Various Artists - Big Night at the Museum, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, TN, 10-28-2020

The other day, I was looking for something Lucinda Williams did, and luckily stumbled upon this interesting concert from a couple of weeks ago (as I write this in November 2020). It's kind of an odd duck, but I really like it. Basically, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee put on a concert to help raise funds for them to keep going during the coronavirus pandemic. It's not exactly a home concert, because they got a bunch of famous country musicians to come to their museum and play music inside it. But there was no audience at all. Instead, the musicians went to various exhibits and played on the actual musical instruments played by country music greats like Jimmy Rodgers and Johnny Cash.

The key, for me, since I really like acoustic music, is that all the performances are solo acoustic. That's very rare for country music these days, but very much needed, since IMHO country music has suffered from bad production for a long time now. Stripping these songs way back, you get the raw essence of the music.

The show this came from was an hour and a half long. More than half of it was filled with talking. A lot of that was promoting the museum and asking for donations. A bit of it was more interesting, with the musicians sometimes talking about their influences and their feelings about playing the instruments once played by their musical heroes. But I cut all that out, since I think this has much greater replay value if it's all music and no talking. As a result, it's only 42 minutes long. That's not much for a show that was an hour and an half, but it's a good length for a typical album.

Even if you're not much of a country music fan, I highly recommend you check it out. Due to its all acoustic nature, it's more like a bunch of singer songwriters who all happen to work in the country genre. And by the way, if you want to catch all the talking parts between songs, I recommend you watch the full show, which is available on YouTube.

01 Buckaroo [Instrumental] (Brad Paisley & Dan Tyminski)
02 That's the Way the World Goes 'Round (Miranda Lambert)
03 Lovin' Arms (Keb Mo)
04 Don't Close Your Eyes (Tim McGraw)
05 Love Hurts (Emmylou Harris & Rodnew Crowell)
06 Heavy Traffic Ahead (Ricky Scaggs with Marty Stuart & Alison Brown)
07 Sweet Dreams (Reba McEntire)
08 I Still Miss Someone (Lucinda Williams)
09 Three Wooden Crosses (Kane Brown)
10 She Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Rodney Crowell)
11 You're Lookin' at Country (Ashley McBryde)
12 I Can't Stop Loving You (War and Treaty)
13 Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Carlene Carter & Marty Stuart)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15832939/BigNghtatMseumCountryMsicHallFmeMuseumNshvilleTN__10-28-2020_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I took a screenshot at the start of the YouTube video that showed the name of the concert.