You may think country music reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s is just a dim memory, sparked only when fans blow the dust off vintage tapes, CDs and vinyl that they store in the cellar.
Well, there’s plenty of evidence to prove that’s wrong.
Take Travis Tritt. Sporting a mullet, black jeans and a black shirt that glimmered with rhinestones, he played an acoustic show last week — just him, two guitars, a water bottle and a coffee cup — to a near-capacity crowd at the Pullo Center in York, Pennsylvania, followed by a sellout at Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis.
“I don’t get a chance to do many of these, but I look forward to them,” Mr. Tritt told members of the audience, who ranged in age from their 20s to 60s. “It’s just you, me and a guitar. It feels less like a show and more like you’ve dropped by, and we’re in my living room.”
The fans seemed to love it.
As contemporary country musicians, including Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood and Blake Shelton, cart out the wind machines, video montages and flashy stage props, those who perform more traditional country, folk, bluegrass and Americana trend toward more bare-bones shows that allow their music to connect fully with the audience.
That was certainly the case with Mr. Tritt, who had the Pennsylvania crowd swaying, jumping up for impromptu ovations and pleading for extra encores as he worked through an almost two-hour set of his hits and covers, interspersed with stage chatter that included a tribute to the late “Little” Jimmy Dickens and shoutouts to performers including Jerry Reed, Chet Atkins and Waylon Jennings.
Mr. Tritt spoke about his unusual membership in country’s “Class of ’89,” which includes Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill and Clint Black.
“The rest of the guys were clean-cut and wore cowboy hats,” said Mr. Tritt, reminding the crowd that at that the time he sported waist-length hair, wore leather and drove a Harley-Davidson motorcycle when he played barrooms and pool halls. “I wasn’t trying to be a bad boy. I was a product of where I played. Being an ’outlaw’ is tough. It would have been a lot tougher if I hadn’t met Waylon Jennings.”
Before playing a tribute to Jennings, Mr. Tritt talked about their close friendship, which extended into performing together. Ever the showman, Mr. Tritt included light moments in the tribute, including a spot-on impersonation of Willie Nelson’s nasal tone for “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”
Members of Waymore’s Outlaws — Jennings’ original band, which now travels with his son, Shooter Jennings — brought laughs from the Rams Head crowd when a member added a similar impersonation of Mr. Nelson during their set, further sealing the good-humored ribbing that was once rampant among performers.
Before the show, Mr. Jennings talked about fans’ joy in hearing that camaraderie when his father’s former band performs with him.
“It has truly been a blast,” he said. “Those guys are very experimental too. We’ve added a lot of new stuff, including [a cover of a song The Ramones made famous,] ’She Talks to Rainbows.’ People really like it because it’s Nashville, but Nashville from afar.”
Suzy Bogguss, who played the Tally Ho theater last week in Leesburg, Virginia, said fans’ enthusiasm for more country mixed with new songs and styles — her recent albums have included jazz and folk — hasn’t lessened.
With fewer news outlets and more extensive coverage of contemporary artists, however, fans have to pay close attention to artists’ sites. In a way, such grass-roots movements have always fed the fan bases of many country performers.
“I grew up in a small town [in Illinois], came to Nashville and made records, but they weren’t traditional country,” Miss Bogguss said. “And I wasn’t Linda Ronstadt or Emmylou Harris. I write about my life and the lives of my friends. That’s still country music. And people still want to hear it.”
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