LOS ANGELES (AP): Country comes naturally to Ringo Starr. It has been a low-key part of his career since his Beatle beginnings, so it was not a serious swerve for him to make a whole country album, the forthcoming Look Up , a collaboration with the modern maestro of classic country and Americana, T Bone Burnett. “I’ve done 20 albums, and there’s always a track that’s country-ish on each one,” the 84-year-old Starr told The AP recently.
His love of the music — Hank Williams and Kitty Wells are favourites — began in childhood, alongside his acquisition of affection for blues, swing, and whatever else came to his hometown. “Liverpool, it’s the capital of country music in England,” Starr said, “because a lot of, I think, it stems from it being a port and why we got rock ‘n’ roll music, physically, was because the lads on the boats would be going to America, they’d be going to Egypt, would be going all over. But they were bringing music in.
” Starr – even his stage name has cowboy vibes – had a star turn with the Beatles in 1965 when he sang the Buck Owens’ honky-tonk classic Act Naturally . Many of the Beatle originals the drummer sang, including What Goes On and Don’t Pass Me By , had country undertones. It would culminate with his second solo album, 1971’s Beaucoups of Blues , going full country.
He kept dabbling — he recorded an Act Naturally duet with Owens in 1989 — but he didn’t make a full country album again for decades. Enter .