Hail To The King

Jimmy Carter in his homebase Nashville.

George Strait ... five more albums for UMG. Getting to see him in an almost private event this week was very high on the cool scale. This guy is still my idea of what Country music is and should be. He is at least the standard of cool and quality. 60 #1s is an amazing feat with more to come.

George Strait 2014 is going to be bigger than 2013 and the plans are about to be unveiled. He is sad about saying goodbye to some places he's played, but he is excited about the security of that future record deal. Long live George Strait. Country music owes a lot to him. He is the Country singer almost any other singer would have liked to be.

The other country God this week making noise is Alan Jackson. Watching him onstage at a club of 150 was weird. Hearing him play his brand of bluegrass on the Internet WSMonline.com and over the air at WSM was amazing. He sounded so good. I'm not a huge bluegrass fan to say the least, but every song was pure Alan. Like George, he could sing a restaurant menu and it would be enjoyable. Alan plays Carnegie Hall in October to give the New Yorkers a dose of needed real music.

As I write this another major fruit basket turnover of radio stations ... Cumulus,Dial Global, Townsquare moving and shifting. Who really knows what this means? Who is next to sell?

The Band Perry kicked off this anything-but-dead summer week with a #1 party. Bigger than #1 for Done was the fact they have 10 million tracks sold. If you sell 10 million pencils, that's a big deal. They are cutting edge and you can't work harder than they have worked. The work and those long days are paying off. Talking to them, they seem as excited now as they did a short four years ago. 10 million tracks.

Now on the subject of tracks ... soon they will say the total for Taylor Swift again ... that is a super-wow number. Taylor is such a huge star now and such a target. Could not keep their camera off her at the MTV awards. Hard to live under that much attention. She is beginning her new CD and will go underground for a while and the timing could not be better.

Country music is the music of the working man ... or it used to be ... Tom Roland wrote a nice story in Billboard this week. To all the hard workers everywhere in the all-access world ... may you not have to see any more coverage of Miley Cyrus. See, I didn't say "Twerk" in this whole article.