Review: Stars swap songs in L.A. at Country Hall of Fame benefit

At a Country Music Hall of Fame benefit, James Taylor, Vince Gill and Joe Walsh reflect on songs that stood out in their memories.

By Randy Lewis

Sept. 28, 2016 9:45 AM PT

Education is a key mission at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

That made the 11th edition of the organization’s annual All for the Hall benefit concert and fundraiser an ideal companion piece. Emcee and 20-time Grammy Award winner Vince Gill and guest participants James Taylor, Joe Walsh, Kacey Musgraves and Chris Stapleton offered a potent and illuminating master class on the transformative combination of words set to music for their audience at the Novo theater in L.A.

For the record:

8:52 a.m. Nov. 27, 2024

An earlier edition of this post identified a song James Taylor used to audition for the Beatles’ Apple Records label in 1968 at “Today, Today, Today,” a song he included from his latest album. The song he played for two of the Beatles was “Something in the Way She Moves.”

In a dressing room backstage before the concert, Walsh, Gill and Taylor spoke of the vital avenue of self-expression music can offer.

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“If you ask each one of us how important music was when we were kids, it was everything,” said Gill, who also serves as president of the hall’s board of trustees.

“Probably even more so because we were creative-minded people, we were going to take to this way more than math and science. It’s been proven that to stimulate your brain and make it work appropriately, you need to engage the creative side of your brain. Economics, unfortunately, dictates that out of schools pretty quickly — it’s the first thing to go.”

Added Eagles lead guitarist and songwriter Walsh, “Kids who are musical, if they can find an instrument that they can express themselves with, that’s all they do. Young guitar players practice for hours, and they used to play video games. And it’s analog, it’s not digital. There’s no music in the schools, so they text. They Facebook. But you give a musical kid an ax [instrument] and you fix that.”

Backstage at the Novo, James Taylor, left, Vince Gill and Joe Walsh share stories about the impact music-making played in their lives growing up.

The assemblage of singers and songwriters then took turns performing, doing so in the style of Nashville “guitar pull” nights. It’s a tradition closely associated with Johnny Cash and June Carter, who for years famously hosted such round-robin sessions at their home.

Gill opened with a song he’d written recently, saying the guitar-pull tradition usually involved musicians sharing what they were working on rather than their greatest hits. His was a salute to one of his musical heroes, Merle Haggard, a touching tribute in which he sang of feeling “all alone in a world without Merle Haggard/It’s a world I thought I’d never see....If I could have one last song/It’s Merle I would choose.”

Each artist shared stories about what inspired them to write certain songs, or bits of their struggle before finding success. Taylor topped them all, introducing “Something in the Way She Moves,” the song he used for his audition when he became the first outside artist signed to the Beatles’ Apple Records in 1968.

“I sang it for Paul McCartney and George Harrison,” the 68-year-old musician said to incredulous looks from those around him onstage. “I was rather nervous. I don’t know how I got through — I really don’t.”

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Singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton performs at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s All for the Hall benefit concert at the Novo theater in L.A.