Vince Gill
You’ve got all kinds of different elements that make up country music. I mean when I think of country music it’s still to me Hank Williams and three chords—that sensibility more than hook lines and repeating the chorus and signatures for guitarists to play, you know what I mean? It seemed to be a lot more primitive back then than it is today which I miss, but it’s kind of hard for me to say that country songs should be what they were 30 years ago. But today’s stuff is great, too. It brought us a huge fan base, and it’s not unlike what was going on in album-oriented rock music in the mid to late ’70s, in that era of James Taylor and Michael McDonald and Jackson Browne. And you’ve got a lot of those influences in country music today, because there’s not one artist who’s recording today that wasn’t influenced by that ’60s and ’70s era of music. And I think it’s healthy that you can’t sit there and write a definition of what it is and have it be correct, because it’s so many different things—it would be relatively impossible to write a definition of what country music is. To me that’s healthy, when you can’t say what it is in black and white.
From Performing Songwriter Issue 8, Sept/Oct 1994
Category: In Their Own Words
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Last year I had the chance to play a concert with Vince, and I was blown away by how genuine he was as a person and a performer.
Ben
thesongbirdproject.com