There’s always a debate going on about country, what it’s supposed to be or not supposed to be, whether it’s called traditional country or new country or rock and pop slipping south to impersonate country, as if there was an exact place and time (and sound) when country was, well, the most country. Meanwhile, underneath all this debate, artists like
Colt Ford have been out there going to mud-bogging parties and realizing that just plain folks, country or otherwise, are listening to a lot of different kinds of music, from country to metal anthems to urban rap, and any and all of it could come blasting out of one of those trucks as it leaps and swerves through the mud -- it’s a weekend party and no one cares about the appropriateness of the music that’s playing; no one is saying, hey, you can’t like country and still like rap, or vice versa.
Ford gets this, and his own brand of country/rap is hardly concerned with genre preservation so much as he’s trying to document what really goes on out there in the fields, mud bogs, and back roads of what passes for the country in the 21st century. You might hear
George Jones -- but you’re just as likely, if not more likely, to hear
2Pac.
Ford is also pretty good at marketing. He’s done a lot of things, including being a professional golfer at one time, and he knows a vibrant niche when he sees one. He’s also very good at what he does. This set is the second volume in his
Mud Digger compilation series, and like the first, it mixes rock, country, and rap into a hybrid that could care less what it is as long as it sounds good coming out of a truck window and you can party to it. That’s at least one definition of country. Highlights include
Ford's remix of his own “Cricket on a Line,”
Sunny Ledfurd's “Trainwreck,”
JB and the Moonshine Band's country-folk-rap “I’m Down,” and
Rehab's charmingly trashy “Come Here Girl.” ~ Steve Leggett