![]() ![]() ![]() Strait doesn’t believe in disappointing paying customers, so he endeavors to play every song that anyone wants to hear. A promotional contract obliges him to wear Wrangler jeans, and decades of ranching and roping inclines him to wear them stacked-that is, long and bunched up, so that he could, if necessary, mount a horse without fear of exposing any extra boot. His onstage outfit, which has barely changed in forty years, includes, along with the cowboy hat and cowboy boots, a button-down shirt and bluejeans, ironed stiff enough to form an exoskeleton. Because he was playing in the round, there was no backdrop, and nothing in the way of pyrotechnics, with the important exception of that smile. Strait prefers to give his audience as few distractions as possible: he likes to play on a stage in the center of the arena floor, with four microphones arranged like compass points every two songs, he moves, counterclockwise, to the next microphone, so that people in each quadrant of the crowd can feel as if he were singing just to them. “We have a lot of songs to play for you tonight, a whole lot,” he said, and then he didn’t say much more. On a Friday night earlier this year, at T-Mobile Arena, a few paces from the Las Vegas Strip, nearly twenty thousand fans came together to hear Strait make his way through more than thirty of his biggest hits-a fraction of the total. “I just look for a song I like, and when I hear it I know it right away.” “I don’t think there’s anything autobiographical about my material, unless it’s subconsciously,” Strait once said. He isn’t so much a great character as a great narrator, telling a variety of stories instead of returning endlessly to his own. Like Sinatra, Strait is chiefly an interpreter, not a songwriter, and he is committed to the old-fashioned idea that an entertainer’s job is to entertain, and not necessarily to bare his soul. When Strait first emerged, he was acclaimed as “the honky-tonk Frank Sinatra,” a designation that fits him even better now than it did then. Everywhere that there is a country radio station, there are generations of listeners who regard Strait’s music as part of the landscape they are intimately connected to these songs, even if they can’t quite say that they are intimately connected to the man who sings them. Since 1981, when he made his début, he has placed eighty-six singles on Billboard’s Top 10 country chart, and more than half of them have gone to No. He is, by some measures, the most popular country-music singer of all time and, by any measure, the most consistent. “Honey,” he said, “I was just in there, and I didn’t see him.” Strait’s response was not, strictly speaking, a lie. Why would he cut a record in this little place?” She said, “My husband says that George Strait is in there, cutting a record, and I told him that can’t be true. One time, in Key West, where he records, he was sitting outside the studio, naked from the neck up, when a woman accosted him. In San Antonio, where he lives, he can usually visit restaurants unmolested, so long as he doesn’t smile too widely-he is famous for his smile, which is bright and crooked. ![]() George Strait has discovered that when he isn’t wearing a cowboy hat people often don’t realize that he is George Strait. Photograph by Maxine Helfman for The New Yorker Strait has always been a singles artist he built his career for maximum longevity, amassing one hit after another. ![]()
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