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Sisters, Oregon
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Commentary
Songs that touch the heart
By Jim Cornelius

Hal Ketchum is an endangered species in country music today: an artist who writes songs with integrity and still manages to get them on the charts.

He credits "dumb luck," acknowledging that there are plenty of great songwriters who labor in relative obscurity, below the industry radar.

It's true that Ketchum came around at the right time, in the middle of what maverick songwriter Steve Earle called "the Great Nashville Credibility Scare" of the mid-to-late 1980s. For a brief period, troubadours were in vogue and "edgy" artists such as Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith were mainstream stars.

Nashville got over it and got back to business as usual. But some of those troubadours stuck around. Steve Earle became the godfather of "alternative country," Nanci Griffith is an icon of contemporary folk music, Dwight Yoakam makes the radio come to him in California and Lyle Lovett remains an uncategorizable, eccentric presence in American music.

And Hal Ketchum continues to cut great records, producing "hit" songs that people actually remember all the words to years down the road. Songs that people fall in love to or listen to to help them through hard times.

The best country songs are populist art -- both commercial and with lasting artistic merit. Merle Haggard charted dozens of songs like that. Try thinking of a few today.

"I think the key to it is to choose material that touches people in the heart," Ketchum said. "Longevity comes in the form of sincerity."

Of course Ketchum has the advantage of a golden voice -- rich and easy to listen to and distinctly his own. But it really does come down to the songs. Listening to Ketchum's songs at the Sisters Starry Nights concert on Saturday, February 2, the truth of that belief was evident.

You believe Hal Ketchum when he sings a song, whether it's a pop love ballad or a story song about a roughneck "lover of a drink, lover of a fight" who sends his pay to an ex-wife he misses every night, though he "might hold back a dollar to wash the pain out of his back."

Sure, songwriters make up songs. If they actually lived everything they wrote about, they'd be dead (ask Steve Earle -- he tried). Some songs are made up on the spot, like one song Ketchum introduced Saturday, after writing it in the studio.

But the great songwriters don't make up a song because it's what the suits think is selling today. For whatever its worth, they mean it. And audiences can tell. Given a chance to be heard, songs like that connect with their audience and become a part of their lives.

It's worked for Ketchum. He's been at it for 15 years or more now. People have fallen in love to the tune of his songs, nursed a broken heart, whiled away the hours of a "Small Town Saturday Night."

And they know the words.

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