Trisha Yearwood shares the love with Artpark crowd
LEWISTON — “Sing the one that brung ya!” This, according to Trisha Yearwood, is what the legendary Nashville singer and songwriter Porter Wagoner used to tell her when she’d attempt sneaking off the Grand Ol’ Opry stage without tackling her first hit, “She’s in Love With the Boy.”
Yearwood apparently took the advice the older, be-sequined, iconic baritone offered her as a youth. Tuesday, she gave an appreciative, large and thankful for the clement weather crowd a tour through her rather platinum-coated career.
“What a great crowd y’all are,” Yearwood cooed near the end of the gig. “You’ve just been so nice.”
Unsurprising, really, since Yearwood — despite the fact that Ray Davies probably wasn’t one of her main musical inspirations — certainly followed the Kinks’ advice to “Give the People What They Want.”
On what turned out to be a lovely evening, Yearwood sang with a noticeable depth of emotion. It was clear that the multi-platinum country fave hadn’t come to our “secondary market” to phone it in. She gave her all and sang with considerable strength, immaculate pitch, and genuine enthusiasm throughout.
Certainly, Mrs. Garth Brooks doesn’t need the money. She must be doing it for the right reasons.
Yearwood is still on tour for her last album, “Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love,” and much of her set concentrated on that collection. She opened with the title tune, staying within the borders of modern country-pop but suggesting an immersion in both gospel and country-blues.
This added heft to her performance throughout — whenever one feared Yearwood and band would fall flaccidly into Cheeseville, some echo of deep tradition would set things straight.
Most of the concert’s most impressive moments came when Yearwood was simply singing her heart out — if that can ever indeed be a simple thing. A late-in-the-set “Georgia Rain” actually cut through most deeply, suggesting the sort of hybridization of R&B and country that Gram Parsons imagined. It was stirring, particularly the blending of Steve Cox’s Hammond B3 and the guitar bits of Johnny Guerin.
Yearwood has a way with a ballad, and “Perfect Love” was probably the best of these. Yearwood prefaced the tune with the suggestion that she was “stupid happy” in her marriage, and then proceeded to sing the song with something resembling actual glee underpinning it.
The up-tempo tunes weren’t exactly lacking, especially a fairly steamy “Wrong Side of Memphis,” which boasted a bit of that city’s grit and swagger. The ubiquitous “She’s in Love With the Boy” did what it was supposed to, and afforded the crowd an opportunity to sing along that did not go unacknowledged.
Concert Review
Trisha Yearwood
Tuesday night as part of Tuesday in the Park series at Artpark.
