Among many other things, country music is marriage counseling with fiddles, which perhaps explains why husband-and-wife acts are as natural in Nashville as men's shirts embroidered with flowers. It was no surprise, therefore, when established hitmaker Tim McGraw married his one-time opening act Faith Hill in 1996, thereby extending a tradition that includes luminaries from George Jones and Tammy Wynette back to A.P. Carter and his wife Sarah (and all their famous descendants and spouses). But so successful have Tim and Faith been in their partnership that they're now daring to move into a realm where husband-wife teams aren't nearly so common -- the far broader marketplace of pop music.

Of course, the duo have been peddling their wares to the mainstream for a while now. Their previous solo albums both debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart, one of many joint accomplishments the pair have shared over their congruent careers. Since their 1993 debut CDs, Hill has put out five albums and McGraw seven, plus a greatest-hits package. According to their (separate) publicists, each of these two catalogues has passed the 25 million mark, which averages out to about one Tim McGraw or Faith Hill album for every household in America.

Over the past few years Hill has taken greater advantage of that achievement than her husband by shifting more assertively into straight pop. Even so, she started in that direction only after McGraw introduced her to his ambitious Nashville producer, Byron Gallimore. Whereas Hill's early handlers had packaged her as the purty farm girl next door, Gallimore oversaw her transformation over the course of three albums into a cover-girl diva who strips her soul naked with sweeping, vaguely new-age-ish emotionality. The shift started in 1998 with the light-pop moves of her mainstream breakthrough, Faith (Warner Bros.), and gained momentum the following year with Breathe (Warner Bros.), which so far has moved eight million copies with its wailing pop-rock salvos (the photo spread of Hill lounging in black lingerie didn't hurt either). Two years after its release, Billboard still named Faith Hill the most-played female artist of 2001, a testament to Breathe's remarkable staying power (and to Hill's post-September 11 version of "The Star Spangled Banner").

And now Gallimore has helped complete her transformation on the brand new Cry (Warner Bros.), which sounds as distant from Breathe as Breathe did from Faith. Released on October 15, the disc leaves behind all the trappings of country music, abandoning bluegrass fiddles and honky-tonk piano for a goth-pop pastiche of R&B flourishes and moody synth washes. Where Breathe leavened its histrionic assault with occasional forays into lite country, Cry just barrels through a set of pseudo Baptist hymns refracted through the prism of Madonna's Ray of Light, Christina Aguilera's teen diva debut, and Celine Dion at her most titanic. Needless to say, it also debuted at #1 on the pop charts.

And that was just the beginning of last month's McGraw-Hill juggernaut. A week ago Tuesday, Gallimore's name appeared in the stores as a co-producer on Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors (Curb). Unlike his wife, McGraw still clamps the lid on his crossover potential with his big black cowboy hat and all that it represents (steel guitars, etc.). Yet his new disc owes so much to the Eagles -- updated with a dash of U2's dour majesty -- that it makes Garth Brooks sound like Ernest Tubb in comparison. At 8 p.m. the evening after its release (the night before Thanksgiving), NBC broadcast an hour-long outdoor concert that McGraw performed in his home town of Start, Louisiana. And at 9 p.m. the following night (Thanksgiving itself), the network topped that with an hour-long special by his wife from the clubs and soundstages that mark the rarefied world of a pure pop star (as opposed to the world of Starr, Mississippi, which happens to be Hill's home town). Neither singer mentioned the other more than in passing, which means few curious new pop fans would make the connection between them. This suggests that the connection between Tim and Faith and the tradition of George and Tammy has become so tenuous, you might as well compare them to Tom and Nicole. Or, more productively, to Bill and Hillary.

Faith Hill

Think about it. McGraw and Hill rose out of Nashville for the same yin-yang reasons that the Clintons rose out of Little Rock -- they benefitted from the concomitant Southernization of America and the Americanization of the South. First postulated by historian John Egerton in the 1970s, this double trend was analyzed in relation to country music by Bruce Feiler in his celebrated 1998 book, Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville (Avon). According to Feiler, at the same time that Southern-style social conservatism has been spreading across America, "the sense of isolation and disenfranchisement that were central to the South have been replaced by a general sense of well-being and good fortune (down here we've got jobs and nice weather)." In short, the South has been transformed into America's idyllic notion of (white) suburbia. In politics, that joint transformation helps explain why the only Democratic presidential candidates to win election since Kennedy have been Southerners (including Al Gore, if you believe in actually counting votes). In country music, likewise, it means that most successful stars these days are "less about place and more about values." In some instances, those values are made fairly explicit, but more often than not they merge into a sonic wash that Feiler calls the expression of "American bliss -- a touch of regret every now and then, a hint of suburban angst, but, ultimately, an overarching sense of contentment."

On his new album, McGraw expresses that bliss as purely as any country performer out there. The disc opens with "Comfort Me," a stately march celebrating America as a land of refuge with lyrics so adroit, they could have come directly from a Clinton speech. From there, the album rolls through plush background vocals and simple guitar riffs that move the tunes forward in a confident and catchy recasting of the late-'70s LA-country æsthetic perfected by the Eagles and Jackson Browne. Whether McGraw is rhapsodizing over his love life or his "Home," he sounds like a man whose notion of maybe naming the album after its opening cut was fueled by self-satisfaction rather than solidarity with immigrants.

And in fact, the few songs that disturb the mood mostly confirm his smug contentment. Like his Rhodes-scholar counterpart, this well-educated son of baseball pitcher Tug McGraw has some shortcomings that can make his Bubba role-playing seem all too real. On Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors, Bubba comes out in tunes like "Who Are They," which sneers at the "funny boys" who run the Village Voice and Nashville Scene, and "That's Why God Made Mexico," which claims the struggling nation was put here just to serve our escapist needs.

"That's Why God Made Mexico" was also one of the few songs from the album that McGraw performed on his pre-Thanksgiving TV special, a spectacle that presented the musclebound Nashville hunk like a countrified version of Born in the U.S.A.-era Springsteen. If McGraw looked tawdrier than Bruce ("Did you see his fly?" exclaimed a friend later. "It wasn't a zipper; it was some kind of gothy stitched-leather thing!"), the show was still about as wholesome as American pop gets these days. The closing stomp-along, after all, was "I Like It, I Love It," a paean to the pleasure of being pussy-whipped that's a far cry from Bruce's "Pink Cadillac," a paean to the pleasure of pussy, period. And yet, to his credit, McGraw also performed his new album's fantastic first single, "Red Ragtop," a controversial number that turns on a teen abortion with as much complex, nonjudgmental empathy as any Springsteen classic.

For that matter, the song is as good as George and Tammy's classic "Golden Ring," a number that also challenges country's conservative ideology while fulfilling its formal conventions. Hill's Cry, on the other hand, achieves the exact opposite combination. Unlike Shania Twain, who packed a country and pop version of every aggressively cheerful ditty onto her new Up!, Hill risked everything with her album. Although it's steeped in country's conservatism and self-absorption and working-class roots (a feature that links it with teen pop as much as its R&B beats do), it rejects country's regional and rural conventions. For that, the album has been savaged in the press and, as Billboard has reported, angrily rejected by a large number of country-radio stations, which are usually as kiss-ass as any corporate mouthpiece you could name.

Tim McGraw

That may have been inevitable, but it's still a shame. Unlike Faith or Breathe or any other Faith Hill product I've ever forced myself to sit through, Cry isn't half bad. Even at her best, Hill still doesn't understand the first thing about making a song tell a story -- she's managed that only once in her career, on the bright, yearning chorus to 1998's "This Kiss." But her vocal skills really are set "Free" by her discovery of black rhythms. The gospel-drenched vocal interplay of "One," the Motown-like swing of "Unsaveable," even the bluesy operatics of "Cry" all boast a confidence and a soulfulness that were absent when Hill was shackled to her fiddles. (What's curious is that the Pink-penned "If You're Gonna Fly Away" isn't one of the good ones.) Just as this adopted daughter of small-town, working-class Mississippi parents claims, the album connects her to a deep, church-based Southern culture -- and then, like a shlockier version of Shelby Lynne's miraculous I Am Shelby Lynne, it goes on to transcend that culture. The modern Nashville that her husband epitomizes does neither; it just paves over that culture and calls it "Home." No wonder the purty farm girl next door has taken to wandering.

Issue Date: December 6 - 12, 2002