Well, it was certainly an eventful night for country music. While the story of the night was undoubtedly Taylor Swift taking home Album, Entertainer and Female Vocalist of the Year awards, there were a couple of other surprises, like Lady Antebellum displacing Rascal Flatts as the Vocal Group of the Year and to the surprise of even them, the group took home Single of the Year for their ballad “I Run To You.” Hosted by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, the event was a smooth-sailing show with the hosts singing skits that changed classic songs into bits about Kanye West not being there to interrupt (Little Jimmy Dickens later continued the joke with Brad and Carrie) and then serenading Brooks & Dunn to the tune of Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”
The event featured a bevy of hot button performances including two Swift performances, “Forever and Always” and an acoustic rendition of “Fifteen” with her former classmates (some who looked about 25) surrounding her in the audience. While Darius Rucker sang “Alright” from the crowd, the Zac Brown Band and Martina McBride gave the best performances of the night, both of them covers. Martina’s was in tribute to Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Barbara Mandrell while the Zac Brown Band’s smokin’ rendition of the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” was unquestionably the highlight of the night. With a performance like that, the whole industry know knows how talented the band is and what stars they’ve become as the band has made their way through their sheer talent, not on how they look. The Vocal Duo of the Year award went to Sugarland whose lead vocalist Jennifer Nettles said “Wow, I didn’t expect this, especially this year,” a quote which was in reference to the retiring Brooks & Dunn. Nettles then went on to praise the duo and thank them for ‘sharing the category’ with Sugarland.
The Vocal event of the Year went to Paisley and Keith Urban for their “Start a Band” duet. Paisley also took home his third consecutive Male Vocalist of the Year trophy. Singer/songwriter Jamey Johnson was up for four awards but only took home one, the same award he won in 2007 for writing “Give It Away” with Bill Anderson. This time he shared the “Song of the Year” honor with fellow singer/songwriter James Otto and songwriter Lee Thomas Miller for writing “In Color.” Mac McAnally won his second consecutive CMA Award for best instrumentalist while Taylor Swift certainly became the story of the night. Darius Rucker was awarded the coveted Best New Artist award and while it could be argued that a man who has one of the most familiar voices in rock music isn’t really a new artist, he was to country music and therefore was eligible for this award.
The biggest ‘thing’ in music right now, outside of soundtracks for popular shows and movies, Taylor Swift expectantly took home the award for Album of the Year for the year’s best-selling album, Fearless. Most people expected her to win that and the video award but nobody really expected that she’d win the Female Vocalist of the Year award, particularly the very very loyal Carrie Underwood fans who have long tried to incite some sort of war between Taylor and Carrie as if it were a life and death situation.
The fans couldn’t complain about Swift taking home the grand-daddy of all the awards last night, The Entertainer of the Year for Underwood wasn’t nominated in the category (although they thought she should be there instead of Taylor). When making the Roughstock predictions for the Entertainer category, I figured that Taylor would likely walk home with this award or that Kenny Chesney would win it again, well I guess I guessed right.
In the end, the event had good jokes, strong pacing (never felt like it was too long) and that made for an eventful night. The Oscar telecast could learn a thing or two about not being too long from the CMA production team.
What did you think? Did the awards show play-out as you expected it to? Were there any real surprises to you besides the two ones mentioned above?
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