Patty Loveless Still Dreams About Pairing Up With Vince Gill
The recently begun and much-in-demand tour of reigning Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year Vince Gill and Patty Loveless, which features a complete Loveless show as a prelude to Gill’s performance, is not an arbitrary, spur-of-the-moment pairing.
The two have sung backup for each other on several records. And before that, when Gill was on RCA Records, his producer was Emory Gordy, who has since become Loveless’ producer as well as her husband.
Gill and Loveless were planning an oldfashioned country male-female duet album - a rarity these days - before she left MCA, for which Gill now records, to go to Sony Music a couple of years ago.
“We were selecting songs and having meetings (with record executives),” she recalls. “It was about to take place, and MCA was all worked up for it. But then when I chose to make a change and asked MCA to release me, that really kind of dissolved that idea. Of course, they continued it on with Reba (in a McEntire-Gill duet project), and it was successful as singles for them.
“But we really were going for an album, the Dolly Parton-Porter Wagoner kind of duet. I don’t know, maybe it was meant for it not to happen at that time. It still could happen. Look at The Trio (of Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris in the 1980s), and look at all the different labels they were on. So I have to dream about it.”
Speaking of big tours
Reba McEntire basically has her own traveling town. Her current entourage and stage ensemble is easily country music’s most mammoth of the moment.
McEntire, whose 1994 tour outgrossed that of any other country act, boasts a 1995 schedule of shows almost twice as long as last year’s, some 120 as compared to about 70. This year’s foray is supported by an 80-person crew and transported by six buses and 13 trucks.
Jackson tours with rookies
Alan Jackson has added new Mercury artist Wesley Dennis to his concert bill for much of 1995, which should help the newcomer’s name get known around the field in a hurry.
Dennis (whose first album, “Wesley Dennis,” has just been released) was discovered by Jackson’s record producer, Keith Stegall, and sings in a traditional style very compatible with Jackson’s.
In his first Jackson date at Springfield, Ill., Dennis received a standing ovation - which is said to be highly unusual on a Jackson show for anybody besides Jackson.
B&D nabs Wade Hayes
Another of the country concerts’ foremost acts, Brooks & Dunn, has grabbed as an opener young Wade Hayes, whose first single, “Old Enough to Know Better,” not only reached No. 1 but stayed there a couple of weeks.
Last year, Hayes toured with Tracy Lawrence and says he and Lawrence became close friends.
Nashville awaits Richey debut
There is a serious buzz developing in Nashville over the impending debut of singersongwriter Kim Richey, who has been singing vocal background on records by such stars as Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year Pam Tillis, Rodney Crowell and Radney Foster and has written songs recorded by Trisha Yearwood, George Ducas and Foster.
Her first Mercury Records album, “Kim Richey,” is due out on May, but she has been associated with Nashville-recognized performers for some time.
She and Bill Lloyd, who was Foster’s partner in the now-defunct RCA Records act Foster & Lloyd, had a band together when they were undergrads at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.
Although Lloyd urged her to move to Nashville, Richey wasn’t persuaded to do so until she heard Steve Earle’s landmark latterday country/rock album, “Guitar Town” seven years ago - and she only began writing songs after she arrived.
Preview copies of Richey’s forthcoming album, all of whose songs she wrote herself, are causing an unusual amount of talk around town.
Milsap opens theater
In late summer, the $8.5 million, 2,000-seat Ronnie Milsap Theatre will join the Gatlin Brothers’ similar facility as a celebrity attraction at the $250 million, 200-acre Fantasy HarbourWaccamaw entertainment complex in Myrtle Beach, S.C.