Universal is in the process of reissuing several of Patsy's albums that have been taken off the market in the past couple of years. "LIVE At The Opry" was reissued on July 22. "Remembering Patsy Cline & Jim Reeves" will be reissued on November 18. And, the remastered edition of "Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits" will be issued on September 9 (the same day as the "Remembering Patsy Cline" tribute album). If you don't have copies of these in your collection, be sure to catch them this time around.

The Imperial Palace Casino in Las Vegas recently introduced the "Legends Pit," a lineup of celebrity-impersonator Blackjack Dealertainers. Among them, Elvis, Liberace, Buddy Holly, The Blues Brothers, Madonna, Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Ray Charles.

Our Country

By: CRAIG HAVIGHURST
Staff Writer

IMAX films about Mount Everest, the ocean and space will transport audiences to extraordinary vistas they will never see. The question facing Our Country, opening today at Opry Mills, is whether the huge-format medium can be used to tell a story more about art and culture than landscape.

First, you have to answer these questions: What good does it do to get Earl Scruggs, father of bluegrass banjo, to be in an elaborate music video if you never introduce him? When would dancers in a Texas dance hall moving to Bob Wills music be choreographed like a Branson stage show? And what does pop country diva Jo Dee Messina singing a rocked-up version of a Merle Haggard song in the Utah canyon lands have to do with country's iconic "outlaws" of the 1970s?

Little. They wouldn't. And nothing.

But judgment calls like these turn this film — a documentary married to a musical revue — into more of a tourist orientation spectacle than an inspiration to deeper awareness of country music.

NASHVILLE SKYLINE: Whose Country Is IMAX’s Our Country?

By: Chet Flippo

The good news this week is that country music finally has its own IMAX movie. The bad news this week is that country music finally has its own IMAX movie.

That also brings up this question: who cares about IMAX anymore? IMAX, for those who have been closeted with cable and the Internet in recent years, is the giant screen presentation of … giant screen dramas. Like lavish epics about dinosaurs or the Rolling Stones. Like Cinerama and even 3-D from many years ago, it’s mainly about eye candy, about big visuals, about projecting big sweeping vistas, about … bigness. Because it’s so big physically as a film format, an IMAX presentation is limited to a short reel length.

In the case of Our Country, the length is 37 minutes. But it’s a hopeless task to try to cram 100 years into it, because that’s the length of country music history it attempts to span. In this particular 37 minutes, what you get as a viewer is very short shrift in terms of original content. But you get a big injection of clichés and things you already knew.

Norah, Michelle Cover Patsy

Cline Tribute Album Due In September

Norah Jones covers "Why Can't He Be You" and Michelle Branch does "Strange" on Remembering Patsy Cline, a tribute album to the late, great country singer, who died in a plane crash thirty years ago.

The compilation, due September 9th from MCA, features a wide spectrum of female singers taking their turns with songs popularized by Cline, who crossed over from country to the pop charts with a string of hits in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The twelve tracks on the tribute are the twelve tracks from Cline's Greatest Hits album, a jukebox favorite and multi-million seller over the past thirty years.

Recording Engineer's Music Collection Gains Attention 40 Years Later

Robin Rupli
Washington
18 Jun 2003, 16:40 UTC

A Baltimore man whose love of country music led him to record thousands of hours of live concerts from the 1950s and 1960s has suddenly found himself at the center of media attention. Recording companies are competing for rights to his archive, and the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and the Country Music Hall of Fame are equally excited about the treasure trove of never-before-heard music by some of country's most legendary stars.

Leon Kagarise, a recording engineer from Baltimore, Maryland, loves country music. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he attended every concert he could, but never without his bulky, 22-kilogram [50 pound] tape recorder in tow. Setting it up onstage, he recorded countless hours of performances of famous and not-yet-famous musicians who would come to be regarded as the pioneers of early country music.

"I taped everyone under the sun - Johnny Cash, George Jones, The Stoneman Family, Reno and Smiley, Flatt and Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers," he said. "And what was in my favor was that most of the recording companies were using just one microphone. So when two people were singing in harmony, they'd get up to the microphone at the same distance apart so I got a good mix on everything.

Nashville May Be Last Outpost For MCA Label

By: JEANNE A. NAUJECK
Staff Writer

Music Row executives think MCA Nashville will be the last outpost of the storied MCA name, which is folding its pop label under a restructuring by corporate parent Universal Music Group.

UMG officials said yesterday it was cutting jobs at MCA Records' New York and Los Angeles offices. It was reported that as many as 100 jobs might be cut and remaining employees will be wrapped into its Geffen label.

MCA Records and country-oriented MCA Nashville are two of more than a dozen U.S. labels owned by UMG. MCA Nashville dominated country music in the 1990s with a roster that included Vince Gill, Trisha Yearwood, George Strait, Reba McEntire, Mark Chesnutt and Wynonna.

The changes will not affect MCA Nashville, said Lauren Murphy, senior vice president of artist and media relations. But the Music Row office has gone through a restructuring that left it with little more than a promotion staff.

Country Music Insiders Choose The Genre's 100 Greatest Songs

By: John Gerome
The Associated Press

NASHVILLE -- George and Tammy are there. So are Johnny and Hank, and Waylon and Willie.

But a ranking of the top 100 songs in country music history is bound to contain a few surprises, and this one by Country Music Television is no exception.

Is Tammy Wynette's 1968 classic "Stand By Your Man" truly the best country song of all time? Should Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" rank that high? Is The Eagles' "Desperado" really a country song? And where's Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me"?

"Everyone has personal favorites that didn't make the list," said Kaye Zusmann, CMT's vice president of program development and production. "Everyone will look and say, 'How can that not make it on there?'"

The list, which is the centerpiece of a six-hour special to air this weekend on CMT, was revealed in a Wednesday concert on the eve of Nashville's annual Fan Fair country music festival.

Following a rundown of songs 100 to 87, a group of contemporary and classic country singers including Kenny Chesney, Martina McBride, Ray Charles and George Jones performed the top 12. The two-hour concert will be broadcast Sunday following a four-hour documentary that begins 4 p.m. EDT.

The Loyalty of Country Music Fans Knows No Age Limits

By: PHIL SWEETLAND
The New York Times

NASHVILLE, June 2 — Last month, albums by Johnny Cash and George Jones were in Billboard magazine's Top 20 for country music and Willie Nelson had a Top 10 country single with a duet. None of this would be especially noteworthy — these country icons are hardly strangers to the top of the charts — except that Mr. Cash and Mr. Jones are 71 and Mr. Nelson is 70.

Country may be as eager to tap the youth market as any branch of popular music is, but it appears to be the only one in which septuagenarians are still a vital force.

"Country music has always been adult music sung by adults," said Bruce Hinton, the chairman emeritus of MCA Records Nashville. "Obviously this could never happen on the pop side, and I'm just glad there is still some recognition of these masters, even if it's not as frequent as we would all like."

Mainstream country radio rarely plays records by these elder statesmen, except those by Willie Nelson, whose hit single "Beer for My Horses" (DreamWorks) is sung with Toby Keith, a comparative young buck at 41. Getting even less air time are songs by older women who are stars, like Dolly Parton, 57, and Loretta Lynn, 69. Tammy Wynette, who died in 1998, had her last Top 10 radio hit in 1985.

Leon Kagarise's Music Collection
Buried Treasures Among Fan's Live Country, Bluegrass Tapes

Morning Edition, June 2, 2003

Fifty years ago, a young recording engineer named Leon Kagarise indulged his passion for country music by dragging his bulky tape recorder to outdoor music festivals in rural Maryland.

His collection now includes thousands of live recordings from the golden years of country and bluegrass music.

Kagarise captured rising stars like Johnny Cash, George Jones, and the Stanley Brothers as they played all-day concerts at rural music parks with names like New River Ranch and Sunset Park. Fans paid $1 per carload to get in. Families would invite the performers to join them around crowded picnic tables as barbecue grills smoked nearby.

Leon Kagarise was a teenager then. Now he's 65. NPR's John Ydstie finds him in the back room of a Baltimore, Md., record store where he repairs audio equipment part-time. As Kagarise plays a tape of the Stanley Brothers performing "Ride That Midnight Train" at New River Ranch in Maryland, he remembers the day in 1961 when he made the recording.

"It was totally raw and totally open and in my recordings you can hear birds singing, you hear people talking during the thing... it was just, it's wonderful," Kagarise says.