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Wilson Performance Steeped In Country, Southern Rock

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By CURTIS ROSS

cross@tampatrib.com

Published: February 16, 2009

TAMPA - Her upcoming fourth album, Gretchen Wilson told a Busch Gardens crowd Sunday, was shaping up to be "the first-ever female Southern rock record."

So what does that make her first three? Wilson may be classified - and proud to be - country, but her music is a good deal closer to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Charlie Daniels than it is to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.

Her songs are built on the same sort of meaty riffs Skynyrd made its reputation with, and the band wielded up to four guitars on the songs for which Wilson strapped on a Gibson Les Paul.

But Wilson wasn't there to split musical hairs. She was there to sing her odes to the working class, redneck women and especially honky-tonks and honky-tonkin'.

You'd have to go back to George Jones (or Dean Martin) to find as many hooch references as Wilson dropped Sunday. Of course, that hardly seems inappropriate for a show staged at a brewery-based theme park.

Besides, if you can come up with as good a country drinking song as "When It Rains" ("... I pour"), well, bottoms up.

Wilson came out kicking with "Here for the Party," the title track to her 2004 debut album, then roared into "There's a Place in the Whiskey."

She previewed her upcoming album with "I Got Your Country Right Here," which name-checks Southern rock and country icons, as well as "Work Hard, Play Harder" and "Trucker Man."

Her remakes of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me the Breeze," itself a cover of a J.J. Cale tune, seemed like a natural, as did Heart's "Barracuda" - Heart may not be Southern, but Wilson shares a surname and some powerful pipes with Heart's lead singer Ann.

Journey's "Separate Ways" seemed like an odd choice, but Wilson sang it with gusto. After that it was on to the semicautionary "All Jacked Up" ("Don't drive your truck if you're all jacked up") and the inevitable encore of "Redneck Woman."

Reporter Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568.

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