Kid Rock Going Country?!

[Kooperman]

Detroit rockers find sweet home down South

By Brian Mansfield Special for USA TODAY

In his 1963 hit Detroit City, country singer Bobby Bare sang about a Southerner who migrated to Detroit to work on an automaker's assembly line.

These days, rock singers from Detroit seem to be headed south.

Rock-rap star Kid Rock had a top 30 country single last year with Picture. His latest album, Kid Rock, includes a duet with Hank Williams Jr. and another song written with Kenny Chesney. Rock also has discussed collaborating with singer/songwriter Billy Joe Shaver on a project.

Chesney and Kid Rock's DJ, Uncle Kracker, have a duet, When the Sun Goes Down, on country radio. Kracker will perform with Chesney's Guitars, Tiki Bars & a Whole Lotta Love tour this summer. He recently recorded a song with Travis Tritt.

Jack White of the Motor City garage-rock duo the White Stripes sang traditional folk and blues songs for the Cold Mountain soundtrack. He also produced Loretta Lynn's new album, Van Lear Rose, which is scheduled to be released April 27.

Perhaps most surprising, considering the often clannish nature of the country-music crowd, is the ease with which these artists are being embraced. Kid Rock already has received award nominations from the country industry. The Chesney/Kracker duet is the fastest-climbing single on the Airplay Monitor country-music charts, currently sitting at No. 9.

"I was really taken aback by how much both those guys knew about the history of country music and how many songs they know by artists I wouldn't expect them to know," Chesney says.

"I told Kid, 'Nashville is in love with you; you ought to consider buying a place down here,' " says Merle Kilgore, Williams' manager.

For Southerners who left their rural homes for the industrial north after World War II, the story of Detroit City was a familiar one. So many people identified with Bare's record that it reached the top 20 on the pop and country charts.

"Detroit was, in a lot of ways, a Southern city," says critic Dave Marsh, a Detroit native. "Where I grew up, it was a Southern city. Maybe half the kids I grew up with came from Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Indiana, Georgia — basically, the upper and mid-South."

That influx of Southerners led to a long-standing affinity between Detroit and country music.

"When I was really little, my dad listened to three things: George Jones, Patsy Cline and Motown," Uncle Kracker (Matt Shafer) says. Kracker started listening to rap about age 10, but he'd added country singers such as Williams and Jones to the mix by the time he graduated high school.

"I went from listening to a lot of rap records where they were talking about 40-ounces (malt liquor), low-riding trucks and wearing baseball hats to country cats like Junior that were just wearing cowboy hats, drinking whiskey instead of 40s and driving pickup trucks instead of low riders," Kracker says. "It wasn't a big change, especially with somebody like Hank, who was very cocky."

Marsh says he's not surprised these singers have sought to work with acts outside their own genre. "There is a tradition in Detroit that you're not done when you have your hit record," he says. "It's not written in your recording contract; it's signed across your heart that you're going to go find the other good stuff, and see what you can do to pull it forward."

The benefits likely will be mutual. Kracker joins the Chesney tour on June 3 in Tulsa. They'll play mostly outdoor amphitheaters into October.

"It'll be good for me, because it'll be an entire new audience," says Kracker, who appeared with Chesney at an industry show in Nashville and on an A&E television special last weekend.

Chesney, who's used to seeing Kid Rock T-shirts in the crowd at his concerts, believes the two audiences complement each other. "We don't have the same audience," he says, "but I think we both realize there's a lot of crossover. We're going to expand our audience because of each other."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/20...try-music_x.htm

Edited March 23, 2004 by Kooperman