All for the Hall Event in Los Angeles Highlighted Emmylou Harris, Lionel Richie and Vince Gill
by Chris Willman - CMT.com

LOS ANGELES -- It was the Odd Quintupling, by some standards. Thursday night's (Sept. 23) benefit for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum at Club Nokia in Los Angeles featured some of the usual suspects you might expect to see at such a hallowed proceedings -- revered veterans Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris and Kris Kristofferson. These three legends were joined by a pair of most unusual suspects -- Lionel Richie, in the annual fundraiser's token non-country-guy slot, and Taylor Swift, filling the not-so-token world's-biggest-music-star slot.

"We were smart enough to invite the kid," Gill told the soldout crowd at the outset, immediately addressing any seeming incongruity in the bill. "We dig her because she sold all the tickets."

If you believe that, then maybe the All for the Hall benefit should have been nicknamed the "All Here for Taylor" show. But Gill was a bit too self-deprecating in that regard since last year's fundraiser in the same venue filled most of the seats without benefit of Swift.

Still, the lineup created an interesting literal split in the audience. Downstairs, at expensive dinner tables, were primarily sedate and presumably moneyed oldsters. Upstairs in the balcony's "cheap seats" were hundreds of girls and moms who would scream every time Swift sang one of her songs. Naturally, Gill acknowledged some of the early squeals by saying, "Thank you. I get that a lot."

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