10:17am June 18, 2015

Old and middle-aged women in country

I know that with most kinds of singers, you’ll find them disappearing sometime in the early to middle parts of middle age, or at least greatly reducing the amount and type of singing they’re willing to do. This is because by that time, after using their voices so much, they generally have done enough injury to their voices that they can’t sing certain notes anymore. I remembering having a singing teacher that students admired because she’d managed to keep her voice working – and beautiful – well into her seventies. Which is apparently really hard to do.

But I’m noticing that there’s a surprising number of women in country music whose voices not only haven’t gone downhill with age, but rather have actually matured and deepened into something that can sound downright amazing compared even to their younger selves. And this seems disproportionate in country music compared to other kinds of music I’ve heard.

(I don’t listen to enough male country singers regularly enough to know whether this applies to them too. It’s not that I don’t like male country singers, I just mostly listen to their older stuff so i don’t know what, if anything, they sound like these days.)

Is there something about country music that lends itself to preserving, even enhancing, one’s voice with age, or is this some kind of huge coincidence that I just happen to notice because when I hear a woman country singer I’ve heard since childhood, my first act is usually to go look and see if they’ve put any music out recently?

Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are Lacy J. Dalton (who does country, folk, and blues-influenced country) and Kathy Mattea (who does country, bluegrass, and folk).

I don’t know their exact ages because I only know the year of their births, not the date.

But Kathy Mattea was born in 1959, which makes her about 56 – not old, but well over the age that most singers have to quit singing professionally. She started recording music in 1983, and she’s won and been nominated for a number of awards. Both her music and her voice have deepened (not in pitch, but in something intangible) with age, so each album seems better than the last, both in terms of her singing and otherwise. I’m still really enjoying “Calling Me Home”, which has mostly songs about sorrow and loss, but they’re so beautiful that they really got me through all the tough times when my dad was dying.

And Lacy J. Dalton was born on October 13, 1946, which makes her my mom’s age, a little under seventy. She put her first album out in 1978, and sang a lot of songs that really sounded like they’d be hard on her voice. And yet her voice sounds amazing – and again, has that deepened-with-age quality – even as recently as her last album in 2010.

You can listen to their voices on their most recent albums here:

http://www.amazon.com/Heres-Hank-Lacy-J-Dalton/dp/B004HFOILG/

http://www.amazon.com/Calling-Me-Home-Kathy-Mattea/dp/B008ZVW0IQ/

That’s 2010 and 2012 respectively. There’s samples of each song so you can hear their voices if you hit play.

Anyway, still curious if there’s something about country music that lends itself towards preserving one’s voice past the age most singers can (and possibly even having one’s voice get steadily better past that age), or if this is total coincidence that I just happen to notice because I mostly listen to country, bluegrass, and folk heavily influenced by either of the two.

I’d really think Lacy J. Dalton would have a lot more vocal problems than she does, though, which is one reason I’m curious. She did a lot of things in her earlier career that sounded like they would take their toll on her voice very quickly. But it clearly didn’t.