, a handful of Black male songwriters, including Shy Carter, Steven Battey, Anthony Smith and Jamie Moore, have co-written songs that have topped the chart.  

For pure longevity on a country chart though, no one tops Ted Jarrett. In 1955, Webb Pierce’s take on the Black singer-songwriter’s “Love, Love, Love” spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Most Played by Jockeys chart, nine weeks atop the Most Played in Jukeboxes chart and eight weeks at No. 1 on Best Sellers in Stores for all “Country & Western Records.”

Assistance preparing this story provided by Tom Roland and Jim Asker.

Everyone comes back from Las Vegas with a good story, even country music superstar Carrie Underwood. In photos shared to her Instagram on Monday (July 3), the Grammy-winning star showed off the matching tattoos she got with her mom and sisters in Sin City. “When your 74-year-old mother asks you and your sisters to get […]