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Friday, May 8, 2009

Band Music Television

Posted by It's Paul Constant's Birthday, Everybody!!! on Fri, May 8, 2009 at 12:14 PM

I'm pretty fond of Friends of Old Time Music, a blog devoted to old, mostly out of print bluegrass and folk music. Today, they put up this video, of an episode of something called the Don Reno-Red Smiley Show, an old-timey bluegrass TV program:

And it got me to wondering: Why don't musicians host TV shows anymore? I don't mean a scripted show like Hannah Montana, or a competition like American Idol, I mean like the Johnny Cash show, kind of: A more fun variety show format. The obvious answer would be that they seem cheesy and old-timey to look at them now. But TVs whole thing is about taking cheesy shit and making it seem not cheesy at the moment, even though it looks incredibly cheesy ten years later. TV hasn't had an original idea since 1951, so why wouldn't they revive this sort of musician showcase? I bet people would love it, especially if you could put together a list of musicians as eclectic as Johnny Cash did, back in the day.

And as a side note, Don Reno and Red Smiley totally rock my world.

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Justin Timberlake is the only one I can think of who could pull it off in today's network tv climate (a lot more channels and forms of media competing for viewers).

While admittedly its a bit more studious than fun, Elvis Costello hosts a fascinating show on Sundance called SPECTACLE: ELVIS COSTELLO WITH... and he even recreated some of Johnny Cash's guitar pull w/ daughter Roseanne and friend Kris Kristofferson.

Posted by drake