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      Bobbie Nelson, Longtime Pianist for Brother Willie, Dies at 91

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      They grew up together playing music, and in 1973 she became a core member of the band that would take Mr. Nelson to worldwide fame.Bobbie Nelson, the longtime piano player in her brother Willie’s band and a grounding influence in his life and music, died on Thursday in Austin, Texas. She was 91.Mr. Nelson’s publicist, Elaine Schock, confirmed the death.Ms. Nelson and her brother, who is two years younger, had been playing music together since they were children; their grandparents, who were raising them, introduced them to instruments. Bobbie was the more able musician, Mr. Nelson noted in his 2015 autobiography, “It’s a Long Story” (written with David Ritz).“Sister Bobbie’s vast musical mind could deal with all those white and black keys on the piano,” Mr. Nelson wrote. “She knew what to do with them. Six strings was about all I could handle.”Both of them played in the band of Bud Fletcher, whom Ms. Nelson married when she was a teenager. For a time, their career and domestic paths took them in different directions. But in the early 1970s, they both found themselves living in Austin, where Ms. Nelson was teaching piano and playing in lounges.“Then Willie signed with Atlantic Records and asked me if I wanted to do this gospel record with him,” she recounted in a 2008 interview with The Reno Gazette-Journal in Nevada. “I took my first airplane flight then and flew to New York City, and we did ‘The Troublemaker’ and ‘Shotgun Willie,’ and we’ve been playing together from that time on.”She became a foundational member of the Family, Mr. Nelson’s backing band, which he formed in 1973. The band helped rejuvenate his career, which had hit a plateau after a decade of working and recording in Nashville. As Mr. Nelson began to tour extensively and record albums like “Red Headed Stranger” (1975) that branched out from traditional country music, Ms. Nelson was at his side.“She is the best piano player for me,” he wrote in “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road,” a 2012 collection of miscellany. “She rolls with whatever I throw at her, and it doesn’t matter where I run off to in music, she is always there when I get back.”Ms. Nelson was generally content to be in her brother’s shadow, but she would occasionally take a more out-front role, as in 2014 when, billed as Willie Nelson and Sister Bobbie, the two of them released “December Day: Willie’s Stash Vol. 1,” an album of 18 of their favorite songs. James Beaty, reviewing it for The McAlester News-Capital & Democrat in Oklahoma, called it “as smooth as lightly falling snow and warm as a glowing fireplace on a winter’s afternoon.”They released other albums together as well, including several gospel records, and in 2007 Ms. Nelson released a solo album, “Audiobiography.” In 2020, they collaborated on the book “Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band,” (with Mr. Ritz), in which they told their intertwined life stories, alternating chapters.“Without my sister,” Mr. Nelson wrote in that book, “I’d never be where I am today.”Bobbie Lee Nelson was born on Jan. 1, 1931, in Abbott, Texas, north of Waco, to Ira and Myrle Nelson. They had married when they were teenagers, and soon after Willie was born they divorced and went their separate ways, leaving the children in the care of their grandparents Alfred and Nancy Nelson.“I believe my brother’s happy-go-lucky personality stayed happy-go-lucky because he wasn’t traumatized by the shock of our parents’ departure,” Ms. Nelson wrote in “Me and Sister Bobbie.” “He was too young to understand what was going on. But the trauma got to me.”As a child, Ms. Nelson was mesmerized by the pianist she saw in church each week.“I loved watching her fingers fly over the keys,” she wrote. “I watched her form the clusters of notes that I’d later learn were chords. I watched her, in short, make magic.”When she started playing herself, she wrote, “the piano felt like a friend.”Ms. Nelson and her brother played at local functions before landing in the Fletcher band. After her marriage to Mr. Fletcher ended — she would marry twice more — Ms. Nelson and her three sons ended up in Austin, where she played at piano bars and shopping center openings to make ends meet. When Mr. Nelson’s house in Nashville burned down, she urged him to join her in Austin. They had not played together publicly for years.“If I did come down,” Mr. Nelson recalled saying in his autobiography, “what would you think about playing with my band, Sis?”She replied: “I wouldn’t be thinking, Willie. I’d be crying with joy.”In addition to her brother, Ms. Nelson’s survivors include a son, Freddy, and a granddaughter. More

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      Florence + the Machine’s Conflicted Coronation, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bonnie Raitt, Kehlani, Mahalia and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Florence + the Machine, ‘King’Career vs. family. Artistic inspiration vs. a stable life. “The world ending and the scale of my ambition.” Florence Welch takes them all on in “King,” which affirms both the risks and rewards of her choices. Like many of the songs Welch writes and sings for Florence + the Machine, “King” moves from confessional to archetypal in a grand, liberating crescendo, while its video elevates her from a tormented partner to something like a saint. JON PARELESBonnie Raitt, ‘Made Up Mind’It’s an old story: the bitter end of a romance. “Made Up Mind,” written and first recorded by a Canadian band called the Bros. Landreth, tells it tersely, often in one-syllable words: “It goes on and on/For way too long.” On the first single from an album due April 22, “Just Like That,” Bonnie Raitt sings it knowingly and tenderly, after a scrape of guitar noise announces how rough the going is about to get. PARELESKehlani, ‘Little Story’Kehlani has long narrated tales of devastating romance, but “Little Story,” the latest single from the forthcoming album “Blue Water Road,” opens a portal to a world of candor. Sounding more self-assured and tender than they have in years, the singer (who uses they/them pronouns) curls the honeyed sways of their voice over the delicate strumming of an electric guitar. “You know I love a story, only when you’re the author,” Kehlani sings, pleading for a lover’s return. Strings crescendo into blooming petals, and Kehlani makes a pledge to embrace tenderness. “Workin’ on bein’ softer,” they sing. “’Cause you are a dream to me.” ISABELIA HERRERACarter Faith, ‘Greener Pasture’A bluesy lite-country simmerer in which the cowboy does not stick around: “I was his Texaco/A stop just along the road/I shoulda known I ain’t his last rodeo.” JON CARAMANICANorah Jones, ‘Come Away With Me (Alternate Version)’With the 20th anniversary of Norah Jones‘s millions-selling debut, “Come Away With Me,” arrives a “Super Deluxe Edition” featuring this previously unreleased alternate take of the title track, with the band work shopping the song. There’s a constant, pendulum-swinging guitar part in this version, matching the songwriter Jesse Harris’s lulling bass figure and pushing the band along. Ultimately you can see why this take didn’t make the cut: The biggest draw is Jones’s matte, desert-rose voice, and it seems most at home when in no hurry, cast in lower contrast to the rest of the band. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPorridge Radio, ‘Back to the Radio’One electric guitar chord is strummed in what seems to be 4/4 time, repeated, distorted and topped with additional noise for the first full minute of “Back to the Radio.” Then Dana Margolin starts singing, decidedly turning the 4/4 to a waltz as the lyrics push toward a confrontation with someone who matters: “We almost got better/We’re so unprepared for this/Running straight at it.” The song is pure catharsis. PARELESMahalia, ‘Letter to Ur Ex’The threat is both restrained and potent in “Letter to Ur Ex” from the English songwriter Mahalia. She’s singing to someone trying to maintain a connection that has ended: “You can’t do that any more,” she warns. “Yeah, I get it/That don’t mean I’m gonna always be forgiving.” Acoustic guitar chords grow into a programmed beat and strings; her voice is gentle, but its edge is unmistakable. PARELESEsty, ‘Pegao!!!’The Dominican American artist Esty collides genres and aesthetics like a kid scribbling on paper. “Pegao!!!,” from her new “Estyland” EP, mashes up the singer’s breathy, coy raps and sky-high melodies with razor-sharp stabs of synth and a skittish, percussive dembow riddim. She declares her imminent ascent in the music industry, whispering, “They say I’m too late/But I feel like I’m on time.” Her visual choices are part of the plot too: between the anime references, her love for roller skating (which has made her famous on TikTok) and a head full of two-toned braids, Esty’s aesthetic is a kind of punk dembow, her own little slice of chaotic good. HERRERAMura Masa featuring Lil Uzi Vert, PinkPantheress and Shygirl, ‘Bbycakes’Here is how layered things can get in 21st-century pop. The English producer Mura Masa discovered “Babycakes” by the British group 3 of a Kind. He pitched it up and sped it up, keeping the catchy chorus hook. He also connected with Pink Pantheress, Lil Uzi Vert and Shygirl. The new, multitracked song is still both a come-on and a declaration of love, but who did what is a blur. PARELESR3hab featuring Saucy Santana, ‘Put Your Hands On My ____ (Original Phonk Version)’Saucy Santana’s “Material Girl” is the optimal viral hit — easy to shout along with, organized around a catchy phrase, full of performative attitude. For Saucy Santana, onetime makeup artist for the rap duo City Girls turned reality TV star, its emergence as a TikTok phenomenon a couple of months ago (more than a year after the song’s initial release) was a classic case of water finding its level. And now, a future full of promising party-rap club anthems beckons. This easy-as-pie collaboration with the D.J.-producer R3hab is an update of Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip,” one of the seminal songs of Atlanta bass music, and a bona fide mid-1990s pop hit as well. It doesn’t top the original, but it doesn’t have to in order to be an effective shout-along. CARAMANICALil Durk, ‘Ahhh Ha’The first single from the upcoming Lil Durk album, “7220,” is full of exuberant menace. Lil Durk raps crisply and with snappy energy while touching on awful topics, including the killing of his brother DThang and of the rapper King Von, and instigating tension with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. In the middle of chaos, he sounds almost thrilled. CARAMANICAKiko El Crazy, Braulio Fogón and Randy, ‘Comandante’On “Comandante,” two generations of eccentrics — the Dominican dembow newcomers Kiko el Crazy and Braulio Fogón, alongside the Puerto Rican reggaeton titan Randy — join forces for a send-off to a cop who threatens to arrest them for smoking a little weed. Randy drops a deliciously flippant, baby-voiced hook, and Fogón’s offbeat, anti-flow arrives with surprising dexterity. When that timeless fever pitch riddim hits, you’ll want every intergenerational police satire to go this hard. HERRERACharles Goold, ‘Sequence of Events’The drummer Charles Goold and his band are hard-charging on “Sequence of Events,” the opening track to his debut album as a bandleader, “Rhythm in Contrast.” He starts it with a four-on-the-floor drum solo that has as much calypso and rumba in it as it does swing. When the band comes in — the slicing guitar of Andrew Renfroe leading the way, with Steve Nelson’s vibraphone, Taber Gable’s piano and Noah Jackson’s bass close on his heels — that open approach to his rhythmic options remains. Goold graduated from Juilliard, probably the premiere conservatory for traditional-jazz pedagogy, but he’s also toured with hip-hop royalty. All of that’s in evidence here, as he homes in on a sincere update to the midcentury-modern jazz sound. RUSSONELLO More

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      Priscilla Block Wants Country Music to Sparkle

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      The singer-songwriter’s “Welcome to the Block Party” is a refreshing and ambitious pop-country debut filled with good-humored feminist anthems and pointed songs about an ex.NASHVILLE — In the summer of 2020, four months into the pandemic, Priscilla Block was broke and forced to move out of the apartment she was renting in a medium-fancy complex near Music Row. She’d been cleaning Airbnbs for money, and the work had dried up. Her mother and sister came into town to help move her into a far grimmer shared house nearby.“I was crying. I just felt like I failed so bad,” Block, 26, said one afternoon last month, parked outside the house in her white Jeep, one stop on a tour of dispiriting places she’d called home over the years.The small, ramshackle house had no air conditioning, and during that hot season, she came down with Covid-19 following a night out at a local bar. Quarantined and sick, Block nevertheless kept writing songs, including one about another misfortune from that same night: bumping into an ex.She’d been posting songs to TikTok for a few months at that point, including brassy, clever, uproarious feminist country anthems like “Thick Thighs” and “PMS.” But this song, “Just About Over You,” was different, a smoldering ballad that balanced resentment with determination. She uploaded a video singing it, and her fans reacted feverishly, raising money for her to record it professionally. Three weeks later, when she self-released it to streaming services, she went live on TikTok to thank them.“I thought that my life was changed then, you know?” she said. “I thought that was it.”The next day, “Just About Over You” unexpectedly topped the iTunes sales chart. For Block, who moved to Nashville in 2014 right after high school, and who sang at bars for tips in between other make-ends-meet jobs, the jolt was sudden. Before long, she had a record deal, a publishing contract and on Friday, she’ll release her full-length debut album, “Welcome to the Block Party.”It’s a refreshing and accomplished pop-country debut album, and an ambitious one, too. In a moment in which female performers are still scant on country radio, it is full of songs that announce their intentions loudly. The sheer scale of some of the album’s choruses — on “My Bar,” “Heels in Hand,” “Wish You Were the Whiskey” and others — recalls the power country of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the genre was taking its cues from arena rock, and when its pop ambitions were unfettered. Nothing about this album is shy.Earlier in the day, Block was sitting at a table at the Listening Room, a cafe and performance space where she used to work. Her hair was pulled up in a turquoise scrunchie that matched both her fingernails and her chewing gum. She wore a marble-dyed mesh shirt, tight jeans, clodhopper heels and a bounty of rings and necklaces. “Classy and trashy,” she joked, adding, “I like to wear clothes that fit my like hourglass shape, owning the whole body thing.”If Nashville has been inhospitable to female performers, it has been exponentially more so to anyone who deviates from its strictly proscribed beauty standards. As a young performer, Block found her role models far from country music; “I would watch Beyoncé get up on TV and like, she was a thicker girl, and that was cool.”“I can be the funny girl or I could be the girl crying her eyes out,” Block said. “The girl crying her eyes out or the girl trying to hype up the girl that’s crying her eyes out.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesBlock encountered resistance from her earliest days in Nashville: “I remember sitting down with somebody and it was that conversation, ‘I’m saying this in a nice way, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you need to lose weight if this is the career path that you really want to go down.’”The uproarious “Thick Thighs,” which had been a breakout success on TikTok, was written in a fit of pique. “I’ve been hearing ’bout ‘dad bods’ a little too long/So what about my muffin top is wrong?” she sings tartly, adding an implied eye-roll at the chorus: “I can’t be the only one who likes/Extra fries over exercise.” When she performed it for the first time at the bar where she sang covers of Carrie Underwood and the Chicks for tips, the crowd was singing along by the second chorus.But when it came time to put out her first EP (released last April) after signing her deal, she opted for a set of lovelorn heartbreak ballads. “I did have that fear of being the ‘funny song’ girl,” Block said. “I can be the funny girl or I could be the girl crying her eyes out. The girl crying her eyes out or the girl trying to hype up the girl that’s crying her eyes out.”But an urging from the president of her label — “She told me, ‘That is new. That is you. And that is ballsy for somebody to say that. I really want to make sure that doesn’t get lost.’” — made her realize how crucial both parts of her creative personality would be for her album.The album’s final song, “Peaked in High School,” plays to to her humorous side, with Block jubilantly dismissing the mean girls who made teenage life hard: “I got a deal, you got divorced/You see my face on billboards/I changed the number you’re still calling.” But the smokiness of her heartbreak songs is potent. They’re often pointedly about an ex who appears to still be lingering — on the insistently resilient “My Bar,” he tries to showing up at her local watering hole (“You think you’re such a star but here’s the funny part/ No one even knows who you are”), while on the slick kiss-off “I Bet You Wanna Know,” he’s painted as a stubborn shadow that Block can’t quite shake.Block’s blend of sass and angst is powerful, and a far cry from the music she was making when she first came to Nashville — “Taylor Swift meets Miranda Lambert” — and was building Pinterest boards charting what her style and aesthetic should be. “I basically was trying to cover up everything cool about me, you know?”Now, she leans into sparkle. In her Jeep, she sips water from a tumbler sent by a fan, covered in glitter and inscribed with the names of several of her songs. She’s having her album release concert at the Las Vegas branch of the bar she favors in Nashville. And she’s seeking out kindred spirits: “My goal is to do a ‘CMT Crossroads’ with Lizzo, and have her playing a frickin’ flute to ‘Thick Thighs’!” More

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      Hargus Robbins, Pianist on Country Music Hits, Dies at 84

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      A revered member of Nashville’s A-Team of studio musicians, he was a major contributor to Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album.NASHVILLE — Hargus “Pig” Robbins, one of country music’s most prolific session piano players and a key contributor to Bob Dylan’s landmark 1966 album, “Blonde on Blonde,” died on Sunday. He was 84.His death was announced on the website of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. It did not say where he died or specify the cause.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.An instinctive melodicist who valued understatement over flash, Mr. Robbins helped establish the piano as an integral part of the smooth, uncluttered Nashville Sound of the 1960s. He also was a big reason that folk and rock acts like Joan Baez and Mr. Dylan began traveling to Nashville to adopt the impromptu approach to recording popularized here.The former Kingston Trio member John Stewart referred to him as “first-take Hargus Robbins” when, on the closing track of Mr. Stewart’s acclaimed 1969 album, “California Bloodlines,” he listed the Nashville session musicians who appeared on it. Mr. Stewart was acknowledging Mr. Robbins’s knack for playing musical passages flawlessly the first time through.Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.“Of all the musicians on my sessions, he stood the tallest,” the producer and A-Team guitarist Jerry Kennedy said of Mr. Robbins in an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame.“He has been a backbone for Nashville,” added Mr. Kennedy, who worked with Mr. Robbins on hits by Roger Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis, and on “Blonde on Blonde.”Mr. Robbins acquired his distinctive nickname, Pig, while attending the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville as a boy.“I had a supervisor who called me that because I used to sneak in through a fire escape and play when I wasn’t supposed to and I’d get dirty as a pig,” Mr. Robbins said in an interview cited in the Encyclopedia of Country Music.He lost vision in one of his eyes when he was 3, after accidentally poking himself in the eye with a knife. The injured eye was ultimately removed and Mr. Robbins eventually lost sight in his other eye as well.While at the School for the Blind he studied classical music, but he would also play jazz, honky-tonk and barrelhouse blues.Mr. Robbins’s wide-ranging tastes served him well, equipping him for work on soul recordings like Clyde McPhatter’s 1962 pop hit, “Lover Please” (where he was inscrutably credited as Mel “Pigue” Robbins), andArthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him),” a Top 10 R&B single from 1962 covered by the Beatles.Afforded the chance to stretch out stylistically on “Blonde on Blonde,” Mr. Robbins played with raucous abandon on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the woozy, carnivalesque No. 2 pop hit hooked by the tagline “Everybody must get stoned.” He employed a tender lyricism, by contrast, on elegiac ballads like “Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”Hargus Melvin Robbins was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Spring City, Tenn. His first big break came in 1959 when the music publisher Buddy Killen secured him an invitation to play on Mr. Jones’s “White Lightning.” Spurred by Mr. Robbins’s rollicking boogie-woogie piano, the record became a No. 1 country single.Another opportunity came two years later, when the producer Owen Bradley, needing someone to fill in for the A-Team pianist Floyd Cramer, hired Mr. Robbins to play on the session for Ms. Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Mr. Cramer soon embarked on a solo career, creating an opening for Mr. Robbins on the A-Team.Mr. Robbins flirted with a solo career in the ’50s, recording rockabilly originals under the name Mel Robbins. “Save It,” an obscure single from 1959, was covered by the garage-punks the Cramps on their 1983 album, “Off the Bone.”One of Mr. Robbins’s instrumental albums, “Country Instrumentalist of the Year,” won a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance in 1978.Working as a session musician was nevertheless his stock in trade, as a scene from Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “Nashville” memorably attests. Upbraiding his recording engineer when a hippie piano player nicknamed Frog shows up to work on their session instead of Mr. Robbins, the narcissistic country singer played by Henry Gibson shouts, “When I ask for Pig, I want Pig!”Mr. Robbins performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2012.Wade Payne/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Robbins was named country instrumentalist of the year by the Country Music Association in 1976 and 2000. Even after he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, he continued — then in his 70s — to do studio work with latter-day hitmakers like Miranda Lambert and Sturgill Simpson.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Losing his eyesight may or may not have helped Mr. Robbins cultivate a keener musical sensibility. His playing, in any case, revealed a commitment to listening and imagination that had him responding to his collaborators with a singular depth of feeling.“Pig Robbins is the best session man I’ve ever known,” said Charlie McCoy, a fellow A-Teamer, at a reception held in Mr. Robbins’s honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Anytime Pig’s on a session everyone else plays better.”“If you’re going to be a good player,” Mr. Robbins said at the event, “you have to come up with something that will complement the song and the singer.” More

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      Ralph Emery, the Dick Clark of Country Music, Dies at 88

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      For six decades he promoted country performers on radio and television, earning a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame.NASHVILLE — Ralph Emery, the M.C. widely regarded as the most popular radio and television broadcast personality in the history of country music, died on Saturday at a hospital here. He was 88.His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed by his wife of 54 years, Joy Kott Emery.Heralded by turns as the dean of country music broadcasters and the Dick Clark of country music, Mr. Emery spent more than six decades on the air promoting country music and seeking to broaden its appeal among audiences with no natural affinity with rural Southern culture.He first made his mark in 1957 after signing on to work the graveyard shift at Nashville’s WSM, home of the Grand Ole Opry. A 50,000-watt radio station known as the “Air Castle of the South,” WSM could be heard throughout the Southern and Eastern United States — and, on clear nights, well beyond them.Only 24 at the time, Mr. Emery immediately distinguished himself at WSM as a low-key host with an intimate, easygoing on-air presence. His informal, open-door policy on the show encouraged his guests, both established and aspiring, to drop by the studio unannounced to chat, drink coffee and spin their latest records.“Ralph was more a grand conversationalist than a calculated interviewer, and it was his conversations that revealed the humor and humanity of Tom T. Hall, Barbara Mandrell, Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins and many more,” said Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame, in a statement. “Above all, he believed in music and in the people who make it.”From 1957 to 1972, some of country’s biggest stars, including Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, made impromptu appearances on Mr. Emery’s show, its most devoted followers perhaps being the cross-country truckers it kept awake as they made their all-night runs.Mr. Emery, right, with Reba McEntire in 2007 during a break in his interview show on the RFD-TV cable channel. Over the years, he interviewed country music’s biggest stars.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressMr. Emery’s early success on WSM also led to a concurrent slot as an announcer on the Grand Ole Opry, as well as a role as host of “Opry Almanac,” an Opry-themed television broadcast on WSMV later billed as “The Ralph Emery Show.”One uncharacteristically fraught exception to Mr. Emery’s otherwise affable tenure at WSM came in 1968 when the pioneering country-rock band the Byrds were guests on his show.The group’s new album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” unabashedly expressed their devotion to traditional country music, even to the point of recruiting some of Nashville’s first-call session musicians to play on the record. The Byrds’s performance on the Opry before going on Mr. Emery’s show, though, was greeted with a cool reception from the audience after they decided to perform one of their originals instead of the Merle Haggard song they assured the show’s management they would play.None too impressed with their hippie take on country music, Mr. Emery likewise gave the Byrds the cold shoulder. Gram Parsons and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds responded in kind by writing “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” a merciless sendup in which they characterized the song’s protagonist (a thinly veiled version of Mr. Emery) as a hidebound Southerner.This inauspicious clash with the counterculture notwithstanding, Mr. Emery continued to flourish within country music with “The Ralph Emery Show.” An early morning television broadcast that ran on WSMV from 1972 to 1991, the program featured a live band and earned a reputation for developing unsung talent like Lorrie Morgan and the Judds.A man of unflagging energy, Mr. Emery also hosted the nationally syndicated weekly TV series “Pop Goes the Country” from 1974 to 1980, before reaching what might have been his peak in popularity as the host of “Nashville Now.” A prime-time broadcast that aired weeknights on the Nashville Network from 1983 to 1993, “Nashville Now” for years featured a Muppet-like co-host named Shotgun Red, played by the comedian and voice-over artist Steve Hall.Mr. Emery, right, presented Loretta Lynn and Marty Robbins with plaques proclaiming them WSM’s top female and male vocalists in 1969.Dale Ernsberger/The Tennessean, Nashville Tennessean, via ImagnWalter Ralph Emery was born on March 10, 1933, in McEwen, Tenn., 50 miles or so west of Nashville, the only child of Walter and Maxine (Fuqua) Emery.His father, who suffered from alcoholism, was an accountant. His mother, who struggled with poor mental health, worked as a stenographer and at other jobs to pay the bills. Young Ralph’s happiest childhood moments were spent on his grandparents’ farm.Radio likewise proved an escape from childhood trauma — Mr. Emery’s “surrogate family,” as he put it in the first of two memoirs, “Memories” (written with Tom Carter), if not a career path.After his parents divorced, Mr. Emery worked as an usher in a Nashville movie theater. He also stocked groceries in a local Kroger store, paying his way through the Tennessee School of Broadcasting.“I practiced and practiced, in school and at home, talking and listening real hard to myself to rid my speech of its horrendous regionalism,” Mr. Emery said in an interview for his bio for the Country Music Hall of Fame.Perhaps inevitably, Mr. Emery tried his hand at recording with “Hello Fool,” an answer record to Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” that reached the country Top 10 in 1961. He also made an album, “Songs for Children” (1989), with Shotgun Red, his co-host from “Nashville Now.”Mr. Emery, right, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007 with, from left, Mel Tillis and Vince Gill.John Russell/Country Music Hall of Fame, via Associated PressMr. Emery also appeared in several B-movies, including “Nashville Rebel” and the “Girl from Tobacco Row,” both from 1966.Mr. Emery continued to host country-themed programming into the 2000s, perhaps most notably, “Ralph Emery Live,” a TV production, later renamed “Ralph Emery’s Memories,” that aired on cable from 2007 to 2015.Mr. Emery was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007 and into the National Radio Hall of Fame three years later.Besides his wife, he is survived by three sons, Steve, Michael and Kit, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Mr. Emery was married several times, including a brief union with the singer Skeeter Davis from 1960 to 1964.“I’ve always tried to bring respect to country music,” he said in his bio for the Country Music Hall of Fame. “I’ll be very content if people can look on me and say, ‘He brought dignity to his craft,’ or, ‘He brought class to the business.’” More

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      Dallas Frazier, Who Wrote Hits for Country Stars, Dies at 82

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      His songs included the novelty number “Alley Oop,” the Oak Ridge Boys’ hit “Elvira” and “Beneath Still Waters” for Emmylou Harris.Dallas Frazier, a songwriter of great emotional range who wrote No. 1 country hits for Charley Pride, Tanya Tucker and the Oak Ridge Boys, died on Friday at a rehabilitation facility in Gallatin, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 82.His death was confirmed by his daughter Melody Morris, who said he had suffered two strokes since August.Although his most enduring success came in country music, Mr. Frazier also wrote pop and R&B hits for artists like the country-soul singer Charlie Rich and the Louisiana bluesman Slim Harpo. Both released versions of Mr. Frazier’s “Mohair Sam,” a swamp-pop homage to a larger-than-life hipster that, in Mr. Rich’s 1965 Top 40 pop version, became one of Elvis Presley’s favorite songs.Mr. Frazier’s big break, though, came five years earlier with “Alley Oop,” a novelty song that reached No. 1 on the pop chart (No. 3 on the R&B chart) for the Hollywood Argyles in 1960. Inspired by the V.T. Hamlin comic strip of the same name, the song has been recorded several times since, including versions by the Beach Boys and the satirical British art-rockers the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.David Bowie also interpolated the line “Look at those cave men go” from “Alley Oop” in his 1973 single “Life on Mars?”“I had country roots, but I had this other thing going on with me,” Mr. Frazier said, alluding to his omnivorous musical appetite in a 2008 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever. “I wasn’t stuck in this one field of music. I had other things going on inside my soul.”Mr. Frazier’s bread and butter, nevertheless, was country music, where his songs plumbed an array of subjects and emotions, like humor, heartache and his hardscrabble childhood during the Great Depression.Mr. Frazier wrote “There Goes My Everything” for the Grand Ole Opry star Jack Greene, “Beneath Still Waters” for Emmylou Harris and “Elvira,” with its atavistic “oom poppa, oom poppa” chorus, for the Oak Ridge Boys. All three were career-defining records, and each topped the country chart. (“There Goes My Everything” also reached the pop Top 20 for the British crooner Engelbert Humperdinck in 1967.)Mr. Frazier, left, with Marty Stuart and Connie Smith, performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2019. Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumConnie Smith, a 2012 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has recorded more than five dozen songs written by Mr. Frazier.Dallas June Frazier was born on Oct. 27, 1939, in Spiro, Okla. His parents, William Floyd Frazier and Eva Marie Laughlin Frazier, were itinerant laborers who moved the family to Bakersfield, Calif., to work in the cotton fields there. Young Dallas was just 2½ at the time.The Model A was loaded down and California boundA change of luck was just four days awayBut the only change that I remember seeing for my daddyWas when his dark hair turned to silver graySo goes the second half of the last stanza of “California Cottonfields,” an autobiographical original, written by Mr. Frazier and Earl Montgomery, that became a signature song for Merle Haggard, whose childhood privation rivaled Mr. Frazier’s.“We were part of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” Mr. Frazier said in 2008, referring to John Steinbeck’s epic novel of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. “We were the Okies who went out to California with mattresses tied to the tops of their Model A Fords. My folks were poor.”The Fraziers lived in tents and boxcars in the California labor camps, suffering not only the indignity of poverty but also the prejudice of native westerners. Dallas began picking cotton at the age of 6.His father exposed him to country music, playing the latest hits by Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell on the jukebox of their local diner. Dallas Frazier commemorated the experience in “Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul,” a song that became a Top 40 country hit for his fellow Oklahoman Stoney Edwards in 1973.Mr. Frazier began writing songs and singing as an adolescent, earning an invitation at 12 to tour with the country star Ferlin Husky after winning a West Coast talent contest. At 14, he signed a contract as a recording artist with Mr. Husky’s label, Capitol Records. During the mid-to-late ’50s, he also appeared regularly on Cliffie Stone’s “Hometown Jamboree,” a popular country music television show broadcast from Los Angeles.In 1963, after his singing career began to founder, Mr. Frazier moved to Nashville with his wife, Sharon, to work for country song publishers. He continued to make the occasional record, steeped in New Orleans-style R&B, before eventually giving himself over to songwriting full time.In 1976, shortly after his induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Mr. Frazier suddenly retired from music to become the pastor of a church outside Nashville. He returned to writing and performing three decades later, emerging as an elder statesman of the music he helped shape.Besides Ms. Morris, Mr. Frazier is survived by his wife of 63 years, Sharon Carpani Frazier; their two other daughters, Robin Proetta and Alison Thompson; four grandchildren; one great-grandson; and a sister, Judy Shults.Despite his success as a songwriter in country music, Mr. Frazier said that at times he felt hampered by Nashville’s unwritten rules, especially when it came to embracing more wide-ranging musical influences like rock and R&B.“Nobody ever said, ‘Dallas, you can’t do this,’” he told Perfect Sound Forever, “but it was common knowledge that you did certain things. I should have had more product in the rock ’n’ roll field, definitely. Had I been living in L.A. or New York, I would have, but less country, you see.” More

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      FKA twigs Seeks Angelic Intervention, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Maren Morris, Stromae, Robert Glasper and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.FKA twigs, ‘Meta Angel’FKA twigs’s new mixtape, “Caprisongs,” is woven through with snippets of conversations with friends, which she has said represents a kind of sonic antidote to the loneliness and self-doubt she was experiencing during the 2020 lockdown. The wrenching, shape-shifting “Meta Angel” is perhaps the purest distillation of this approach: After an introductory pep talk from a friend, twigs confesses her private vulnerabilities (“I’ve got voices in my head, telling me I won’t make it far”), before summoning all her defiance on an artfully Auto-Tuned, Charli XCX-esque chorus. “Throw it in the fire,” she belts, in a conflagration of emotion that sounds like the first step to healing. LINDSAY ZOLADZStromae, ‘L’enfer’“L’enfer” — the “Hell” that Stromae confesses to in this single — is thoughts of suicide. Stromae, whose father is from Rwanda, is a Belgian songwriter, musician, dancer and YouTube creator who has been making a return after releasing his last studio album in 2013. This song suggests the reason for his absence: dark, self-destructive impulses that he has averted. It begins with Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies and moves to four mournful piano chords as Stromae considers how “It’s crazy how many people have thought the same.” A choir, stuttering electronics and a looming beat answer him, but there’s nothing sanctimonious about the song; Stromae sounds like he’s still grappling with his troubles. JON PARELESAldous Harding, ‘Lawn’“Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me,” sings the ever-enigmatic Aldous Harding in “Lawn,” from an album due in March. The track is a wispy-voiced homage to Stereolab, serenely cycling through two-chord piano patterns over breezy syncopated drums, as Harding airily ponders “losing you” and the obligations of songwriting: “Time flies when you’re writing B-sides,” she observes. The video, co-directed by Harding, features human-lizard hybrids and actual reptiles, but she never sounds entirely coldblooded. PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Circles Around This Town’The first single from Maren Morris’s forthcoming album, “Humble Quest,” vividly conjures her earliest days in Nashville, hustling around town in a “Montero with the A/C busted” shopping “a couple bad demos on a burned CD.” Those details may feel lived-in and time-stamped, but Morris knows she’s operating within a long lineage — she was certainly not the first aspiring songwriter to drive circles around Music City in hopes of catching her big break, nor will she be the last. The song’s direct appeal to this country tradition makes it feel like a throwback to the days before Morris’s pop crossover, but she and the producer Greg Kurstin prove twang is no obstacle to a soaring, universally inviting chorus. “Thought that when I hit it, it’d all look different, but I still got the pedal down,” Morris sings from the other side of success, still hungry but now with a mature confidence in her talent. ZOLADZPavement, ‘Be the Hook’An infamous lore hangs over “Terror Twilight,” Pavement’s fifth and final album, from 1999. The alt-rock super-producer Nigel Godrich was hired in an attempt to make the band’s slacker-rock sound slightly more palatable to the mainstream, but his methods ended up hastening the already-fraying group’s demise — or so the story goes. On April 8, though, Matador Records will finally release a comprehensive deluxe edition of “Terror Twilight,” and perhaps enough time has passed since the LP’s polarizing release that it can finally be appreciated on its own terms. The first taste of the unreleased material, the loose and bluesy jam “Be the Hook,” already complicates the received wisdom that “Terror Twilight” was all streamlined melodies and smoothed-over edges, as Stephen Malkmus meta-vamps charismatically atop a crunchy riff: “Everybody get your hands together and cheer for this rock ’n’ roll band!” ZOLADZKing Princess featuring Fousheé, ‘Little Bother’King Princess, a songwriter from Brooklyn, uses a programmed punk-pop beat, U2-style guitar chords, cascading vocal harmonies and the endorsement of a co-writer, Fousheé, to confront an ex who ended up being indifferent, treating her like a “little bother.” Pointedly, she asks, “Do you feel like you should-could have tried a little harder?” PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Killer Mike, Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Black Superhero’Robert Glasper, a jazz pianist who maintains a close connection with hip-hop, works through three thick chords and enlists choir-like backup vocals behind Killer Mike (from Run the Jewels), Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid to call for a “Black Superhero.” The song invokes 1960s activism and current unrest to call for ways to save “every block, every hood, every city, every ghetto.” PARELESDJ Python, ‘Angel’The Brooklyn-based producer Brian Piñeyro (a.k.a. DJ Python) has a reputation for tenderness. Consider the title of his website, a painfully veracious observation on contemporary texting behavior: “sayingsomethingsincerelyandendingitwith.lol.” That kind of soft-focus sentimentality also appears on “Angel,” the latest track from his upcoming full-length “Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2.” Over the course of the 10-minute production, Piñeyro collages oneiric, crystalline synths and drums into a suspended state of astral bliss. The song arrives alongside a custom perfume, whose description — a “gender-spectral” scent that draws on rave culture — only plunges the release further into the universe of daydreams. ISABELIA HERRERAJacques Greene, ‘Taurus’Jacques Greene has always been interested in weaving the textures of all kinds of club music, but on “Taurus,” he takes a more meditative path, perhaps inspired by the film scores he recently composed. Hard-edge drum breaks propel the production, recalling the rush of a distant dance floor, but a softness remains at the center. The vaporous whispers and echoes of the vocalist Leanne Macomber float on and over each other, curling into a small misty cloud, like visible breath on a frigid day. The effect is cold and cavernous, but it offers an unexpected sense of comfort. HERRERAGonora Sounds, ‘Kusaziva Kufa’Gonora Sounds, from Zimbabwe, is led by a blind guitarist, Daniel Gonora, who had been a member of a top Zimbabwean group, Jairos Jiri Band. For years, he made a living performing on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. A documentary, “You Can’t Hide from the Truth,” revived his reputation, and on Feb. 4 he releases an album, “Hard Times Never Kill,” backed by some of Zimbabwe’s top musicians. His style is called sungura, which meshes Zimbabwe’s own traditions — guitar picking that echoes the plinking patterns of thumb pianos — with styles from across Africa. “Kusaziva Kufa” (“Ignorance”) taunts anyone who doubted that his music would survive; between drums, vocals and guitars, it’s a syncopated marvel that shifts to an even higher gear halfway through. PARELESRokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, ‘Kurunba’The Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Koné smiles her way through the video for “Kurunba,” and the beat she and the Irish producer Jackknife Lee — whose collaborative album is due Feb. 18 — worked up meshes a four-on-the floor thump, electronic swoops, quick-strummed guitars and West African percussion, an unstoppable groove. Yet her lyrics, delivered with a tough rasp, are about the ways a patriarchal culture discards women after they have raised their children, protesting with unquestionable vitality. PARELES More

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      Why Kane Brown Loves Cookie Monster, Elvis Presley and ‘Ted Lasso’

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      The country star’s list of must-haves mixes heartstring-yanking shows, sports video games and powerhouse musicians known for shaking up the culture.The country singer Kane Brown will not lie: He has not developed any new skills during the pandemic. He’s spent a lot of time with his wife and daughter. He’s spent a lot of time in the gym. He oversaw construction on his house, and almost looked into whether he could try building his own home in the future. (That did not pan out.)But for the most part, he’s been waiting to get back on the road. Calling from Indianapolis, on the first day of the second leg of his Blessed & Free tour, he said it was “crazy” to be performing again, and observed that the feeling stretches to the audience. “The fans don’t know what to think; they don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t really have answers for them, or explanations. But we get to play the show.”Tour life in the time of Covid-19 is different than it used to be. One constant is video games: Brown plays just about all the available sports games, with some “Call of Duty” thrown in for good measure. He doesn’t take much care to hide his identity, which makes for some fun interactions. “I got a big microphone above my head, so a lot of people think I’m a rapper,” he said. “One time, we had these kids convinced I was Lil Baby. But if you click on my profile, it says my name, so then I’ll get a lot of messages like, ‘Man, I’m a big fan.’”Brown is on tour for the next two months, so those fans will have plenty of time to catch him in the digital sphere. Before the Indianapolis show, we spoke about 10 of his beloved cultural necessities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. The Madden N.F.L. series One of my favorite memories was Madden 2004, when Michael Vick was on the cover. I got my first PlayStation 2, and I remember sitting down in the basement, just beating my stepdad. The game is really mechanical, but I kind of learned how to play football like I play Madden — just run and get a touchdown. You know, don’t play by the rules; don’t get hit; just run. That’s what I did in real life football, and I guess that’s why I’m sitting on my tour bus today.2. Elvis Presley Elvis was just his own thing, man. My nana was a huge Elvis fan; I remember she used to have this crazy bedazzled Elvis purse she would take everywhere, that was just his face blown up on a purse. As I got older, I started listening to his music, and if you really listen, he’s not scared to do anything. I find myself trying to sound like him all the time, on “Blue Christmas” or “Hound Dog.” However long this world goes on, he’ll still be talked about.3. “Ted Lasso” Jason Sudeikis is one of my favorite actors; I just love his dry sense of humor. I see a lot of myself in Ted. I wish I could be more like him, but I love how he’s so optimistic. No matter how much bad news is given to him, he always tries to turn it positive. The team is looking at him as a weird dude that doesn’t know anything about soccer, and he just goes in there and shows everybody his heart. It’s just amazing to me.4. Steph Curry I remember Curry coming to UTC, a college in my hometown of Chattanooga, and he hit a half-court buzzer beater. I remember everybody saying he was small and overrated, and he was just killing us. To see him go to the league, just destroying the competition, is insane. I did a podcast with him, and I think my favorite part was he brought his daughters in. I asked what they would listen to every day going to school, and they said my song “What Ifs.” It just hit a spot in my heart.5. H.E.R. I didn’t really know much about her until I met my wife, who was a huge fan. Our first dance at our wedding was “Best Part,” her song with Daniel Caesar. She’s just an amazingly talented vocal artist, and she can play that incredible guitar. She’s one of my favorite collaborators that I’ve got to work with; I feel like she’s another artist that’s going to be around for a while.6. “Click” I’m a huge Adam Sandler fan, and I actually showed this movie to my security guard last night. The angel of death gives him a universal remote that controls everything, but also controls his life. Every time he uses it, it just keeps fast forwarding. He ends up going past 20 years of his life — he loses his wife, his kids are grown, he ends up getting cancer. He fast forwarded past all the boring parts of his life, and now his life is gone. It literally brings me to tears every time I watch it. If you’re sitting on the couch like, “Oh, I’m bored,” that’s precious time you could be spending with your family. After I watched it last night, I called my wife; my security guard even called his wife. We just said, “We love you.”7. “Sesame Street”When I was a kid, Elmo and Cookie Monster were the main two characters for me. I didn’t expect to ever meet or film with them, but I got to do it last year. It was cool to see how they did it; they really make you feel like the characters are alive. I got to watch it with my little girl Kingsley, and you know, she just looks up to me and she loves Elmo. So for her to see her daddy with Elmo, it was one for the books.8. “Yellowstone”I fell in love with the TV show “Yellowstone” so much that my wife told me I need to go outside and do something. So I bought full cowboy gear and went to Lowe’s to buy some wood to build a treehouse. [Laughs] The story’s amazing; the music’s amazing. My nana always took me to rodeos, growing up. I used to mutton bust, and I used to chase the cows and try to get the ribbons off their tails. She also took me to a lot of pow wows, so to see the Native American culture that’s also in there — it’s just another part of my life that I really like watching.9. His first home in Mount Juliet, Tenn. I never really grew up in a steady home; I was always moving around, moving in with friends or different apartments with my mom. I was always grateful to have a roof over my head, but we never knew if we were going to stay there long, or what was going to happen. Before this house was built, we kept going there, and being like, “This is our new home.” Thinking about what we were going to put in there, I really felt like an adult. It was a huge, life-changing moment for me. Fast forward, we have a new home that we’re expanding on because I just had another kid. It’s amazing to give them things I never had growing up.10. Madison Square Garden The first time I went there, I watched the Knicks play Boston. The next night I was playing the Hulu Theater, so I didn’t actually get to play Madison Square Garden, but my dream was always to go to the big arena across the street. We actually get to do it this year; I think we’re even shooting a documentary. When you think about all the names that have gone through there, it’s just like: “I’m a nobody artist from Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., and I’m actually going to be headlining the arena that they’re all talking about.” It’s mind blowing. I can’t even think about the jitters; I just know it’s going to be a good show. More