A diverse group of Nashville talent-among them superstar Randy Travis, new star Daron Norwood and Nashville Network host Shelley Mangrum-gathered here Sunday to help U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros launch Americorps, President Clinton’s “domestic Peace Corps.”
The troupe, which also included backup singer Donna McElroy, gospel group Fairfield Four, recording artist Dean Chance, the single-named singer-songwriter Teresa, entertained 700 Americorps volunteers from Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee in the ornate Tennessee Performing Arts Center.
Offstage before the show, Travis-whose troubled youth kept him from finishing high school and put him into full-time country music by his mid-teens-lauded the Americorps program’s promise to reward two years of public service work with financial credits toward college education.
“I wish I had finished at least high school,” he said.
Norwood, who introduced a new single titled “USA,” told the young people that “if I can do my part and you do yours, all together we can make America a better place.”
Chance, an American Indian, who previewed a new single titled “What Color Am I,” told the multiracial audience that when he was 8 years old in eastern North Carolina, his father was arrested for placing his sister and his cousin in a mainstream school rather than permitting them to be bused to an American Indian facility 75 miles away.
McElroy, a favorite in Nashville’s recording studios, riveted the crowd with her rendition of the National Anthem, and the Fairfield Four awed them with a cappella virtuosity. A definite standout was the unheralded but vivacious songwriter Teresa, who performed with just her guitar, with the audience waving and applauding in time.
The 700 in Nashville were part of about 20,000 scheduled to work in education, crime abatement, human needs and environment.
– After five years on the road, reigning two-time Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year Mary-Chapin Carpenter (she vies for her third title Oct. 5 on CBS-TV) took a year off to concentrate on writing the 13 songs that make up her new Columbia Records album, “Stones in the Road.”
Every one of those songs was written by Carpenter.
“It’s been so long since I’ve had a concentrated period of writing, there was a lot to come out. . . . It has been a very intense couple of years,” Carpenter says.
Of her songs, which are widely praised for both their literacy and their deep perception of the human condition, the New Jersey-born and Ivy League-educated Carpenter protests that she is “as typical a person as they come.”
“I’m so much like everyone, and we all go through so much that’s the same. I think I can write what I write and it’s true for a lot of people. The challenge is being true to what you feel and to keep doing what you do without worrying about whether you get to No. 1.”
– Suzy Bogguss of Downstate Illinois says her new Liberty Records album with Chet Atkins, “Simpatico,” is a result of lots of afternoons in which she would take her guitar to the sun room at the back of Atkins’ office and play music with the master.
She says she tried to get him to record with her something that they played on those afternoons, but “I couldn’t bamboozle him into it.” Then one day he left a message on her answering machine that he had found some material he thought they could record successfully.
On “Simpatico,” she was Atkins’ producer, an intimidating task.”I was producing one of the most legendary producers in Nashville!” she notes. “But he said, `You produce and I’ll be the artist. Just tell me what you need.’ Sometimes after a take, he’d say, `I believe that is as good as it’s going to get,’ and I’d have to say, `I don’t think so.’ I pushed him really hard. If we weren’t friends, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, because I would’ve been in awe of him.”
