CMA Triple Play Awards showcase generations of country songwriting excellence

The Country Music Association's Triple Play Awards, held March 1 in Nashville, celebrated songwriters who penned three No. 1 songs within a 12-month period based on the Country Aircheck, Billboard Country Airplay and Billboard Hot Country Songs charts.

So along with being an excellent place to hear snippets of songs that for the past year have sound tracked grocery store trips and time spent in rush hour traffic, the event was an ideal place to have a few conversations about four decades of mainstream country music.

On the surface, Rhett Akins and Robert Earl Keen couldn't be any different. The latter is a 67-year-old Houston native inspired by both Eric Clapton and Flatt and Scruggs whose songs have been covered by the Highwaymen ("The Road Goes on Forever") and George Strait ("Maria") among many others.

The former is not just 20-time country radio chart-topper Thomas Rhett's father. Instead, alone, or as part of the Peach Pickers (the team behind 2000s-era hits for Brooks and Dunn and Luke Bryan, among others), the singer-songwriter has been and continues to be a vaunted professional.

Akins was a Triple Play award recipient at Nashville's Saint Elle venue, along with Kurt Allison, Luke Combs, Jesse Frasure, Nicolle Galyon, Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome, HARDY, Ben Johnson, Tully Kennedy, Shane McAnally, Chase McGill, Thomas Rhett, ERNEST, Josh Thompson and Morgan Wallen.

Keen's appearance at the event (he sang his 1998 hit "Feelin' Good Again") was not linked to his current work. He hasn't released an album of new material in eight years.

Instead, he was there to honor Jody Williams, BMI's former vice president of creative in Nashville, with the 2022 CMA Songwriter Advocate Award. Williams in June 2020 founded his own song publishing company, Jody Williams Songs (home of artists including Ashley McBryde), in partnership with Warner Chappell Music Nashville.

"Honesty is still the key to great songwriting," Keen told The Tennessean.

His mainstream Nashville career kicked off with 1984's "No Kinda Dancer," critically acclaimed for its humorous, touching takes on Texans and their culture.

Discovering the space between the folk-driven freedom of his Texas roots and the confines of more corporate Nashville country allowed Keen to merge his freewheeling creativity with the level of craftsmanship required to survive Music Row's commerce-driven infrastructure.

Keen has been inducted into the Texas Cowboy and Texas Heritage Songwriters halls of fame. Thus, when asked about the legacy of his style and work, he's quick to point to other artists present at the Triple Play Awards, including 2020 CMA Entertainer of the Year Eric Church, who was also present to honor Williams. (Church performed a brand new, unreleased song, "My Nebraska.")

"He's kicking a-- with some outstanding songs that expand the genre's lyrical boundaries," Keen says.

"There are some artists we might call 'Americana,' like Brandi Carlile and Tyler Childers, who in the past five years have shown more talent than I have in the past 40, who are also impressive," Keen adds.

"I wish we still had the ability to allow songwriters to [feel a greater sense] of hunger toward their passion."

The sentence has multiple meanings. Foremost, as country music's popularity grows, there may still be a need for writers to feel the literal hunger attached to earning enough to afford food and rent.

But moreover, he's speaking to the idea that songwriters hungry for earning power and acclaim are also more often bridging into being vocalists. Combs, HARDY, Rhett and Wallen are four Triple Play Award winning songwriters who have rung the bell at No. 1 as vocalists in the past year.

"Songwriters need not all be gifted at also getting their songs into the world," Keen notes. "There are so many singers in town that I just want to walk up and say, 'You don't need to write a song, too, you just need to sing a great-written song.'"

He recalls recently hearing soul vocalist Bettye LaVette sing her version of Bob Dylan's "Things Have Changed." Keen noted LaVette's ability to interpret Dylan's lyrics with unique intonations that change the song's emotional impact.

Keen added that Joe Ely's take on his "darkly comedic, tongue-in-cheek" tune "Whenever Kindness Fails" was greatly improved by his fellow Texan's "straight-ahead freight train" style version.

"Knowing where the words are and how a mere inflection can change the force at which a song hits the listener is a severe talent that many singers have, but most who are stronger at songwriting do not," Keens says.

The types of songs that singers are cutting and songwriters are making on Music Row has evolved somewhat since Keen's 1984 Music City arrival.

In 2004, Akins and Ben Hayslip, Georgia natives and friends for 20 years, joined forces with Dallas Davidson as the Peach Pickers songwriting team because they "loved everything from Hank Williams Jr. to Run-DMC."

Though the influences are different, one thing has unified top-tier songs — whether from Akins or Keen — over the years.

"Choruses with harmonies," Akins says.

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The 53-year-old Akins sings Ja Rule's almost quarter-century-old hit "Put It On Me" when asked about what, conceptually, has allowed '90s country — about which he'd know a great deal given that he was an Academy of Country Music Awards Top New Male Vocalist nominee in 1997 — to resonate in the modern era timelessly.

He sings: "If you want to go and take a ride with me / We 3-wheeling in the fo' with the gold D's / Oh why do I live this way? / Hey must be the money."

In 2001, Nelly sang that chorus on "Ride Wit Me" and achieved gold-selling success on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. A decade later, he sang alongside Florida Georgia Line and achieved platinum success on the Hot 100 chart. Nearly 10 years later, the same artists collaborated for the triple-platinum Hot Country Songs chart hit "Lil Bit."

"Choruses with harmonies" clearly works. Akins didn't lie.

"We didn't know that the sounds of the '90s and 2000s would last forever," he says. "Yes, guys like Ja Rule and Nelly were important, but country music had acts like Garth Brooks, Brooks and Dunn, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, Travis Tritt and Shania Twain. They all had their own flavor, but they could deliver a great story with a memorable chorus."

Akins' trio of No. 1 hits from the past 12 month's are Parker McCollum's "To Be Loved By You" and two from his son, Thomas Rhett, "Half of Me" and "Slow Down Summer."

With festival and touring revenue ever-increasing in mainstream country music, the desire to place a song on an artist who can hit the top of the charts is synonymous with a song that will resonate for years. There's pressure to achieve that standard in relation to the art of crafting good art in general.

"You can write a song like someone's last 10 hits, or like I did for Jon Pardi's 'Dirt on My Boots' (a 2016 No. 1 hit) or Blake Shelton's 'Boys 'Round Here' (No. 1 in 2013), I wrote the last thing I'd ever think they'd want to cut given the expectations of what has stereotypically worked for them in the past."

As described by Williams in a 2020 interview, Keen and Akins' eras in Nashville have developed a potentially mega-lucrative period for pop-aimed country music.

"No matter what market conditions are, songwriters still move to Nashville. I love finding young talent and trying to connect the dots so that there's an income stream made with their music. The climate has never been better."

Keen adds a reminder of the core necessities of country's songwriting art overall.

"I'll always dig for the most honest way to enable and project genuine feelings via a song from both the vocalist and the live audience," he says. "The great songs cause people to respond emotionally — emotions don't lie."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: CMA Triple Play Awards: Robert Earl Keen, Rhett Akins on songwriting