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    K.T. Oslin, Country Singer Known for ‘80’s Ladies,’ Dies at 78

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyK.T. Oslin, Country Singer Known for ‘80’s Ladies,’ Dies at 78Her song, the first of many hits, heralded the arrival of a songwriting voice whose sharply drawn miniatures conveyed domestic humor and pathos.The singer and songwriter K.T. Oslin in Central Park in 1987. Her song “80’s Ladies,” released that year, became an anthem for a generation of women.Credit…Oliver Morris/Getty ImagesDec. 22, 2020Updated 4:49 p.m. ETNASHVILLE — K.T. Oslin, the pioneering country singer-songwriter whose biggest hits gave voice to the desires and trials of female baby boomers on the cusp of middle age, died on Monday at an assisted-living facility here. She was 78.The country music historian Robert K. Oermann, a longtime friend, said that the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. He said she had also tested positive for Covid-19 last week.“80’s Ladies,” Ms. Oslin’s breakthrough single, became an anthem for a generation of women. Released in 1987, it heralded the arrival of a songwriting voice whose sharply drawn miniatures conveyed domestic humor and pathos reminiscent of the songs of Loretta Lynn two decades earlier.“We’ve been educated/We got liberated/And had complicating matters with men,” Ms. Oslin sang in a rich, throaty alto to open the song’s second stanza, looking back over four decades of living.Oh, we’ve said “I do”And we’ve signed “I don’t”And we’ve sworn we’d never do that again.Oh, we burned our brasAnd we burned our dinnersAnd we burned our candles at both ends.Its rock-leaning arrangement might have had more in common with the piano-based ballads of the California singer-songwriter Jackson Browne than with the standard Nashville fare of the era, but “80’s Ladies” was down to earth and catchy enough to make the country Top 10 in 1987. The next year, it also made Ms. Oslin the first female songwriter to earn song of the year honors from the Country Music Association.Ms. Oslin performing at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville in 1987. A year later, she was named female vocalist of the year.Credit…CMA“Do Ya,” her next single, proved that “80’s Ladies” was no fluke; rather, it was the first in a series of poignant meditations from Ms. Oslin on the ebb and flow of midlife vulnerability and desire.“Do you still get a thrill/When ya see me coming up the hill?/Honey now do ya?” she entreats her lover, the coarse timbre in her voice redolent of some of Janis Joplin’s more intimate performances.Do ya whisper my nameJust to bring a little comfort to ya?Do ya?Do ya still like the feel of my body lying next to ya?“Do Ya” was the first of Ms. Oslin’s four No. 1 country hits, cementing her place among a distinguished circle of thoughtful, independent female songwriting contemporaries that included Pam Tillis, Gretchen Peters and Matraca Berg. In contrast to their plucky rural forebears Dolly Parton and Ms. Lynn, Ms. Oslin and her peers attended college and openly embraced feminism, weaving its insights into their lyrics.A late bloomer, Ms. Oslin was 45 when “80’s Ladies” ignited her recording career. Before that she had worked as a folk singer, appeared in traveling productions of Broadway shows like “Hello, Dolly!” (with Carol Channing) and recorded television commercials for soft drinks and household cleaning products.She might have languished in obscurity had Joe Galante, the longtime president of RCA Nashville, not taken a chance on her when she was at an age when many recording artists were contemplating retirement.“I thought it was my last chance at doing anything in this business, which was all that I knew how to do,” Ms. Oslin said in a 2015 interview with Billboard. “I would have ended up selling gloves at Macy’s if it weren’t for Joe Galante. I was so naïve about the business.”Ms. Oslin’s first two albums for RCA, “80’s Ladies” and “This Woman,” were certified platinum for sales of more than one million copies. She had 11 Top 40 country hits in all, most of them collected on the brashly titled 1993 compilation “Greatest Hits: Confessions of an Aging Sex Bomb.”Ms. Oslin also won three Grammy Awards, as well as female vocalist of the year honors from the Country Music Association in 1988. She was later inducted into both the Texas and Nashville songwriter halls of fame.Kay Toinette Oslin was born on May 15, 1942, in Crossett, Ark. Her father, Larry, died of leukemia when she was 5. Her mother, Kathleen (Byrd) Oslin, worked as a lab technician for the Veterans Administration.Ms. Oslin and her brother, Larry, who died several years ago, spent much of their childhood with their mother in Mobile, Ala., and their teenage years in Houston, where Ms. Oslin studied drama at Lon Morris College and sang in a folk trio with the singer-songwriter Guy Clark.In the mid-’60s she moved to New York, where she worked in the theater and as a jingle singer.Ms. Oslin made New York her home for much of the next two decades, appearing in, among other productions, the Broadway musical “Promises, Promises” and the Lincoln Center revival of “West Side Story.”She also started writing songs and was encouraged by Diane Petty, an executive with the performing rights organization SESAC, to pitch her country-leaning material to song publishers in Nashville.She eventually was signed, as Kay T. Oslin, by Elektra Records, but neither of the singles she released for the label went anywhere. It was not until other singers started having success with her songs that her career began to gain momentum, ultimately leading to the showcase at which she performed for Mr. Galante.Her acting experience served her well, resulting in several memorable music videos, including the “Bride of Frankenstein”-inspired staging of her final No. 1 single, “Come Next Monday” (1990).Dusty Springfield, the Judds and the soul singer Dorothy Moore are among those who have recorded Ms. Oslin’s material. Latter-day country singers like Chely Wright and Brandy Clark have cited her as an influence.Ms. Oslin in concert in 2012.Credit…Rick Diamond/Getty ImagesMs. Oslin began to focus more on acting than singing as the 1990s progressed, appearing most notably as a Nashville nightclub owner in Peter Bogdanovich’s country music-themed 1993 movie, “The Thing Called Love,” starring Sandra Bullock and River Phoenix.She also appeared frequently on the TV talks shows of Johnny Carson, Arsenio Hall and Joan Rivers and was profiled on the ABC program “20/20.”She had quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1995 and recorded only sporadically after that, embracing her Americana influences on “My Roots Are Showing” in 1996 and releasing a dance-floor mix of the 1951 Rosemary Clooney hit “Come On-a My House” in 2000.No immediate family members survive.In 2015, two years after celebrating its 25th anniversary, Ms. Oslin recorded a new version of “80’s Ladies” for her final album, “Simply.”“That’s the one I still hear the most about, and that’s great,” she said of “80’s Ladies” in her 2015 Billboard interview. “I still love that song. It spoke to a lot of people. I don’t know how I managed to write it, but it was a great song.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What Country Music Asked of Charley Pride

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat Country Music Asked of Charley PrideThe singer put himself on the line to become the genre’s first Black superstar. He died on Saturday not long after performing at a largely mask-free awards ceremony.Charley Pride onstage in 1975. The country star’s 1994 memoir, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” details a litany of aggressions he experienced in his career. Credit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020At the 54th annual Country Music Association Awards last month, there was Charley Pride, onstage singing his indelible 1971 hit “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” alongside the rising country star Jimmie Allen. In the socially distanced audience, Nashville luminaries took in the wondrous spectacle. Eric Church, exuding stoic cool — no mask. Brothers Osborne singing along — no masks. Ashley McBryde swaying to the music — no mask.Here were two kinds of wish fulfillment, tightly holding hands. First, honoring Pride, who also received the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award that night, was a belated effort at demonstrating sufficient respect for country music’s first Black superstar. Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2017, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys. “I’m going to put this with all the other awards,” he said backstage after the show, clutching the trophy.And then there were those unadorned faces, telegraphing a certain blitheness about the coronavirus, which was, at the time of the show, raging through the country. On the day the awards were filmed, 1,576 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project — at the time, it was the most in one day this country had seen since mid-May, near the end of the pandemic’s initial wave. (That daily death count has been topped 15 times since the CMAs.)[embedded content]Of all the recent awards shows — the BET Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, the Billboard Awards, the Latin Grammys, the American Music Awards — the CMAs were singular in showing almost no people wearing masks, either onstage or in the audience. (It was also one of very few shows with an audience of any kind.)If you believed what you were watching, you might think that the country music business was a tolerant one, encouraging of Black performers and willing to acknowledge the genre’s debt to Black music. And you might believe that it was possible for a gaggle of superstars (and the behind-the-scenes people who help them navigate the world) to keep the pandemic at bay.The optics were pretty much seamless, the reality less so. Five of the show’s planned performers pulled out because they tested positive for the coronavirus, or were exposed to someone who did. And most cruel was the news that this past Saturday, a month after the awards, Pride died, at 86, of complications of Covid-19. It is likely impossible to know whether Pride contracted the virus traveling from Texas to Nashville, or at the CMAs, but many, including the country stars Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton, expressed reasonable concern on Twitter that Pride’s appearance on the show might have led to his exposure. (The CMA released a joint statement with Pride’s representatives after his death noting that Pride had tested negative for the coronavirus before, during and after attending the awards.)It would not have been the first time Pride risked his well-being and safety in the name of country music’s embrace. His 1994 memoir, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” details a litany of microaggressions and macroaggressions he experienced in his career. To be a Black performer in country, especially in the throes of the civil rights era, when Pride was getting his footing, was to put yourself on the line. Opening for Willie Nelson in Dallas in 1967, Pride was warned the crowd was potentially hostile. Not to worry, the promoter told him, because they were prepared to rapidly pull him offstage if the situation turned dire.“My mouth went so dry it felt like it was stuffed with cotton,” Pride wrote. “He’s not talking about name calling. He thinks something really bad might happen in a room with ten thousand people, and he only has two guys to get me out?” (The show went smoothly.)He had to be careful about his song selection. “There was a time, after all,” Pride wrote, “when it was deemed unsafe to sing ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ because it was about a condemned prisoner dreaming of his woman with ‘hair of gold.’”Pride remembered being called slurs by performers who were his colleagues and friends; how George Jones and another man scrawled “KKK” on his car after a bender; and how he had to remind Webb Pierce — who told him it’s “good for you to be in our music” — that “It’s my music, too.”Pride mostly relates these stories with dispassion, sometimes even with flickers of affection: These occurrences were simply the cost of doing business as a boundary-crashing pioneer. In the book, he is expressly resistant to politics, and seems eager to assure everyone — fellow Nashville stars, show promoters and people he meets along the way — that he’s got no interest in starting trouble, or being near it.Pride was a pathbreaker, but the path largely remained empty in his wake.Credit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesUltimately, Pride was rewarded by the country music business — by the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he was one of the genre’s central, crucial performers, a part of the firmament. But he was also, naturally, the exception that proved the rule — even with his success as an example, the country music industry remained largely inhospitable to Black performers. He was a one of one.Nashville is ever so slightly more progressive now when it comes to diversity. Still, of all the pressures applied to the save-face-insistent country music industry this year, the racial justice reckonings of the summer certainly have been the most challenging to face up to.The CMAs are the most revered of the Nashville industry awards shows — in 1971, Pride won entertainer of the year, the show’s highest honor — and its choice to bestow Pride with the lifetime achievement award this year felt, at a minimum, conspicuous.It was of course a lovely gesture on its own terms. Darius Rucker, one of the show’s hosts and the most successful Black country singer since Pride, has frequently cited Pride’s influence. And Pride’s duet partner, Allen, is a promising young pop-country talent and one of a handful of Black singers with recent hits. But their performance also had the air of tokenism — did no white country star also want to pay tribute to a genre legend?Pride is not the first victim of the coronavirus in country music; the 1990s star Joe Diffie died in March, and John Prine (who wasn’t even acknowledged at the CMAs) died in April.But just because the coronavirus has hit close to home has not discouraged country music stars from taking public risks with their health and others’. In June, Chase Rice played a concert for several hundred fans, and was roundly criticized after video appeared online of maskless revelers clustered together near the stage. Around the same time, Chris Janson was similarly criticized for performing for hundreds of fans. (In this, country stars are not alone; an Ohio venue was recently fined for hosting a Trey Songz performance, and New York officials have reported routinely shutting down dance parties in the city.)In October, Morgan Wallen was forced to withdraw from a scheduled appearance on “Saturday Night Live” after video emerged on TikTok of him partying with — and in one case kissing — fans in Alabama. Wallen ended up performing on the show earlier this month, and even participated in a skit poking fun at his indiscretions.Those things don’t simply happen because of individual choices — they happen because of a system that forgives certain kinds of transgressions, and because of an industry that sees no tension between satisfying the thirst of fans and potentially putting them and their loved ones at risk.Those responsible for organizing the CMAs were not unaware of the risks posed by the coronavirus. The CMA president, Sarah Trahern, told Variety that the organization administered around 3,000 coronavirus tests to performers and staff, in addition to temperature checks and questionnaires. The performers who attended were given face shields to wear anytime they were not seated at their table or onstage during the event. In footage posted from backstage during show rehearsals, the show’s executive producer, Robert Deaton, is shown wearing a mask and a face shield when speaking to Pride and Allen about their performance.Unsurprisingly, the CMAs went into damage control mode this weekend. The organization’s news release about Pride’s death mentioned his award, but made no mention of his performance last month.Regardless, recent events are a painful asterisk on Pride’s career, and a reminder of the ways Nashville remained deaf to his unique circumstances. That insensitivity continues apace. Pride was a pathbreaker, but the path largely remained empty in his wake, owing to an industry for which the image of racial comity is more important than the furtherance of it, and for which the appearance of freedom during a pandemic far outweighs any cost that arises from that hubris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More