Opinion: Modern country is the worst musical genre of all time

@bdp24 

If it’s Soul music you want, there is one current "act" I can enthusiastically recommend: The War & Treaty. An unlikely name, but this husband & wife duo of Michael and Tanya Trotter are absolutely fantastic!

Listening to this now for the first time...great! Thanks for the suggestion.

@thespeakerdude 

There is a long list of musical artists over the years who can’t / couldn’t read/write sheet music. 

True, but perhaps an equally long list of those that can. The great Oscar Peterson comes to mind. His scores are complex!

As an aside, I was maybe 12 or 13 when my dad took me to see my first Jazz concert - Oscar and Joe Pass, just the two of them. Lucky boy.

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos of Robben Ford discussing all things guitar. I saw and heard Robben live a lot when he moved to San Jose (during my senior year in high school I had been in a band with a bassist who was in Robben’s band for awhile), as did all the other musicians in town. I then followed his career when he moved down to L.A., where he worked first with Joni Mitchell. He went on to play with a lot of greats, including Miles Davis (who gave Robben his blessings when he tendered his resignation from Miles’ band, understanding Robben had to forge his own solo career), George Harrison, many others.

Anyway, Robben freely acknowledges that he is self taught, never took any lessons, and doesn’t read music. But if you watch his videos you will soon learn that he has a deep knowledge of music theory, which is more important than being able to read. That is, unless you intend getting into doing a lot of session work, in which reading is pretty much mandatory.

@macg19: Excellent! Now consider giving the album producer’s Buddy Miller a listen (if you haven’t already). He’s a mighty fine singer in his own right, an unusually interesting guitarist (he plays on the War & Treaty album, as well as those of Emmylou Harris), and though not a prolific songwriter has the songs of his wife Julie as material (they did two albums together, and he of course produced and plays and sings of her solo albums), plus he has excellent taste in the songs of others he has recorded.

I love the recorded sound Buddy gets: very "alive", with great immediacy and presence. And you often can hear the sound of the room in which his recordings are made, which I love. He sometimes manipulates the sound, to replicate that heard on old records (as did Dave Edmunds on his fantastic 1970 Rock ’n’ Roll re-imagining of the old Blues "I Hear You Knocking").

I like cake and pie