Well now, this is just my kind of thing, and I'm posting it for that reason and also in case it may be yours. Paul at Setting the Woods on Fire is inviting you to submit a list of your top 10 country music stars. Impossible to resist. He gives his own list, as does Alex via whom I came to Paul's invitation. This is an exercise I went through on the old normblog site ('I don't know whether to kill myself or go bowling', August 6 2003), but that was nearly five years ago, and so it's time to reconsider. Here's a list of my 'contenders', produced by starting with those who came up for consideration last time, adding two and excising one:
Terry Allen, Johnny Cash, Guy Clark, Iris DeMent, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Lyle Lovett, Bill Monroe, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, Dolly Parton, Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, Dwight Yoakam.Now comes the hard part. I need 10 from those 22, and to rank them. Here goes:
1. Emmylou HarrisOh, the pain of the omissions. Don't hang around.
2. Lyle Lovett
3. George Jones
4. Merle Haggard
5. Waylon Jennings
6. Steve Earle
7. Townes Van Zandt
8. Randy Travis
9. Iris DeMent
10. Ricky Skaggs