Bettye Shelton, wife of country music star Ricky Van Shelton, recently found herself in the National Enquirer with revelations about how she dealt with her husband’s excessive drinking and infidelity.
She was “thrilled,” she recalls.
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“I had a couple of negative reactions from the family when I told them (her book was being excerpted in) the National Enquirer,” she says of her relatives. “But our first reaction when they approached us and asked our permission to reprint it was `Absolutely.’
“The people picking up the Enquirer are searching and looking and very misinformed about a lot of things, but if a million people want to pick it up and read it, by golly, yes, those are the people we want to talk to. That’s the audience.”
“She Stays” (Thomas Nelson Publishers), the Christian-oriented book that Bettye Shelton and a friend, Andy Landis, wrote about how Landis put her own marriage on the line to help Shelton, is more than an apparent success for its Nashville-based publisher. It has spawned a duet recording of the same title that teams Landis with Ricky Van Shelton and exemplifies what seems to be a growing Nashville trend: positive country music.
Of 2,300 or so country music stations in North America, a good half of them have formats that devote at least some time each week to records with spiritual values, Christian or otherwise. At least four of Nashville’s major country record companies-Warner Bros., Capitol, Arista and Epic-have forged working agreements with Christian record labels: Warner Alliance, Sparrow, Reunion and Word Nashville, respectively.
Rick Bowles, Word Nashville’s director of marketing and reputed coiner of the term “positive country” 2 1/2 years ago, says that in the past couple of years the sales of this subgenre of country music have increased 10 to 15 percent annually by just word of mouth. He predicts more sales increases are on the horizon, citing the fact that Positive Country hit charts are now to be found.
“The records we’re talking about are ones like Collin Raye’s `What If Jesus Came Back Like That,’ Patty Loveless’ `Handful of Dust,’ or the Ricky Van Shelton-Andy Landis duet,” Bowles says.
The latter, written by Landis about the Shelton marital crisis, was recorded with the rich-voiced country singing star as part of the promotion of his wife’s book project. He gave Bettye and Landis permission to use his picture on the book’s front and back covers and, Bettye says, accorded the project his blessing before they began writing the manuscript.
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But his cooperation with the book’s promotion has varied with each situation.
Upon reflection, it seems pretty amazing that Shelton, an ex-pipe fitter from Grit, Va., would participate at all in the promotion of a book that doesn’t cast him in a very favorable light-not to mention that he would countenance his wife’s wish to do it.
It also is an illustration of his uniqueness that he and Bettye not only are still together but by all accounts are happier than ever.
Bettye says Ricky’s somewhat equivocal endorsement of the project is hard to explain but that she and Landis “didn’t have to persuade him.
“He and I had been on (Christian cable TV) several times and had talked about what we had gone through, and he had seen the thousands of letters that we got from people. We would sit there for hours and hours and read these letters. It was unbelievable the number of people who saw his testimony and just wanted to call us or write us and say, `I need help, too.’ He knew and understood that people are out there who need to hear a message of hope.
“But it is embarrassing to Ricky, because he doesn’t like people to know what he did. It’s a natural reaction. He’s ashamed of what he did, and it’s an embarrassment to him to think that he had gotten so totally out of control that he was ready to commit suicide. That’s not a very pretty thing to have people focus on, but the whole purpose (of the book) is that they don’t focus on that, that they focus on what God did.”
Since he talked on the Christian broadcast outlets about his former problems-of running wild with money and the pressure of sudden fame-Shelton has been battling a widespread public assumption that he now performs only overtly religious music to dogmatically Christian audiences.
Actually, the thematic content of his concerts has not changed at all since he first became a star. Even during his worst drinking days, Bettye notes, he always “kept a clean show” that appealed to all ages, and he still does, but it includes no public professions of his Christian faith or other religious overtones. He doesn’t even do any gospel songs.
In some ways Shelton and his image problem illustrate the need for a Positive Country Format. Rick Bowles of Word Nashville says he has found that a considerable segment of country music’s audience isn’t just interested in a particular artist or two but, rather, in the lyrical messages of hope and spiritual love that Nashville music has often contained.
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The people who appreciate this kind of country music can be but aren’t necessarily people who go to church, agree Bowles, Bettye Shelton and Andy Landis. It’s a demographic in which the two formats, Christian and country, overlap.
A former country radio disc jockey at KNFO (now KKCR) in Waco, Texas, Bowles says the music he did at a two-hour Waco show in 1988 appealed to that middle ground.
He eventually came to Nashville to work for a company that initially collected 37 new examples of this kind of music and sent it out in a CD package to 3,000 radio stations in an attempt to assess possibilities for this niche of the country format.
“We got 700 positive responses,” he says. “Since then it has grown to about 1,600 with no promotion, just by word of mouth.”
Of the 1,600, Bowles says, roughly 1,300 are “secondary market secular country” stations that play this inspirational sort of music as part of their regular format. Then there is a large handful of country stations in more major markets (WGAR in Cleveland, KSCS in Dallas, WSIX in Nashville) that have special Sunday shows on which to highlight positive country records. The 1,600 also include about 150 religious stations.
Fittingly, Word Nashville’s first project since it opened its offices in early 1995 was a cooperative venture with the country Epic Nashville label on an album called “Common Ground,” on which star country performers sing songs of positive emotional or spiritual content. Bowles says Word Nashville’s plans include the launching of new artists within that specific format.
With the Shelton/Landis book (co-written with Carol Gift Page), Thomas Nelson Publishers is attempting to work the same kind of ground except from a prose point of view. Thomas Nelson publisher Ken Stephens recently told Billboard magazine that he hopes the book will appeal both to country fans of Ricky Van Shelton and people who read Christian-oriented books.
“I think we’re, happily, through the Me Decade,” says Andy Landis. “I think we’ve discovered that it really isn’t good for Me unless it’s good for You and Me. And I think most of us are seeing that with massive layoffs and diseases that we have no answers for and all the rest of it, we’ve just been bombarded, and people are hitting walls.
“And eventually you hit a wall where you have nowhere to look but up.”
Source: https://t-tees.com
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