One week away from CMT’s Can You Duet (CYD) season finale or, as host Lance Smith noted, “only one week away from crowning country music’s next great duo.” Seven days. And what happened? Something went haywire between CMT’s programming and our cable provider. Instead of viewing the show on Saturday in the early afternoon, the HD version didn’t start until 10:30 PDT. If that wasn’t bad enough, which it was for me, the whole show wasn’t there — only the last half hour. I managed to find CYD on the standard channel, set it to record, and wouldn’t you know, the same thing happened. Sunday, ditto.
Tonight, I finally got to watch the whole show at one time. Now, I know that I could have written this up only talking about the last 30 minutes, but I just couldn’t do it. I mean, what if something amazing happened during the first two performances? Suppose Ryan & Avalon totally blew me out of the water and I thought "pick them now and forget everybody else"? Actually, they did do a... oops. I’m getting away from things here. First things first.
This week’s show began with all three duos, Steel Magnolia, Ryan & Avalon, and JB Rocket singing Big & Rich’s “Big Time” all together. What a great way to start the show. Not only do I dig the tune, but I finally got what I’d been looking for all season. Individually and as pairs, each one of them broke down that fourth wall as they connected not just with their audience but to those of us watching at home. Everyone looked very loose and natural, like they were having a total blast.
After Lance intro’d each pair, he gave some love to the judging panel. Big Kenny (BK) was grinning from ear to ear, due in part to the fact that he, along with his partner John Rich, co-wrote the opening song with Angie Aparo. Ms. Naomi Judd looked pretty happy too. As Lance recalled her musical accomplishment of having 20 top-selling singles during her career as one half of The Judds, along with daughter Wynonna, I was thinking that’s certainly something to smile about. Scott Borchetta, founder, president, and CEO of both Big Machine Records (Taylor Swift, Trisha Yearwood, Jack Ingram) and Valory Music Co. (Reba, Jewel, Emerson Drive) had a mood to match his peers. Later on in the show one of his acts would be singing. The panel had another reason to be excited. With three acts left in the competition, each judge got to pick one of the duos to mentor in the past week.
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