A Country Way of Life

George Jones & Tammy Wynette – Two Story House

The week this piece goes live, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga have the number one song in America. Also in the top ten is I Had Some Help, a former number one for Post Malone and Morgan Wallen. Here, serendipitously, are four songs that encompass male-male and male-female duets.

Country music has forever paired a guy and a girl, and it is even better if they are romantically involved. There was a recent TV drama about George & Tammy, who teamed up for nine albums across their career; the last of these was 1995’s Together Again, which came 15 years after their eighth, which is the album from which this song is taken. It was held at two behind Beneath Still Waters by Emmylou Harris, who sat alongside three songs sung by women, making Jones the odd man out and so nearly an all-female top five.

In the Mr Brightside key of D-flat major, George opens the song with their shared dream of retiring to a big house rather than ‘that little two-room shack’. They would do as ‘the rich folk do…together me and you’, which is more or less a metaphor for the American Dream. Tammy joins in, noting how the pair of them ‘worked and never stopped’, and a pedal steel pipes up alongside her. For the chorus, a panoply of backing singers chime in with ‘yes we live!’ and some ahhs.

Naturally, as the second verse moves to the key of D, there’s a twist: amid the ‘splendour’, including marble floors, ‘chandeliers in every room’ and ‘imported silks’, the people in the house share ‘no love’. The American Dream, as so often (and in no way topically), has become the American Nightmare.

Kenny Rogers and Dottie West – Anyone Who Isn’t Me Tonight

This song features on the same album of duets as songs written by David Gates, Tammy Wynette and Kris Kristofferson, plus the chart-topping Every Time Two Fools Collide.

Stuck behind Sleeping Single in a Double Bed by Barbara Mandrell in November 1978, this is one of those jubilant country toe-tappers from a boastful pair of lovers: ‘If you think I’m braggin’, well you’re right!’ The bouncy arrangement is enriched by the pedal steel of the great Pete Drake and those patented harmonies by The Jordanaires, and the backing does the song’s job just as much as the trite dashed-off lyrics from the two vocalists.

‘I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven’, ‘I’m higher than a kite’ and ‘lay me in your arms, I’m through with livin’ are clichés that would be laughed out of a writer’s room today. Jelly Roll would surely ‘get down on my knees and thank the Good Lord’ for the love Dottie sings of being given, and perhaps Dan + Shay could update Rogers’ line ‘every inch of you that’s woman makes me that much more a man’ for a modern ear.

Kenny Chesney and George Strait – Shiftwork

Set to an island rhythm using the Gulf and Western sound Chesney borrowed from Jimmy Buffett, the song has a heck of a hook: ‘seven to three, three to 11, 11 to seven’. Unsurprisingly we end up at the beach where Chesney ‘drank my money away’, swapping his shift pattern for nonstop partying.

It’s odd to hear Strait doing this style of music, and the song is a pleasant four minutes which also allows the pair to go ‘a big ole pile of shiiiiiftwork’, because it sounds like they’re about to say a rude word! The message is slightly let down by the fact that these two superstars, who have spent the last 20 years headlining stadium shows and making millions upon millions of dollars, are a long, long way removed from the shiftwork their fans do.

Hence why they needed Troy Jones to write this song, which featured on Chesney’s 2007 album Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. How’s this for a 1-2-3: Never Wanted Nothing More, written by Chris Stapleton, is track one, while track two is Don’t Blink, a career song written by Casey Beathard; track three is the only one of the three not to hit number one, ending up behind Cleaning This Gun (Come On In Boy) by Rodney Atkins.

The song enlivened a rather sombre radio playlist at the beginning of 2008: Letter to Me by Brad Paisley, Small Town Southern Man by Alan Jackson, the fatherhood anthem You’re Gonna Miss This by Trace Adkins and I Saw God Today by that man George Strait.

Hardy ft. Lainey Wilson – Wait In The Truck

Talking of sombre: Hardy said before one performance of this career song that he was inspired to write country music after he heard Ol’ Red by Blake Shelton. He resolved to write a song as good as that one, and felt he cracked it with this murder song which turns into a gospel singalong, repeating ‘have mercy on me’ in a minute-long coda.

It hit number 23 on the Hot 100, number five on Hot Country and number two on Country Airplay behind Rock and a Hard Place by Bailey Zimmerman during the reign of Last Night by Wallen, Hardy’s good friend. Either with Hardy or not, Wallen has never written a song as good as this one, a musical movie which takes the listener by the hand and leads them into the truck, the house and, eventually, jail.

The power of the song comes for the same reason as we appreciate George and Tammy’s song: we believe that this has happened even though it hasn’t, because the singers sell the song so well. Whereas that song is in a bright D-flat major, this one is sombre and serious: Hardy’s narrator espies Lainey’s character ‘scared to death…bruised and broke from head to toe’, and questions arise and are not answered. What is Hardy doing ‘in some little town’? Why is he driving ‘through a middle of June midnight thunderstorm’? And what on earth happened to Lainey, who had ‘been through enough’ and is covered in, as she sings, ‘whiskey scars’?

Her chorus outlines how her ‘day of justice’ comes not from a judge but from the man who told her to wait in his truck as he took it upon himself to accost the man who had treated her badly. Hardy shoots the man dead and accepts his fate: ‘I didn’t even try to run,’ he sighs, recalling how he sat waiting for the police to arrest him for murder smoking one of the man’s cigarettes. Five years after his crime – the poetic ’60 months’ – the lady still visits ‘from time to time’ even though he ‘might be here forever’.

The punchline is that the place where he sits condemned is ‘a whole hell of a lot better than the place I sent him to’. In short, don’t mess with Michael Hardy.

Future editions of Stuck at Two will appear on the Country Way of Life Substack page. You can read existing pieces in this series and the Any Given Songday series in the dedicated tab here.

1966 Red Sovine – Giddyup Go

It’s odd to see the names of country stars who were frighteningly successful in their heyday and have been almost entirely forgotten five or six decades later.

Sovine, who died in 1980, is one such figure, described by my Big Book of Country Music as being renowned for his ‘“touching” country recitations’. This is one of them, rivalling Little Rosa and Phantom 309. Born in West Virginia as Woodrow Wilson Sovine in 1918 – if he had been born this month he would have been called Donald J Trump Sovine – he was a DJ before he was a singer, whereupon he spent five years fronting a band who played the Louisiana Hayride.

This four-minute chart-topper with a superb title, released in the early days of the Vietnam War, is sung to a three-chord arrangement that foregrounds that voice. Our narrator is a trucker whose son would treat his dad’s truck like a horse: Giddyup Go is thus its name, with the poignancy of Sovine’s trucker spending six years ‘being in and out’ doing his job. He comes home one day to find ‘my wife and little boy gone’, his voice breaking as he recalls the events. ‘From that day on,’ intones Sovine, ‘it’s just been me and ole Giddyup Go’.

One day, a trip on Route 66 brings him beside a fellow trucker, ‘both stacks blowin’ black coal’, whose vehicle has ‘a little sign on the back…that read Giddyup Go’. Sovine, eyes watering ‘like I had a bad ol’ cold’, follows the new truck to the next rest stop, and offers to buy the driver, whose identity even the stupidest listener will by now have guessed, something to drink. ‘Mom said he got the name from me,’ Sovine sings in the son’s voice with another quiver and tremble in his narration, as the older trucker shows the younger one the famous truck.

‘I felt like a king!’ says the proud father, noting that his son handled his ‘rig better than any gearjammer that I’d ever seen’. The two trucks ride off into the Route 66 sunset, and ‘the lines on the highway have got a much brighter glow’. Sappy songs sell, then and now and forever.

1976 C.W. McCall – Convoy

And indeed, in ten years’ time, they would sell again.

In more ways than one, this is a ridiculous coincidence: ridiculous because, like Giddyup Go, it’s a novelty song about trucking; ridiculous too because it topped the country chart ten years to the day after it. Red Sovine himself even joined the craze with Teddy Bear which, if you can imagine, is an even worse song than this (no time to explain, look it up). Every new piece of technology seems to affect the world at large in some way, be it home gaming consoles, smartphones or, as here, CB (citizens band) radio, which were a useful tool for truck drivers especially.

Do I really need to run through the plot of this song, which is a dirge that is seldom if ever heard today except on Pick of the Pops on Radio 2? Rubber Duck radios Pig Pen to tell him ‘there’s a big 10-4…we definitely got the front door’ and tells the story of ‘the sixth of June in a Kenworth’, where first 85 then ‘a thousand screamin’ trucks and 11 long-haired Friends o’ Jesus’ encounter ‘bears…wall to wall’.

To translate into English: by ‘front door’, McCall (whose CB radio call sign is Rubber Duck) means the head truck in the convoy; by ‘Friends o’ Jesus’, he means hippies; and by ‘bears’, he means policemen, the kind who wore hats that reminded people of Smokey the Bear (‘reinforcements from the Illinois National Guard’, ‘choppers filled the skies’). Our hero encourages the convoy to crash through the tollgate to make a getaway.

Writing for his Number Ones series on Stereogum.com, Tom Breihan compares it to rap music in how it is ‘all about breaking laws’. For me, it’s complete nonsense but it sure sounds good. Simon Cowell would have killed to market this to America and the world, but he had to make do with Westlife, who never sung a truckers’ tale.

Breaking up the narrative is the chorus sung by female backing singers; with the expertise of a jingle writer, it encourages/they encourage people to ‘join our convoy…’cross the USA’. Every number one song needs an advertising campaign behind it, and Convoy had a literal advert for it. Originally created by Bill Fries for a bread commercial, where he sang a minute-long ditty about an Iowa trucking café, the character of C.W. McCall returned for this song, co-written by Chip Davis.

It rose to number one on the country chart within a month and stayed there for six weeks, becoming the number one song in the USA this week in 1976 too. In the UK, where it was parodied by Radio 1 DJs Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis, it loitered near the summit for the first few months of the year, sharing space on the record racks with Oh What A Night by The Four Seasons and Love Really Hurts Without You by Billy Ocean. Had it not been for I Love To Love by Tina Charles and Save Your Kisses For Me by Brotherhood of Man, the song would have been a UK number one too.

Its success inspired a movie of the same name which starred Kris Kristofferson; Fries/McCall, meanwhile, became mayor of a town in Colorado and died in 2022 at the age of 93. I hope he used all that Convoy money wisely; after all, for season three of The Simpsons he let Homer sing it tunelessly on the famous Timmy O’Toole episode when Bart ‘fell down a well’.

1986 Kenny Rogers – Morning Desire

Rogers also starred in a film based on one of his own songs (The Gambler, see the December 23 piece), but unlike McCall he had his own set of Transatlantic number ones. Rogers, according to the Big Book of Country Music, was the man who ‘did more to drag country music into the pop domain’ than anyone else of his era, which led to him being ‘glorified and vilified’ in equal measure.

He was still a star in the mid-1980s when he took this Dave Loggins composition to the top of the country charts for his 18^th number one. Produced by George Martin (yep, that one) and featuring a solo from jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, the music video debuted at the CMA Awards. It could not sound more of its time if it tried, with washes of synth beneath bass and electric guitar. Anne Dudley of The Art of Noise is on keyboards, while the solo comes from renowned jazzer Stanley Jordan.

Rogers had told Loggins to write a cross between I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen, which explains the lyric ‘I’m on fire’ in the chorus, and Something’s Burning by his old band the First Edition, jokingly keeping him in his guesthouse after the pair played golf. Perhaps inspired by this, Loggins wrote a song set in the bedroom, and so Rogers sings in his trademark style about his carnal lust: ‘I listen to her breathe and it makes me wanna wake her up’. On three occasions he mentions the thunder, which ‘sounds like horses’ hooves’.

1996 Faith Hill – It Matters to Me

Faith had vocal surgery after completing the promotion of her debut album, and ironically this is a song about a woman given the silent treatment: ‘where’d you ever learn to fight without saying a word then waltz back into my life?’ Accordingly, Kevin John Coyne’s piece for Country Universe calls this ‘absolute classic’ an example of a new description of a human experience which, as the lyrics read, explains ‘the distance between the woman and a man’.

The piano-led torch song, written by Mark Sanders and Ed Hill (no relation), could have been a career song for Reba McEntire or Martina McBride, but it went to Faith and was the title track of her second album. Fun fact: Dann Huff plays the guitar solo.

The chorus is morose, singalongable and suitably empowering for the era: it matters to the woman ‘when we don’t talk, when we don’t touch, when it doesn’t feel like we’re even in love’. Faith’s narrator asks ‘how can I make you see’, a line fraught with emotion which will chime with her target audience of mature women who might well be used to the silent treatment. Let us hope her own husband heeded the lessons of this chart-topper.

2006 Billy Currington – Must Be Doin’ Somethin‘ Right

In any case, as Currington sings in the opening line of his first number one, ‘A woman is a mystery a man just can’t understand’; that sounds like an old George Jones song. Produced by Carson Chamberlain, who has links to both Keith Whitley and current star Zach Top, this is Adult Contemporary Country of the highest order, whose album version lasts four and a half minutes.

Our narrator is besotted by his beloved’s ‘deep blue, need-you eyes, don’t know what I did to earn a love like this’, as his voice soars to a top E on ‘baby I’. The verses are full of fidelity (‘tonight’s about giving you what you want’) and advice to other fellas: ‘other times you gotta take it slow’. Hence why sometimes country music offers life lessons you don’t learn in school or on the farm.

It’s as close as country gets to a sultry r’n’b ballad, and proves how influential the pop sound was on country music of the time. Also on the charts in early 2006: Your Man by Josh Turner, What Hurts the Most by Rascal Flatts and Come a Little Closer by Dierks Bentley, which this song replaced at number one. Plus Joe Nichols’s song about the magical powers of tequila.

2016 Thomas Rhett – Die a Happy Man

And here’s the man who replaced Billy Currington on country radio: a swarthy guy with a catalogue of love songs who can croon in a poppy yet country manner.

It is often the case that country music looks at what is happening in the pop charts and adds a bit of dobro, fiddle and twang. Thomas Rhett Akins Jr. is known as TR, and he is still one of the big acts on the label Big Machine; signed, in fact, to its Valory Music imprint. TR was following up Crash and Burn, an infectious song with a debt to Chain Gang by Sam Cooke, a song from the pop charts of two generations ago.

In January of the previous year, Ed Sheeran’s wedding ballad Thinking Out Loud, a song with a debt (but not, in the end, a plagiaristic one) to Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye, had been the second biggest song in the USA. In January of the following year, and indeed for the first six weeks of 2016, TR’s wedding ballad was at the top of both the Hot Country and Country Airplay charts.

Rather cheekily, our besotted narrator even mentions Gaye in the opening verse, knowing even at this point that TR’s song, written with LA-based pop writers Sean Douglas and Joe ‘London’ Spargur, borrowed the feel of the aforementioned song. The previous night was ‘hands down once of the best nights I’ve had, no doubt’, what with the wine and the dancing and the ‘crazy love’, which is itself a reference to a Van Morrison ballad of that title which also sounds an awful lot like Thinking Out Loud. (Sheeran would quote Morrison in his defence of borrowing the musical idiom of his predecessors; Mark Krais, his defence lawyer, is the brother of my uncle’s good friend Ashley.)

And never mind the red dress, ‘the black dress makes it hard to see’. He’s so excited he can barely breathe, extolling his saint and goddess, a ‘masterpiece’. He will die happy even if he never sees the Northern Lights or Paris (‘the Eiffel Tower at night’), or if he doesn’t head to California, all with his beloved’s hand in his. She is his ‘great escape’, even when they are dancing in the living room with the radio on. The mention of a ‘mansion in Georgia’ marks TR’s heritage as the son of Rhett Akins, who grew up in the state; I reckon TR can, by now, build his Southern mansion.

The song was the second single from TR’s second album Tangled Up, a top ten on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart. It featured guest vocalist contributions from three pop acts drafted in to help spread TR’s music to pop fans: Jordin Sparks, Tori Kelly and LunchMoney Lewis. Another track invited listeners to shake their ‘southside’, while Vacation was credited to 13 writers because it interpolated the melody and feel of Low Rider by War. It was TR’s worst performing song on radio, although it has become a bankable set opener.

If he would ever fail to play Die a Happy Man, the official music video of which has been viewed just short of 300m times, he risks the ire of thousands of people who have paid good money to hear it.

George Jones – Tennessee Whiskey

The first of a quartet of songs this week with a very obvious theme, Chris Stapleton has said that this 1983 hit was one of his favourite country songs. He started singing the words over a groove he and his band were playing during a soundcheck, perhaps inspired by the sight of Jones’ former steel player Steve Hinson onstage. ‘We decided to do that song that night, and every night since,’ he told online magazine The Fader.

Incredibly, in that same interview, Stapleton suggested readers check out Dean Dillon: ‘He’s written hit on top of hit, standard on top of standard’. In a lovely piece of ring composition, Dillon has benefitted beyond measure from the royalty checks from this song, which he wrote with Linda Hargrove, who died in 2010. I hope her executors are enjoying the fruits of the copyright.

At this point, the earnings from this song might threaten to match those Dillon earned from his old copyrights for George Strait, who turned this one down, meaning David Allan Coe was the first to cut it in 1981. Jones’ version was (if you can believe it) stuck over Thanksgiving 1983behind Holding Her and Loving Her by Earl Thomas Conley, who must have had a really good promotions team.

By this stage the words of this song are as well known as the words of Friends In Low Places or Wagon Wheel, but just in case you’ve just awoken from a coma, here’s the synopsis: our narrator used to knock the liquor back in the barroom (‘found the bottom of the bottle always dry’) but has been rescued by a woman who ‘poured out’ her heart to him. She is, as we all sing together, ‘smooth as Tennessee whiskey…sweet as strawberry wine…warm as a glass of brandy’ and whose love will make him ‘stoned’ and ‘high’.

Coe’s version is entirely in the key of D, while Jones’ take moves from F to F-sharp. Stapleton’s radical interpretation, which only needed two chords and is in the key of A, is now diamond certified, with sales or equivalent streaming of 10 million; it has now been streamed over 1bn times on Spotify.

It took a 2015 CMA Awards performance from Stapleton, with Justin Timberlake to his right, for the song to hit mass consciousness and finally become a chart-topping copyright three decades after it was composed. The four-note intro to the newer version is one of country’s most cherished contemporary riffs. It sees Dillon and Hargrove’s tune get rapturous cheers around the world including, on at least four occasions in the last decade, at the O2 Arena in London.

Waylon Jennings – Drinkin’ and Dreamin’

Jennings was already on the radio, when this song was released, as one quarter of the Highwaymen, whose eponymous song hit the top in August 1985 a month after Willie Nelson and a month before Johnny Cash’s kid Rosanne. This song, written by Troy Seals and Max D Barnes, stalled at two behind I Fell in Love Again Last Night by The Forester Sisters.

Jennings’ vocal reminds me of late period Elvis: he pronounces every syllable clearly and with the voice very, very high up in the mix, the better to tell his sad tale of oblivion. ‘I’m looking for some way out’ is the opening punchline, and he later complains of how ‘this suit and this tie is just a disguise’. He is a rural fella trying to be an eighties man; indeed, the song’s MOR arrangement makes it an obvious Urban Cowboy pastiche, much as how everybody in 2015 wanted to be a bro and everyone today is a gloomy emo kid with (or wanting to have) face tattoos.

Here, the narrator’s wife ‘don’t understand’ that his ‘heart and soul are out there ridin’ the wind’, and the only solution is getting ‘a thousand times out of my mind’. The song fades out as Jennings is in the middle of singing another chorus, doomed to drink and dream and then go back to the bar the following week, or night.

Travis Tritt and Marty Stuart – The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’

Sometimes, however, the drink doesn’t do what it ought to do, and you get up and dance.

In his one-man show captured on the 2016 album A Man and His Guitar, Tritt praises the ‘instant bond’ he felt with Stuart, whom he spotted in a Nudie suit backstage at the 1990 CMA Awards; the pair, he boasts, are ‘twin brothers from a different mother’. Then Stuart came onstage to play this song, which he co-wrote for Tritt, who used it to open his 1991 album It’s All About to Change.

With Matt Rollings on piano and Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Tritt starts the complaint, or celebration, of how the ‘heartache that hurt me night and day’ has disappeared because he has finally gotten over the lady he loved. Marty Stuart takes the solo, and you can tell it’s inimitably him because he slides up and down the neck, and then sings the first two lines of the second verse before cuing Tritt back in. He offers the awkwardly syntactical line: ‘In my mind, peace I’d find when they start to pour’. The pair are on the lookout for ‘one good honkytonk angel…a woman warm and willing’.

As a jibe against the hot new trend of singers wearing cowboy hats, Tritt and Stuart co-headlined a No Hats tour. This song was released to coincide with it, and it got stuck behind A Jukebox with a Country song by Doug Stone in 1992, who was not a hat act.

Little Big Town – Day Drinking

Released in Summer 2014, as is often the case in country music, a summer smash eventually clambered to the top five in late autumn. Written by the band with Barry Dean and Troy Verges, this got to number four on the Hot Country side and number two at radio, where it shared chart real estate with four tracks that all topped one of the country charts: Something in the Water by Carrie Underwood and Shotgun Rider by Tim McGraw, which were Hot Country number ones; and Somewhere in My Car by Keith Urban and Girl in a Country Song by Maddie & Tae, which topped the radio chart.

Aside from the solo passage, the rest of the song can pretty much be sung over an E major chord. ‘I don’t need a reason or a happy hour,’ sings Karen Fairchild, who doesn’t want to wait ‘til the sun’s sinkin’ and encourages a little tipple under ‘an open umbrella on the patio’. Before she has even opened her mouth, the hook is introduced as a whistle before a mandolin elbows it out of the way. The whistling returns after the chorus proper, and that is all you really need for the song to hit.

Karen could be singing an instruction manual in the verses – the second of which is a list of reasons for drinking: work, the weather, ‘the tick-tock moving too slow’ – so long as we get back to that catchy, chantalong chorus. The song has one goal: to provide a singalong moment during an afternoon cookout, at a Little Big Town concert or during a (sober) car journey.

1965 Connie Smith – Once a Day

The first post of the new solar year looks back to charts ending in 5. We discussed this song in the December 9 piece.

1975 George Jones – The Door

Another song co-written and produced by Billy Sherrill, this is another ballad perfect for Jones’ narrator: ‘I did my best, I took it like a man,’ sighs Jones. For extra pathos the song moves up from G to A-flat for the last chorus, the better to explain how his mother’s tears, a train ‘that took me off to war’ and ‘earthquake, storms, guns and wars’ do not compare to ‘the closing of the door’ when his beloved left him.

With miserable timing, the song topped the chart the week Tammy Wynette filed for divorce from Jones, but even without this verisimilitude, it would be a country standard to match The Grand Tour, which was also a Norro Wilson co-write. Wilson described how he rented a miniature door and used the slam on the recording, which the narrator sings is ‘the one sound in the world my heart can’t stand’.

The slam comes a perfectly placed 92 seconds into the song. The timing shows the mastery of Sherrill of his craft and the importance of the record producer in popular music, from Joe Meek and Phil Spector down to Jack Antonoff and Dave Cobb today.

1985 George Strait – Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind

Written by Whitey Shafer and his then wife Darlene in the mid-1970s, Strait had the hit after Keith= Whitley recorded a version that never came out. This very Texan heartbreaker, which gave him the title track of his fourth album, is so on brand for the singer that it might as well have been written for him.

‘You’re in someone else’s arms in Dallas,’ he complains over rimshot percussion and what sounds like two fiddles but is actually just the legendary Johnny Gimble, a five-time CMA Musician of the Year  and Country Music Hall of Famer. His sad melody plays as Strait’s narrator spends nights drinking ‘Cold Fort Worth beer’ which ‘ain’t no good for jealous’.

The kiss-off in the second verse sounds like bravado: ‘while you’re busy burning bridges, burn one for me if you get time’. It’s the sort of line a guy, having put a quarter in the jukebox in a Fort Worth honky-tonk, would raise his eyebrows knowingly at. This is country music done well, and is one of dozens of three-minute reasons why, if Bob Wills is the king of Western Swing, George Strait the Urban Cowboy is at least its Prince Regent.

1995 Joe Diffie – Pickup Man

Here’s a chart-topper that is perfect for line-dancing by pickup men and the women they pick up, the real life equivalent of ‘Bobbie Jo Gentry, the homecoming queen’. They may be attracted to the fella by the ‘romantic glow’ of the lights on his vehicle, be it ‘a bucket of rust or a brand new machine’, and how without trucks, there’d be no tailgates. Plus you never have to make the ‘eight-foot bed’.

The fiddle and electric guitar solos, respectively played by the great Stuart Duncan and Brent Mason, are proper country, as is the instrumental coda, and check out how Diffie pronounces ‘chaise longue’ to rhyme with ‘I can be found’. Three decades later Post Malone gave us his best Diffie impression alongside the man himself for Hardy’s Hixtape dedicated to Diffie’s material, as well as at the CMA Awards in what was a precursor to his attempts to make an impact on country music in 2024.

2005 Blake Shelton – Some Beach

‘Beach’ sounds like the word used for a female dog, you see, and Shelton is the only singer apart from Toby Keith who can sell this sort of thing. It was written by Paul Overstreet and Rory Feek, who later became half of the beloved duo Joey + Rory, and there is a performance on Youtube for your delectation here, with a bonus fourth verse about Vaseline and you can guess the rest. Please do not (DO NOT) watch it while consuming food.

The opening track from Shelton’s Barn & Grill album from 2004, we open with the narrator in the car with Margaritaville on the radio, but his reverie is interrupted by a fellow driver in a ‘foreign car’ who sticks his middle finger in the air. Then he has his parking space nicked by a Mercedes-Benz in verse two, and the doctor sticking a drill in his gums ‘before I was numb’ from novocaine. What a trio of bit…beaches.

Just as Kenny Chesney sang about an island where you didn’t have to wear shoes or a shirt to have a drink, so Shelton casts his mind to ‘some beach somewhere where there’s nowhere to go and you got all day to get there’. Pedal steel comes from Paul Franklin, the CMA-nominated Musician of the Year who has won zero times in 32 (thirty-two!) attempts in what is Nashville’s longest-running practical joke.

It is odd to hear a steady island groove on a January chart-topper, but it was released in July 2004 and songs take at least five months to have their turn in the sun. It climbed all the way to number 28 on the Hot 100, following Austin and The Baby into the all-genre charts and setting Shelton up as the people’s country star and making his transition to primetime TV, judging The Voice, inevitable.

2015 Craig Wayne Boyd – My Baby’s Got a Smile on Her Face and Tim McGraw – Shotgun Rider

Craig Wayne Boyd is over in the UK this spring to play Buckle & Boots, whose attendees will go wild for his accomplished voice. Having moved to Nashville in his twenties, he put out an album under the name Craig Boyd in 2008 and opened up for Jamey Johnson and Randy Houser.

Throughout his run on The Voice in Fall 2014, he sung copyrights made famous by Travis Tritt, George Strait, Randy Travis, Alabama and, funnily enough, Randy Houser. This was his winner’s song, which he performed on the finale and which was co-written by Mark Marchetti and Stephanie Jones. It is vapid drivel but, proving the power of TV, it was only the second song, after More Than A Memory by Garth Brooks, to go straight in at the top of the Hot Country chart. The following week it was nowhere to be seen.

It’s a chugging power ballad using the chord progression from The Joker by Steve Miller Band. Boyd’s narrator begins by noting how his baby rolls out of bed after a late night: ‘she looks so satisfied…I must be doing something right’. Nudge, nudge, we know what you mean. After Boyd sings the verses in B-flat, the chorus kicks into the key of C major, a ridiculously sudden and uncalled-for change.

In the second verse our hero can’t wait to get home to see (nudge nudge) his lady, who ‘doesn’t say a word when I walk in, looks like we might not get much sleep again’ (we know what you mean). It is banal to the point of tedium, and is pretty much over halfway through its running time, but it showcases the Voice-winning voice which was recently part of the short-lived trio Texas Hill.

The Country Airplay chart was topped by a man who, in 2015, was two decades his career and, in 2025, is a legacy artist who just about survived the rise and fall of the bro. The less said about Truck Yeah, his attempt at getting down with the bros, the better; the world prefers when he’s telling people not to take the girl and to always stay humble and kind.

This is another bit of patented Tim McGraw Adult Contemporary Country. Now, George Strait has two songs with the same title, and so does McGraw; this is not the twangin’ track from his 2007 album Let It Go but a plodding radio-friendly unit shifter written by Marv Green, Hillary Lindsey and Troy Verges, which appeared on the 2014 album Sundown Heaven Town.

Wire brushes provide the drumbeat and Dan Dugmore adds some wistful pedal steel. The chunky rock riffs come from two men: studio cat Michael Landau, who has worked with Michael Bublé, Richard Marx, Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan and Faith Hill; and also from producer Byron Gallimore, who discovered McGraw. The line ‘singin’ to the radio, woah’ at the end of the addictive chorus is catnip for radio programmers.

The song is full of fidelity: ‘I don’t ever wanna wake up looking into someone else’s eyes’, ‘slide over now so close’, ‘don’t wanna be cruisin’ through this dream without you’. Really, though, this could have been given to anyone on the charts as 2014 became 2015, from Eli Young Band to Kenny Chesney to Thomas Rhett to, indeed, the primetime country stars Keith Urban or Blake Shelton.

2025 Shaboozey – A Bar Song (Tipsy) and Koe Wetzel & Jessie Murph – High Road

I’m not a soothsayer. Billboard date the chart for the few days after it is announced, so this week’s number ones are already known. In any case, as is common across the decades, they are both the same as the last week of the previous year.

It will not surprise you to learn that for a 28th week, Shaboozey tops the Hot Country chart, which meant people were bringing in the new year in a tipsy manner. We discussed his song, which topped the Hot 100 for a record-equalling 19 weeks, in the December 9 piece; Mariah Carey will, barring something very unusual, overtake his and Lil Nas X’s record at the end of 2025.

The last radio chart-topper of 2024 spends the first week of 2025 at the top too. Koe Wetzel is a Texan rockstar who has pivoted to country, while the tiny 20-year-old Alabama-born Jessie Murph collaborated with Bailey Zimmerman and Jelly Roll on her 2024 album. Both singers are signed to Columbia Records, whose money helped Wetzel’s 9 Lives set become the 15^th biggest seller in America when it was released last summer.

Over the course of the latter half of last year, this duet has rocketed up the charts, taking only 23 weeks to hit the summit. The pair wrote it alongside their producer Gabe Simon and four other writers including Laura Veltz and Amy Allen. Amy, whose contributions are all over 9 Lives, was nominated for Songwriter of the Year at the forthcoming Grammy Awards, having had a quite astonishing year where Sabrina Carpenter took multiple songs to the top ten of the Hot 100. I wonder what Amy will buy with all that money; she has earned about a third of a third of a penny from all the times I’ve been playing this song since I got hooked on it last week.

It’s lovely that the sort of emo power ballad from 25 years ago made by acts like Creed, Avril Lavigne and Nickelback is in fashion again. With rock now a heritage genre, it became part of the country radio sound of 2024 alongside Jelly, Zimmerman and Wallen, much as how Brooks & Dunn and Jason Aldean cranked up the amps over the past three decades.

Jessie and the man born Ropyr Wetzel trade verses and harmonies over a very familiar chord progression (vi-IV-I-V, if you’re interested). ‘I can tell that you’re mad’ is Wetzel’s opening line, which is followed by a telling ‘who cuts first and who bleeds last’. There’s an incredibly infectious descent down the F-sharp scale into the chorus, which also contains the kiss-off ‘knock yourself out and hit a new low’.

The radio version cleans up lines like ‘I don’t need a ticket to your shitshow’ and ‘maybe get stoned’, which respectively become ‘freakshow’ and ‘maybe get gone’. Jessie counters this with how Wetzel comes home ‘smelling like liquor every other night’. She picks up on Wetzel’s line about how ‘rumours always turn into yellin’ and fightin’.

Fun fact: both Elle King and Zach Bryan put out songs also called High Road in the second half of 2024. This copyright would also sound perfect with Bryan as Wetzel and Elle as Jessie. Perhaps some people think Elle and Bryan are on this High Road and they’ve got confused.

Across 2025, you can read a series of pieces about number ones from the 1990s in a new series for Nashville Worldwide. Visit the site here.

Bill Anderson – But You Know I Love You

The first in a quartet of celebratory songs to bring in the New Year, this song has the odd distinction of being the co-title track of Anderson’s 1969 album; it had two titles, the other being album opener My Life. That song was a number one, while this one was a number two.

It was actually a cover of a Hot 100 top 20 song from the same year by Kenny Rogers and his band First Edition. Dolly Parton turned it into a troubadour’s ballad and topped the country charts in 1981, and just short of the top 40 on the pop side, as part of an album called 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, a companion piece to the soundtrack movie.

Written by Mike Settle, who played guitar for First Edition, it’s the type of song Glen Campbell, or perhaps Elvis, would have sung about being on the road and missing his baby as ‘the morning sun streaks across my room…the dollar signs are keeping us apart’. Yet he must be out on ‘this travelling life’ and lament his ‘chain of broken dreams’.

Unlike For Loving You, the piece of dreck that we discussed in the Any Given Songday series which did get to the top of the country charts, this has a melody and some excitement, with a kinetic pedal steel part underneath the road warrior/worrier’s tale. In the middle section, Anderson realises ‘the answers could be found in children’s nursery rhymes, I’d come running back to you’.

He sings ‘I love you’ 15 times, mostly answered by stabs of Mariachi trumpets; if the track hadn’t faded out, he might still be confessing his love half a century later.

Travis Tritt – It’s a Great Day to Be Alive

Tritt is doomed to be best known for a song he didn’t write and which did not top the country charts, held at bay by Who I Am by Jessica Andrews. Tritt cut it for his 2000 album Down the Road I Go after Jon Randall had recorded it for an album that was not released until the 2020s.

It is one of those country songs where a boy is thankful for the little he’s got, a campfire singalong which I reckon Ketch Secor used as a base on which to build Wagon Wheel. In writer Darrell Scott’s case, he had just been bedridden after an accident so had gratitude on his mind.

It may be ‘goofy’ but he’s happy to sing away, with a soaring melody attaching itself to the title and ‘the sun still shining’ in the face of ‘hard times’. His joy is natural, ‘neither drink- nor drug-induced’, and the G-major key is a perfect setting for the lyric.

We open with images of ‘rice cooking in the microwave’ and ‘homemade soup’, and ‘a three-day beard I don’t plan to shave’; in the final verse, the narrator meditates on growing ‘a Fu Manchu’ moustache before a syncopated final few iterations of the chorus interrupt his reverie and bring him back to his main theme.

Scott’s lyric, which Tritt copies with a superlative reading, has a proper middle eight with some concessions to reality: ‘sometimes it’s lonely, sometimes it’s only me and the shadows…howling at the moon’, which is rather appropriate for the ‘lone wolf’ he sees in the mirror. I believe that the singer would take his old motorbike ‘for a three-day cruise’. What a shame his politics make him a tough figure to like, although January 20 will be a great day for the Trump fan Tritt to be alive.

Josh Turner – Firecracker

The owner of one of country music’s most profound (as in deep) voices missed out on a number one with this in 2008; you can read about the song and the 18-year-old performer that held it off in a very recent Any Given Songday piece (clue: slamming screen door).

Written with Pat McLaughlin and Shawn Camp, who respectively wrote I Remember Everything for John Prine and Two Piña Coladas for Garth Brooks, this lead single from Turner’s third album is a quick-stepping country love song with a traditional bent, right from the basso profundo note that Turner hits before he begins his mostly two-chord, 12-bar declaration of love.

Our narrator is overwhelmed by his beloved, whom he compares to the title explosive where ‘sparks start a-flyin’ like the Fourth of July’ and ‘my heart starts a-poppin’. The song is written to the title: we get ‘a pack of Black Cats in a red paper wrapper’, ‘a dynamite stick’ and ‘a great big bang’, as well as ‘a blonde bottle rocket’ and ‘a heart attacker’.  

An unheard C-sharp chord comes on the line ‘I’d sure hate to see it go up in smoke’, making it musically interesting as well as very, very danceable.

George Strait – Love’s Gonna Make It Alright

In 2024, George Strait toured stadiums with a young whippersnapper as an opening act. Before Chris Stapleton became a sort of Prince to Strait’s King, he co-wrote the second single (alongside Al Anderson) culled from Strait’s 2011 album Here for a Good Time. You can hear him harmonising the backing vocals in the chorus, making me wonder why it took so long for Stapleton to become a superlative singer/songwriter and eight-time (eight-time!) CMA Male Vocalist of the Year.

A 22-year-old Taylor Swift was at number one with Ours the very week that a man in his 60^th year had the number two song in country music. It’s a mood piece where our narrator purrs some fidelity over three simple chords: ‘girl you’ve had one of those days’, ‘whatever bad luck is getting you down, honey I’ll be right here for you’, ‘we can dance your cares away’ and ‘I’ll chase you down the hallway’. It works very well next to Check Yes or No, as if George and Emmylou Hayes have grown up, or indeed when played next to anything by Josh Turner.

The middle section boasts the tongue-twisting triple negative ‘there ain’t nothin’ that lovin’ can’t get us through’, while the singalong chorus is the song’s title sung twice with ‘alright, alright…tonight, tonight’ added after each. Like Taylor’s Love Story, the final chorus goes up a key, here from E to F-sharp, with some boisterous fiddle emphasising just how alright love is gonna make it alright, alright; tonight, tonight.

1957 Bobby Helms – My Special Angel

When looking at the charts in 1957, we emphasise sales rather than airplay, but in this case Helms’s song was the best seller and the most played by DJs that week. It crossed over from country to pop, hitting number seven on the Hot 100, although notional country songs by his contemporaries Elvis Presley and The Everly Brothers – Jailhouse Rock and Teddy Bear by the singer, Wake Up Little Susie and Bye Bye Love by the duo – went all the way to number one on the pop side.

That quartet of tunes are still heard seven decades later, and Helms is always near the top of the hit parade with his Christmas perennial Jingle Bell Rock, which also came out in 1957 and will still be heard in 2057. It has had 1.2bn Spotify streams; this song, meanwhile, has had just over 5m and lies a very, very distant second. Interestingly, like Elvis’ material, it made both the country and R&B charts, which is code for saying white and black people both took it to heart.

Jimmy Duncan wrote the words, which barely get beyond the formulaic: ‘A smile from your lips brings the summer sunshine’, ‘I feel your touch…and I’m in heaven again’, ‘The Lord smiled down on me’. Bobby Vinton also recorded it, because that’s how things went in the fifties: one copyright, many singers. Michael Vaughan had the UK hit with it, treating it with less gentleness and more oomph.

On Helms’ version, the famed Anita Kerr Singers ooh and coo behind him, as was the fashion of the time. The singer’s delivery is akin to that of Pat Boone, who was very hot in the late 1950s; indeed, Boone’s April Love was number one in the Hot 100 over Christmas 1957.

1967 Bill Anderson and Jan Howard – For Loving You

Ten years later, and here’s another song with a chorus of backing singers and a hot male vocalist. Anderson is accompanied by Jan Howard, wife of Harlan, the man who ought to have copyrighted the phrase ‘Three Chords and The Truth’ as a definition of country music. The pair divorced in 1968; Jan would not marry again for 20 years.

But this is dreck. Bearing in mind that The Beatles were having a Magical Mystery Tour, Jimi Hendrix was pushing rock music forward and Bob Dylan was inventing Americana, Nashville thought people wanted devotion from husband to wife, with the vocalists intoning their lines over an arrangement that could have been written in the 1930s.

Anderson opens his heart by thanking his beloved for making his life ‘so much richer…I never really lived before’. Jan does the same by saying her ‘faith is a little stronger…There was good there, I just could never see’.

But after three verses of fidelity, the dagger comes, as does a key change from E-flat to F: ‘Now I’m losing you and I’m a sadder lonelier man,’ sings Anderson, following ‘the hunting trail of memory’ but appreciating how he ‘had the chance of loving you’. As is often the case, while the kids played with their guitars, their parents wanted to wallow in their sadness.

1977 Dolly Parton – Here You Come Again

By this time in her career, Dolly had jumped from country to showbusiness; accordingly, she cast her net more widely for songs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote this song; their copyrights can be summed up by just one, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, which they said bought them a flat.

Producer Gary Klein had heard the song when BJ Thomas did it, and he thought it would be perfect for Dolly. He ensured the piano sounded muffled and staccato by dampening down the keys with tape. The pair reached a compromise when Al Perkins added some pedal steel to give it compatibility with a country radio playlist which, by the end of the year, it shared with standards like Take This Job and Shove It and Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.

Dolly had just changed management, heading out to LA and full speed ahead towards a pop market, although she was keen to say she was ‘taking country with me’ rather than leaving the genre behind. The ploy worked: in 1978 she was named both ACM and CMA Entertainer of the Year. Dolly ended 1977, having started the year as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, with the biggest song in country music and one of the biggest songs in the USA across all genres.

The song, which was the title track to Dolly’s 1977 album, hit number three in the Hot 100 in early 1978. It crossed over to a pop audience who were enjoying the Bee Gees, who were at two with their chart-topping How Deep Is Your Love; the brothers Gibb would give Dolly an even bigger smash, Islands In The Stream, a few years later.

Thomas’s version of this song starts a key lower than Dolly’s, but goes through various chord changes. Verse two is a semitone higher than verse one, and the same for verse three and two. Thomas starts in D-flat and moves first up to D then up to E-flat; Dolly sings the opening verse in F-sharp before moving up to G and finally A-flat.

The song has upward momentum to match the reappearances of the unnamed man (in Dolly’s case) and, with him, the title phrase at the top of each verse: ‘You waltz right through the door…and wrap my heart round your little finger’, ‘you look into my eyes and lie those pretty lies’, ‘shaking me up’. In the bridge section, her ‘defences’ drop when the man decides to ‘smile that smile’. The lyrical turn – ‘here you come again and here I go!’ – is typically masterful and unsurprising from a pair of gifted songwriters.

1987 Highway 101 – Somewhere Tonight

It is strange how some country acts have no cultural footprint beyond their initial moment. Highway 101 were an LA rock band who signed to Warner Nashville, who marketed them at a country audience who would be amused by hearing a band led by a female lead singer, Paulette Carlson. You’d expect a band with a drummer named Cactus and a guitarist called Jack Daniels to be talked about today; I will thus rescue Highway 101 from obscurity.

Their music was produced by Paul Worley, who would work with another band with a prominent female vocalist in Lady A two decades later. This song was their first number one, co-written by two heavyweights, Rodney Crowell and the aforementioned Harlan Howard. I get the sense that Crowell – who was about to have a quite amazing run in 1988-89 with five consecutive number one singles from his Diamonds & Dirt LP – could write this sort of song before breakfast.

The Highway 101 sound is a little bit country, a little bit pop and a little bit rock, all of which is present on this heartbreak song, which came out in the middle of the neo-traditional era dominated by Keith Whitley and Randy Travis; the latter cut the song but the version was not released. It looks back to all those sad songs of the early commercial era sung by girl singers: Paulette’s poor narrator is ‘so lonesome I don’t know what to do’ while her ‘livewire’ ex is ‘shinin’ like a diamond…rollin’ like a summer storm’. He left her a ‘goodbye letter’ which she has ‘read…at least 1000 times’.

Also chiming with the era of independent 80’s Ladies of the kind K.T. Oslin sang about, Paulette’s offer of ‘better homes and garden parties’ were, sardonically, not ‘his cup of tea’ and so he is ‘running wild and free’.

1997 Garth Brooks – Longneck Bottle

How have we only reached Garth Brooks in the final post this side of New Year’s Day?

The first single from his album Sevens, this brings in the mighty Steve Wariner, who wrote the song along with Rick Carnes, to provide some scatting. The song starts with a long held note on ‘looong’ from Garth, with harmonies from Wariner, with the chorus at the top so as not to bore us. Garth then runs through two verses which each last 15 beats. There are no bells or whistles, just pure talent and oomph.

‘Hey jukebox don’t start playing that song again!’ is our narrator’s second complaint, following his first to the titular bottle (‘let go o’ my hand!’). Garth plays a sap, ‘a fool’, who is annoyed at the mirror (‘go stare at someone else’) and the dancefloor, which is ‘underneath my feet everywhere I turn’.

The bottle, jukebox, dancefloor and barroom mirror conspire to keep him far away from ‘the girl at home who loves me’. In any case, she ‘won’t understand’ the pull of the saloon, or how our narrator is hooked, helpless, aware that he should ‘waltz right out of them swingin’ doors’, but that’s a step he ‘just can’t learn’.

The lyric is set to a Western Swing arrangement that Country Universe describes as ‘two parts George Strait and one part Roger Miller’. The players are known as The G-Men: Bruce Bouton on pedal steel, Mark Casstevens on acoustic, Rob Hajacos on fiddle, Chris Leuzinger on electric and Bobby Wood on keys. They were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2016; millions upon millions of people have heard their work without any clue who they are.

2007 Taylor Swift – Our Song

She was 17 when this song was released and 18 when it topped the chart, which is a frighteningly young age even without the attendant pressures from fans who were connected across the world and with whom she communicated via Myspace.

The daughter of stockbroker Scott, Taylor Swift has had more than one book written about her in 2024 alone. You can try Caroline Sullivan’s unauthorized biography, inevitably titled Era by Era, or Rob Sheffield’s book-length essay Heartbreak is the National Anthem. In any case, Taylor is now the most famous woman in the world, so type her name into Google if you want to find out everything you could possibly wish to know about her.

Taylor’s genius was similar to Garth’s: marketing, connection with an audience and writing (or picking) great material. Both acts are now bigger than country music itself, but there will always be a place for them as and when they want to return home. I think Taylor is going to write books and poetry anthologies, because she has run out of worlds to conquer on the pop music front.

This self-written chart-topper, the third single from her self-titled debut album, a teen-pop song with country instrumentation, from the opening fiddle riff and dobro played by the aforementioned Rob Hajacos and Bruce Bouton, while producer Nathan Chapman dusts the arrangement with banjo and plays a chunky guitar solo.

Our narrator is ‘riding shotgun’ without a care in the world, singing along to the metaphorical song shared by her and her beloved. They lack an actual one but, suggests her beau, their song is a series of images: ‘a slamming screen door’, ‘the way you laugh’, the first date missed opportunity (‘man I didn’t kiss her and I should have’).

It is interesting, looking back almost two decades, how the chorus has God in a prominent place: ‘asking God if He could play it again’. The second iteration of this chorus is preceded by the narrator going to her ‘lovin’ bed’, a poetic device known as a transferred epithet because a bed cannot be loving. The bed is full of roses upon it, as well as a note upon which is written ‘our song is a slamming screen door…’

The middle eight is a sigh that Taylor has ‘heard every album, listened to the radio’ but can’t find a song as good as theirs; whenever you are pandering to radio programmers, as Taylor Swift and her then Big Machine label boss Scott Borchetta were doing, it pays to mention the radio. Then, in a very meta touch, she adds a coda which returns to the opening image of ‘the front seat of his car’: she ‘grabbed a pen and an old napkin and wrote down our song’. Taylor played that song acoustically in the filmed version of the $2bn-grossing Eras tour across 2023 and 2024, by which time she need never write another song.

As she was on the world tour, Taylor still had time to write and record 31 more, which were collected on her Tortured Poets Department set of 2024. Not even Garth Brooks could do that.

2017 Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line – Meant to Be and Blake Shelton – I’ll Name the Dogs

We discussed Meant to Be in the October 21 piece.

Shelton’s radio chart-topper matches Honey Bee in how the singer is the Y to his addressee’s X: ‘you be the pretty and I’ll be the funny’, ‘you pick the paint, I’ll pick a guitar’, and the title hook ‘you name the babies, I’ll name the dogs’. It also includes an eight-beat middle two, rather than a middle eight, the better to return to the chorus: ‘Laying next to you every night sounds like a damn good life’.

The verses are typically lovey-dovey: ‘no more messing around’, ‘you, me, with the same street name, same last name’, ‘watch the sunset from a gravel road’, ‘still lovin’ on you when the rooster crows’. The rural imagery – ‘sing you a song out there with the crickets and the frogs’ – is alluring, while the use of zeugma is excellent throughout. From the Greek for ‘to yoke together’, as in oxen to a plough, zeugma is when you use one verb to govern two clauses: as well as the fantastic example of picking in the chorus, the second verse includes the couplet: ‘I’ll put a little swing on the front porch if you put a little tea in my glass’.

It’s a rural love song, written by Matt Dragstrem, Ben Hayslip and Josh Thompson, which Shelton delivers with a typical mix of charm and confidence. There is also a faithful demo version of the song with lead vocals from Thompson, who used to be an artist signed to the same label as Miranda Lambert before writing hit songs for Jason Aldean (Any Ol’ Barstool), Luke Bryan (One Margarita), Dustin Lynch (Stars Like Confetti) and, most remuneratively, Morgan Wallen. The singer took Wasted On You into the top 10 of the Hot 100, seven decades after Bobby Helms did the same, three decades after the domination of Garth Brooks and during the world-beating decade-long titanic success of Taylor Swift.

Hank Williams Jr – A Country Boy Can Survive

Along with Family Tradition, this is Hank Jr’s most streamed song via Spotify stats, which has thus survived four decades since its release in 1982 when it could not overtake songs by Rosanne Cash and Charley Pride to top the charts. It did come back into circulation in 1999 and 2001 when Hank Jr respectively teamed up with Chad Brock for a Y2K version and, after the September 11 attacks, changed the lyric to America Will Survive.

Over a dropped-tuned guitar in the key of D, we open with an image of end of days from a preacher, with muggings downtown and a falling stock market. A sitar line answers the narrator in the opening verse, who sings of living ‘back in the woods’ with ‘a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive’. Whenever he wants, he can plough his field, ‘skin a buck’, ‘catch catfish’ and ‘run a trotline’. He can also make his own wine and whiskey and ‘grow good ole tomatoes’, having been taught by his grandpa ‘to live off the land’.

Hank Jr’s narrator namechecks the Mississippi river, the coalmines of West Virginia and the Rocky Mountains, as well as ‘North California and South Alabam’. He contrasts these places with a friend in New York; he ‘never called me by my name, just “hillbilly”’ and kept sending him images of ‘Broadway nights’ to entice Hank Jr to the big city.

Looking back to the mention of muggings in the opening verse, his friend was stabbed for $43 in cash; the narrator might seek revenge for this attack and ‘spit some Beech-Nut in that dude’s eye’, referring to chewed tobacco. This underlines how country folk have become accustomed to fighting for themselves, although the line can also be read as a dig about city folk.

Across a century of commercial country music, this dialogue between rural and urban has often taken place, with pros and cons for both sides. Like Okie from Muskogee by Merle Haggard, this song has lasted because of its huge affinity for ‘country folks’ as well as the boy of the title: ‘You can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run…we say grace and we say “ma’am”’. The arrangement never explodes, rumbling along like a truck and with a swamp guitar line to match the sitar. Hank Jr’s final note, on the word ‘survive’, is excellent.

Alan Jackson – Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow

Of all the number ones Jackson had, this song was not one of them; in December 1990, it was impeded by I’ve Come to Expect It from You by George Strait. Jackson’s song was the fourth single from his album Here in the Real World, so perhaps people did not want to buy a tune they already owned.

Written with Jim McBride, it is a song about playing bars as an up-and-comer, ‘living that honky-tonk dream…just wanna be heard and seen’. The first verse is packed full of music being played or heard: country shows on the radio, mama singing ‘that sweet harmony’ and baby Alan hearing ‘the crying of a steel guitar’ in the cradle. Thus, as his narrator sings in the chorus, ‘all I’ve ever wanted is to pick this guitar and sing’.

The second verse describes the reality of the dream: ‘an atlas and a coffee cup, five pickers in an old Dodge Truck’, our narrator on the way to play a show in Houston even though ‘half the time I sing for free’. The conversational nature of the lyric increases the listener’s empathy: ‘well this overhead is killing me’, ‘Lord it makes this thing I’m doing seem right’.

What else makes it worth it is when ‘the crowd’s into it’; although his mama ‘worries’ about how he has taken his love of music ‘this far’, Jackson’s narrator has ‘made it up to Music Row’. By the time he mentions this during the final verse, the key has changed from G to A, giving it a much brighter feel with more sharps in the key signature. The same father who won a radio in a contest tells his son: ‘I just know we’re going to hear you singing on it someday’.

As with the Hank Jr anthem, it appears that the singer is the character of his own song, and it is one that would sound great in the bars with those very same neon rainbows. It would also be covered by acts who, as Jackson himself did, are chasing success too, perhaps having heard Jackson on the radio. Luke Combs, for instance, picked up on the song’s lyrical idea in his song Honky Tonk Highway.

Kenny Chesney – Big Star

Continuing with songs about musical dreams, this was the fourth single from Chesney’s album No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems. Darryl Worley’s patriotic song Have You Forgotten? kept this song at number two. When he was recording his live album, Chesney brought out Taylor Swift to be the female protagonist of a song he narrates, which was written by Stephony Smith, who also wrote It’s Your Love for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.

Beginning with a chugging riff, this country-rock hybrid has defined the Kenny Chesney Stadium Sound for two decades. We open with a girl overcoming ‘her insecurities’ to sing karaoke at Banana Joe’s, and soon she is a TV star who attracts groupies. The rhyme ‘she belted it/she melted them’ in the first bridge becomes ‘signed autographs/in the aftermath’ in the second; in the latter, Garth Brooks is namechecked to recall his famous CMA Fest marathon signing session.

Even if, as the middle section suggests, ‘her high school girlfriends cut her down’ and her neighbours believe ‘she slept her way to the top’, our Big Star sings to ’20,000 plus’ after a pre-gig caviar supper. There’s also a new chord on ‘she doesn’t care anymore’ and a quiet few bars at the start of the third verse where the guitar chords go choppy to underscore the song’s message: ‘You don’t get where you’re going ‘less you got something they ain’t got’. This is followed by a punchy pair of chords over the first notes of the line ‘so she sings tonight’.

The chorus, which begins with the same two-chord riff as the verse and includes some clapalong percussion, includes some advice to aspiring big stars: ‘If you work hard…it feels good in the hot spotlight’. Those girls are mentioned in the third verse saying ‘that could be us’, who might take the song’s offering of skill and tenacity to heart and start chasing that neon rainbow or, as here, heading straight to the karaoke bar.

Kelsea Ballerini – Hole in the Bottle

One of those girls inspired by big stars like Taylor Swift, Kelsea writes her own songs and sells them with panache, although having a radio promo guy for a dad has also helped her cause. Shania Twain appeared on a version of this song, which got to number six on the Hot Country charts and made the top 40 of the Hot 100. It was held off number one at radio by Better Together by Luke Combs.

The song begins with a spoken-word intro from a mock instruction tape. The first verse is then driven by a funky guitar riff that loops around and around with a digital drum loop joining in the chorus, on which Kelsea sings: ‘There’s a hole in the bottle drinkin’ all this wine’. In the coda, she laments how ‘she can’t even find the hole in the bottle of wine’. It’s good fun and her vocal is full of character.

The verses frame the idea that she is drinking to forget an old flame (‘honey no, I don’t miss him’), although she won’t cry because ‘tears would water down’ her bottle of red. ‘I just came here to unwind’, ‘this Cabernet has a way of vanishing on me’, ‘now this one’s halfway gone and it’s barely even open!’ are all, as the term goes, written to the title.

In the modern fashion, the song is credited to five writers including melody specialists Steph Jones and Hillary Lindsey, the latter who also finesses the song with backing vocals. The other two writers are track guy Jesse Frasure and all-round behemoth Ashley Gorley. Derek Wells adds a terrific guitar solo too.

It might well have been written to order as something for bachelorettes to bellow along to on Lower Broadway, albeit once the world had opened up after the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to a hooky melody that is hard to dislodge, it also made the top 40 of the Hot 100.

1958 Ray Price – City Lights

We discussed this song in the October 21 piece.

1968 Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman

‘And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.’

Jimmy Webb has written many celebrated lyrics, not least ‘someone left the cake out in the rain’, but the song about the longing lineman takes the cake. The protagonist is on the lookout for electrical overloads and complains that he needs ‘a small vacation’. He hears an unnamed woman ‘singing in the wire’, one for whom he has an intense longing that is shown in the top note Campbell hits at the end of each refrain (‘still on the line’).

Before the final chorus, Campbell’s three phrases of guitar, saturated in reverb, mimic the loneliness the lineman feels, physically and emotionally. The song is in the key of F, but the key is only stated in the opening theme and never recurs, emphasising the lack of resolution in the song and the lineman’s thoughts. The strings take over for the coda, which fades out cinematically.

The song’s success provided name recognition for Campbell, a former Wrecking Crew session musician, who presented a variety show of his own for three years between 1969 and 1972. The song has been interpreted by dozens of artists including Elbow, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Dwight Yoakam. The writer Dylan Jones composed a book-length essay on it, such is his admiration for the world it paints.

1978 Kenny Rogers – The Gambler

Like Wichita Lineman, Don Schlitz’s story which was given wind by Rogers has never not been popular. Chelsea FC sung it in their dressing room, and an American insurance company hired Rogers to reprise it in a commercial.

Amazingly, nobody wanted to cut The Gambler based on the demo, with Conway Twitty and Schlitz himself doing so before Larry Butler brought it to Rogers. He then employed several musicians from the Nashville A Team including Pig Robbins on piano, Pete Drake on pedal steel and the Jordanaires on backing vocals.

Thanks to a key change and a smattering of new lyrics, Rogers’ version brought the wisdom of cards to the wider world: ‘know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em’; ‘count your money’; ‘there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealin’s done’. Less heralded is his wise counsel that ‘the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep’.

The opening verse has the excellent image of the narrator and the gambler ‘too tired to sleep…the boredom overtook us’. The latter, who is an expert at ‘reading people’s faces’, espies that Rogers is ‘out of aces’; the final line of the final verse picks up this image (‘I found an ace that I could keep’).

1988 Restless Heart – A Tender Lie

This was the sixth number one in just over two years for the quintet signed to RCA Records. Randy Sharp wrote the song, which producer Tim DuBois plucked from the submissions pile.

It’s a soft-rock ballad with a strong vocal from Larry Stewart and a pleasant acoustic guitar solo passage from Greg Jennings, albeit the song has a bland snare drum which ruined much 1980s country music. Each verse and each chorus ends with the title, with the first line of every chorus hitting a new chord progression. The band harmonise over it with possible lies: ‘say you’ll never stop loving me’; ‘say you’re gonna come back to me’. When they ask ‘how much more damage’ such fabrications can do, they also use the phrase ‘unto me’, purely for syllabic reasons.

Strangely, at one show in 2019, Restless Heart did not play this song but they did cover Wichita Lineman.

1998 Brooks & Dunn – Husbands and Wives

Here’s another example of an old copyright given new life, in this case a Roger Miller hit from 1966. Miller died in 1992 and, six years later, the duo covered it on their fifth album If You See Her. After performing it at the CMA Awards, it headed to the top of the charts; their version is in F, while the original is in C.

With help from Larry Franklin’s fiddle and mandolin, Ronnie Dunn gives a predictably excellent reading of the waltz which offers a view on the propensity for people to divorce, which was far more common in 1992 than in 1966. Even in 2024, as in both those years, couples need to have less ‘pride’ and more forgiveness. ‘Angry words spoken in haste’, a line is delivered over some melancholy chords, is to the narrator ‘such a waste of two lives’, causing hearts to look like ‘houses where nobody lives’.

Before the verse and chorus are repeated in their entirety, the middle section comprises a post-chorus lyrical turn to show that both husband and wife are equally guilty: ‘a woman and a man…some can, some can’t’.

2008 Montgomery Gentry – Roll with Me

Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry were, like Brooks & Dunn, a country duo whose voices blended together well. The pair had their 20^th hit with this song, written by Clint Daniels and Tommy Karlas, which came from their sixth album Back When I Knew It All.

Gentry takes the verses, while Montgomery and John Ondrasik (aka Five for Fighting) add harmonies on the sweet chorus. Having seen the light during a Sunday church service (‘it was like the Lord spoke right to me’), he has decided to focus on his own life (‘the man I wanna be’) and asks an unnamed addressee to join him on his journey. It might be a lady but more likely it is a possible apostle.

In the second verse Gentry’s narrator lingers on the memory of a sobbing mum at the funeral of her 20-year-old son; ‘made me think how we all just have our time’ is Gentry’s conclusion. The emphatic chorus includes a series of rising phrases which hit the words ‘down/around/town’ and ‘time/rhyme/song’.

After a guitar solo, the narrator admits in the middle section that he would ‘rather not know’ what the future has in store. The song’s gentle arrangement supports this carefree attitude, along with the stabs of organ played by former Allman Brothers Band member Chuck Leavell, who has spent half his life as the Musical Director for the Rolling Stones; he also has credits on albums by Train, John Mayer and Aretha Franklin.

2018 Dan + Shay – Speechless

This wedding ballad from Dan + Shay was number one on both charts, Hot Country and Country Airplay, at the end of 2018. It’s a sort of update of Wonderful Tonight, where the man is made to wait for his lady (‘you say you’ll be down in five’) but is bowled over by how wonderful and beautiful his lady looks, especially in ‘that dress’, which is an effective rhyme with the title.

She is his ‘weakness’ and serves to ‘take the breath out of my lungs’; with a neat match of music and lyric, after he hurries the second part of the second verse, Shay Mooney holds on to a long ‘I’m’ before the second chorus which cuts the verse short. The imagery is delightful, with ‘the smell of your perfume’ drifting downstairs to where Mooney’s narrator waits, knowing that as per usual he’ll ‘be a mess the second that I see you’.

Some of the lines are vague; the colour of ‘those eyes’ is not specified, nor the hairstyle beyond a description of being done ‘like you do’, and when the pair met she ‘just did something to me’. Some detail would be nice, but the chorus is where the meat of the song is found, all the better to allow Mooney to show off his voice.

Written with Laura Veltz and Jordan Reynolds, this is an Adult Contemporary pop song which might have been modelled on Amazed by Lonestar and then repurposed for an era where anyone can knock up a photo or video montage based on social media posts.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in November 2024, I look at a new EP from Remember Monday, then consider the winners of the 2024 CMA Awards and the nominations for the 2025 Grammy Awards.

From the November 10 Hymn Sheet: Remember Monday

Remember Monday – Crazy Anyway EP

The stars of The Voice UK went all in on their trio after member Lauren finished a stint playing Miss Honey in the West End production of Matilda. They made up for lost time by putting out four standalone songs of their own plus covers of Brown Eyed Girl and Hand In My Pocket; they had performed the latter on Jennifer Hudson’s US TV show.

Last month they put out a five-song EP Crazy Anyway, which like the music of Ward Thomas, Twinnie and The Shires is beautifully sung with plenty of personality, and also veers more towards pop than country. Production comes from Kaity Rae and, on the propulsive Down with Me, Rob from Holloway Road.

Who You Are is a kiss-off containing the word ‘narcissist’ that sounds an awful lot like Kiss Me More by SZA, while Prove Me Right (‘my intuition is screaming’) is a glossy showstopper where the girls anticipate being let down by a guy. The single chosen to trail the EP is Famous, a funky song addressed to another bad boy (‘headline: how’d he lose someone so pretty?’). I expect another C2C appearance amid a busy year of festivals, support slots and promotion; their time has come.

From the November 24 Hymn Sheet: Grammy nominations

Well done to Jessi Alexander and Jessie Jo Dillon on their Songwriter of the Year nomination at the Tayoncé Awards aka the Grammys. I have a feeling The Beatles will win Record of the Year for their last ever release Now and Then. Song of the Year will go to Please Please Please or Die with a Smile, leaving Taylor and Beyoncé to contest Album of the Year. I reckon they’ll share it, although Jay-Z did gently suggest his wife ought to win the prize having never won it before. I’d love to hear the backroom discussions; this is a political award as much as a musical one.

When it comes to country and roots music, Beyoncé will certainly win the Country Album prize because Cowboy Carter is the only country album to be within a shot for the all-genre award: well done to country star Lainey Wilson, representing Nashville, rock’n’roll Kentuckian Chris Stapleton and Texan rap/pop/country star Post Malone, but it’s not your year, no matter how greasy you make the voters’ palms.

Kacey Musgraves, who won Album of the Year for Golden Hour, is also in the running, and I suspect she’ll win the Country Solo Performance award for The Architect, the highlight of Deeper Well co-written by Shane McAnally. Kacey, Stapleton (It Takes a Woman), Beyoncé (16 Carriages) and Jelly Roll, for I Am Not Okay, might struggle against the commercial might of A Bar Song (Tipsy); Best Country Song sees three of those songs – those by Kacey, Shaboozey and Jelly – up against I Had Some Help and Texas Hold Em.

Sending a pointed message to Music City, the Best Americana Performance category sees nominations for seven women and one bloke, David Rawlings, who is the husband of one of those women, Gillian Welch. Beyoncé is nominated for Ya Ya, a song which doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, which makes it perfect for Americana, the genre for misfit toys.

Equally pointedly, Linda Martell, who was about 50 years ahead of her time when she made Color Me Country in 1970, is nominated at the age of 83 for her role in Spaghettii, the track on Cowboy Carter which introduced much of the world to Shaboozey. I am a fan of the Melodic Rap category, which is the new name for the prize which in 2004, when it was Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, was won by Beyoncé and Jay-Z for Crazy In Love; more recent winners have included These Walls by Kendrick Lamar, Hotline Bling by Drake and This Is America by Childish Gambino.

The Best Americana Album is to be fought over by half a dozen of the coolest cats, four of whom are women: Sierra Ferrell, Sarah Jarosz, Maggie Rose and Waxahatchee. The blokes are Charley Crockett and soon-to-turn-77-year-old T-Bone Burnett, who has just produced Ringo Starr’s new album. Billy Strings should walk the Best Bluegrass Album prize, and it’s good to see Dan Tyminski’s set from the Ryman and Del McCoury there in his eighties too.

Mazaltov to Luke Combs for Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma getting a nomination against Barbra Streisand, Olivia Rodrigo, NSYNC and Jon Batiste in the category celebrating songs for TV or movies. II Most Wanted, the magical duet between Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus, may take Country Duo/Group Performance, especially if they perform it on the night (Miley will be promoting a new album, due in 2025). Well done to Brothers Osborne and Dan + Shay, nominated respectively for Break Mine and Bigger Houses, and Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan for Cowboys Cry Too.

I Had Some Help will be the favourite, which means Post Malone is nominated in country and pop categories, the latter for Beyoncé collaboration Levii’s Jeans, as well as for Song of the Year for Fortnight, the Taylor Swift duet. A movie about June Carter Cash is nominated for Best Music Film, but it will likely lose out to one about the recording of We Are The World, especially given that its architect Quincy Jones is no longer with us.

The Best Audiobook award category is frankly absurd: how on earth can Grammy voters decide between a Beatle book, memoirs by Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand and George Clinton, and a celebration of the 100-year-old former president Jimmy Carter. I’d love to see a group photo or hear a Zoom call between Dolly, Barbra, Paul, Ringo, the former president and the man who once sang about One Nation Under a Groove.

Good luck to all in the Tayoncé Awards aka the Grammys, where one billionaire goes up against another to see if their success trickles down to the rest of the industry.

—

As I was redrafting a recent piece on how Country2Country is My First Country Festival, I alit upon the idea of how experienced fans of the genre might look down on plastic-hatted neophytes. In every society or religion, there are the more dedicated acolytes and the more casual ones; in Judaism, the Orthodox man who goes to synagogue three times a week can coexist with the Three-Day Jew who goes for the New Year services. All of them are Jewish; some just take it more seriously than others.

Thus do the country cosplayers of C2C trot along to Greenwich, dressed in denim and prepared to pay £9 for beer or however ludicrous the price point is in the arena this year. If they enjoy Lainey and Cody and Dierks and Shaboozey, they can book tickets for The Long Road and go camping in the grounds of a stately home while listening to any number of acts in any number of styles on a bill curated by Baylen Leonard.

If these new country fans want something indigenous and native to the UK, they can try boutique festivals in Stockport (Buckle & Boots), Southsea (Country on the Coast), Blackpool (The British Country Music Festival) or Paisley, where Mill Town launched this year to replace Millport. It runs alongside the biannual Country in the Afternoon events down in Putney, the most recent of which brought together Gary Quinn and Matt Hodges from the UK and Jeremy McComb from the USA.

There’s also the Roadhouse Weekender in Bodiam, East Sussex, which is replacing Black Deer, which is spending 2025 trotting around the country offering smaller gigs to people up and down the UK. Big acts already on the Roadhouse lineup include Drake White, Kezia Gill, Morganway and, all the way from Down Under, Travis Collins. Look out for their own roadshow stops before the festival proper, coming to a town near you.

Then there are regular club nights across the UK in St Helens, Blackpool and London, including Lil Nashville based in Chiswick, West London. The Yeehaw Cowboy Brunch, whose crowd is mostly women between 18 and 34 years old, has already announced a slew of dates for the first few months of 2025 including visits to Southampton, Aberdeen and Bristol. There’s even a country club night at the Electric Ballroom in Camden.

All of this would have been unthinkable even five years ago, but country’s cool again. How long will it last?

—

And so we come to the CMA Awards, the annual procession of acts that the Country Music Association want to represent the genre as it currently is. There are quite enough recaps of the awards without me adding my sixpence, but I will just note that Morgan Wallen was suspended by Big Loud in early 2021 after being caught on film saying The Word. In 2023, he had the biggest song and album in America; in 2024, the year he had the biggest song in America twice more, he headlined Hyde Park in London.

So who do you think was going to win Entertainer of the Year? Not Jelly Roll, a convicted felon who can’t play London because of his past convictions, and who is my choice for the Trump Inauguration anthem singer who, like Garth Brooks before him, unites both sides of the aisle. Not Chris Stapleton, who now has more consecutive CMA Male Vocalist awards than people living in his own house: eight prizes, five kids and a wife. And not a woman, because they gave it to one last year.

Wallen has had more number ones at radio in 2024 (five) than there are often women being played on the radio in an average week. It is interesting that Lies Lies Lies was the first chart-topper this year to be solely credited to Wallen, after he teamed up with Ernest, Thomas Rhett, Eric Church and of course Post Malone. All is forgiven, and Nashville can love their cash cow again. Mazaltov to all concerned, especially Wallen’s label Big Loud, who have been waiting for this coronation for years. Wallen was absent, of course, just in case he got booed and tarnished the event in which he won the biggest prize.

Country music: reliably nonsensical. Happy Christmas!

The Sunday Hymn Sheet will return to A Country Way of Life, in its dedicated tab on the site on January 19, with news on albums by Jessica Lynn and Ringo from the Dingle. Thank you for reading the pieces throughout 2024.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in October 2024, I look at new albums by Billy Strings, Luke Bryan and Joe Nichols

From the October 20 Hymn Sheet: Luke Bryan and Billy Strings

Luke Bryan – Mind of a Country Boy

Thomas Luther Bryan took over Keith Urban and Blake Shelton’s dual role as the primetime country star thanks to his role as a judge on American Idol. Like his fellow former judge Katy Perry, Luke Bryan is a Facebook/iTunes star in a TikTok/Spotify world, and has moved into the same slow lane as Shelton, Tim McGraw, Darius Rucker and Kenny Chesney.

I will never say a bad word against Bryan the man because of his support for America’s farming communities and how he has helped raise his sister’s children after they lost both their parents. His music has reflected the commercial sounds of country music, although I am sure he didn’t expect to be caught up in the years of the bro.

Bryan has been a radio staple for over 15 years, often taking five or six singles from his big albums to the top of the charts. The song currently at radio to promote Mind of a Country Boy is the perfunctory ballad Love You, Miss You, Mean It, another number one which finds itself in the top ten most played songs alongside those Face Tat Country acts Jelly Roll and Post Malone. His last album, 2020’s Born Here Live Here Die Here, saw him move into the legacy artists bracket alongside the aforementioned quartet; incredibly, he is now 48 years old, having only become a star in his mid-thirties.

Only two of the 14 tracks have writing contributions from the singer: the title track, a list of Georgia-boy country stuff which was composed with his old friends The Peach Pickers (Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson and Ben Hayslip); and For the Kids, a song full of grown-up melancholy (‘we swore we’d never end up like this’) written with Brad from Old Dominion, who also wrote Bryan’s hit Light It Up.

Like recent releases from McGraw and Keith Urban, this is a brand consolidation exercise, a set of songs by a country boy which were obviously written to be sung by one: I’m on a Tractor, which is where he goes ‘to think about trying not to think’; Pair of Boots, which you should ‘buy a boy’ so the boy can then buy for his baby boy; Southern and Slow, a raunchy sex jam enlivened by a wonderful guitar solo; Country On, a shoutout to rural workers which begins with the line ‘hey farm boy!’; and the dumb song about nothing But I Got a Beer in My Hand, which is the only thing here that fits into the Country Girl/That’s My Kind of Night wheelhouse.

The best title of all belongs to closing track Jesus Bout My Kids, a thinky-thinker whose lyric is full of paternal concern and sounds like something from the charts of a bygone era. Fish on the Wall is an age-appropriate reminiscin’ song with a gentle groove that could be a Blake Shelton song, while on the love song Kansas he suggests that if love is like farmland, Bryan has loads of it: ‘If it’s a wheat field, I’ll give you Kansas’.

The songs are all great, and all sound like Luke Bryan songs which will appease longtime fans. Such is the fate of a superstar as he matures into a legacy artist, more on which will follow in a few weeks time when I offer a retrospective of the latest superstar-turned-legacy-act Dierks Bentley, who is eight months older than Bryan and is (get this) 50 next year.

Billy Strings – Highway Prayers

Listening to Billy Strings in 2024 feels like what it must have been like to listen to Willie Nelson, whose birthday concert Billy opened last year, in 1974. Billy Strings is not the guitar player’s real name – it’s William Apostol – but it’s a smart moniker for a man who continues his hot streak with Highway Prayers. It is 20 tracks and 75 minutes long, and is produced with the estimable Jon Brion.

I can’t believe it’s been three years since I was knocked out by the album Renewal, released the week before Billy turned 29. I also can’t believe that Highway Prayers is even better than Renewal, with an eclecticism that shows a huge appreciation for those who came before him.

Billy recently released a live album and introduced himself to any new fans via his pickin’ on M-E-X-I-C-O, one of the strongest tunes on Post Malone’s country project F-1 Trillion. He has six (six!!) dates lined up for Asheville, North Carolina in February, which should see him play to over 40,000 people, with two more at the Bridgestone Arena and one at the Ryman Auditorium.

And remember, this is a bluegrass artist. But Billy Strings is no ordinary bluegrass star. It could be the haircut, but it’s likely because virtuosity will always attract a big fanbase, from Liszt to Liberace to Lang Lang and even to people who don’t play the piano.

Opening track Leaning on a Travelin’ Song includes immediately thrilling solos for fiddle, banjo and mandolin before Billy takes 16 bars of his own. Proving his credentials as the heir to Willie, the hook of stoner anthem MORBUD4ME is ‘a friend with weed is a damn good friend of mine’, a t-shirt slogan sung as a campfire canon over the sound of a bubbling hash pipe. This is followed by the project’s lead single Leadfoot, a hyperactive tune that is impossible not to clap or stomp along to; the video is good fun too, especially if you like facial prosthetics. 

Shawn Camp, who wrote Two Piña Coladas, helped Billy with Don’t Be Calling Me (At 4am), one of many songs on the album possessing a magical melody; see also the menacing waltz My Alice and the thrumming Cabin Song. The gorgeous Gild the Lily (‘toss a penny and close your eyes’) will appeal to anyone who loves classic American rock music from 1972; band harmonies and a laidback arrangement seem to encourage chemical enhancement.

That track follows Escanaba, a five-minute instrumental that is made for front porches rather than arenas. And how’s this for a title of another instrumental: Malfunction Junction. Even better, its first few minutes are in 7/4 time!! Halfway through the album I was almost out of my seat with enjoyment.

Billy has said he wanted to make a record that ‘somebody can put on when they’ve got an hour drive or more ahead of them’. You don’t even need to start the car to enjoy a journey like this. He’ll be following Zach Bryan to international superstardom, if that’s what he is pursuing; next year he’ll feature on Ringo Starr’s new album along with Larkin Poe, Lucius and Molly Tuttle.

To promote the project Ringo said this about country music: ‘The wife’s left, the dog’s dead and there’s no money for the jukebox.’ Peace and love, Ringo!

From the October 27 Hymn Sheet: Joe Nichols

Joe Nichols – Honky Tonks & Country Songs

The man I call Hot Sexy Joe Nichols, who has a nice voice and an even nicer face, returned this week with Honky Tonks & Country Songs. It’s a follow-up to his 2022 comeback album Good Day for Living, whose title track got a big push to country radio and made the top 20.

Like Luke Bryan, whom he is four months younger than, Nichols had to play the game and sing fluffy songs to help his record label, Universal South, make money. Between 2002 and 2014 he had five number ones including the charming trio of Yeah, Gimme That Girl and Sunny and 75, the latter forcing him to sing ‘I’m so there!’ Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off will definitely get played in Lower Broadway bars but, if it were written today, it would not be allowed out of the writer’s room, even if it’s good fun and the woman has plenty of agency in the song.

Nichols played the famous Gilley’s in Dallas, where the movie Urban Cowboy was shot, on the evening of release day, which is apt for a record with Honky Tonks in the title. Tyler Hubbard co-wrote the title track, which is yet another ‘we go together like’ country song, while Hardy was in the room for the twangy song of Southern pride which has the hook ‘we ain’t got an accent…Y’all Do!’. It sounds an awful lot like a William Michael Morgan song. Dan Smalley, who like Willie is a friend of Gary Quinn who has played Buckle & Boots 2024, contributes the twangy sex jam On and On: ‘she don’t just crank my tractor, she ploughs the whole field’ is a t-shirt slogan.

In the old style, Nichols is an interpreter rather than a writer, and he gathers 11 songs including the anthemic Hank Williams Jr song Country Boy Can Survive. People Still Doing That is about the durability of barroom chatter and jukeboxes, while the smouldering Hard Fires and Better Than You both benefit from the featured female vocalists, respectively Stevie Woodward and Annie Bosko.

Jimmy Yeary, who co-wrote I Drive Your Truck and is married to Opry member Sonya Isaacs (whom I just learned is descended from Holocaust survivors), gave Nichols Doin’ Life With You, a magnificent love song which could have fitted on Luke Combs’ recent album. It will sit alongside The Impossible in his live show before he fulfils his contract and does the tequila song.

Might Nichols pop over to the UK to promote this excellent album? He’d be a terrific Long Road booking, and not just because of his photogenic cheekbones.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in September 2024, I round up albums from Mitchell Tenpenny, Drake White, Kassi Ashton and Shawna Thompson

Mitchell Tenpenny – The 3^rd

Mitchell Tenpenny gave an interview recently where he said he wanted to write ‘lifetime music, not lunchtime music’, which is shorthand for durable songs. Drunk Me, a top 40 hit on the US Hot 100, peaked at number two on country radio, as did Truth About You; a lunchtime-y collaboration with Chris Young, At the End of a Bar, went one better.

Rather than putting his life in a song, he puts his name – James Mitchell Tenpenny III – into the title track of his new album The 3^rd. His grandma was CEO of Sony/ATV Publishing who (get this) was voted Lady Executive of the Year. ‘Lady’, and in 1994 too! Perhaps the industry connections helped Tenpenny secure a nomination for New Artist at this year’s CMA Awards, even though Drunk Me came out in 2018.

Having come over for Country2Country in 2023, he’ll surely return to promote a set of songs that are sonically similar to what UK audiences are used to: poppy, rocky, middle of the road and only slightly country. It’s Nashville pop and it’s very exportable.

As with his last overlong album, The 3^rd doesn’t need to be 60 minutes and 20 songs long, nor does there need to be a cover of Iris by Goo Goo Dolls, even though his voice suits it; that’s someone else’s lifetime music, in this case John Rzeznick, who has sold his catalogue on for many millions of dollars. This is how things are in the Venture Capital era of the popular song.

When I started tuning into radio station The Big 615 before the playlist got too repetitive, they were rotating Bigger Mistakes (‘get over yourself!! I’ve made bigger mistakes than you!’), which appears early on in the collection. There are, it is true, some lifetime-y songs across the album: Set It in Stone has a chorus full of love for family and the image of a headstone, plus a dobro solo; Tennessee In Me sticks a banjo solo into a country love song; and on the similarly anthemic Not Today, where there are drums on every beat of the chorus, our poor narrator is still unable to shake a girl off his mind.

Make It Rain is a story song which sounds an awful lot like God’s Country by Blake Shelton because Devin Dawson, who wrote that one, was involved in the composition of this one. I wish there had been more songs like it on Tenpenny’s album, although perhaps not to the extreme extent of Demon or Ghost, which features screaming from rock band Underoath. About 12 tracks earlier Colbie Caillat had sung the first verse of the poppy, lunchtime-y Guess We’ll Never Know, giving this album no stylistic coherence.

That is, bizarrely, aside from the many tracks that sound like John Mayer. Two of them, summer love song Smoke and melancholy Started Stoppin’, were written by Ashley Gorley, and both are lunchtime-y. I Won’t, which Mitchell wrote with his brother Rafe and is about trying to let a breakup stay broken, sounds like about four Mayer songs, and you can’t copyright a sonic imprint. Tenpenny goes back to this sound on Same Moon, which is lovely, and Breaking My Heart, which is great too but is 101% Mayer.

Trannie Anderson, who is part of Lainey Wilson’s Heart Wranglers songwriting crew, contributed to Head Start on a Heartbreak, but at this point I wondered how many heartbreak songs you need on an album. Anyhow, almost nobody will listen to The 3^rd in one go, allowing you to choose your own Tenpenny adventure.

Drake White – Low Country High Road

Drake White has abandoned the development deal of a big label for life as an independent act. His big hit, the top 20 smash Livin’ the Dream, was a gift from Luke Laird, while follow-up Makin’ Me Look Good Again stalled well below its potential. White shifted from one label to the next and eventually, six years after Spark, he brought out his third album The Optimystic on his Reverend White imprint.

I caught him promoting that record in 2022 when he made a cameo at the Nashville Meets London festival; he had previously played at Country2Country 2019, opening the main stage on a day headlined by Chris Stapleton. A few months later, he had an onstage stroke which led to some quite atrocious health problems, so it remains a miracle that he can even record.

His new album Low Country High Road was produced with Jonathan Singleton, who has masterminded the Luke Combs sound. The title track that opens the album charmingly includes ‘chickens’ in its very first line and has a chorus that is instantly memorable.

White is backed up by a small choir of voices who return with some woahs on Hometown Healing (‘just what the doctor ordered’) and add a country gospel feel to the chonk-chonk guitar line of Faith. And watch out for the false ending of closing track Stompin’ Ground, or you’ll miss the album’s finest minute.

Miracles reminds me of Hawaiian surfer chap Jack Johnson, perhaps on purpose, while fans of Combs and Chris Stapleton will respectively enjoy Everyday Yours and Life, Love and War; the latter includes the simile ‘I’m shaking like a labrador’. Full marks to White and Marcus Hummon for finding a song to go with the title Tequila Mockingbird, which includes a fine whistling hook.

Keep It Movin’ is rollicking good fun (is there any other kind of fun?) that, like The Last Time and Wildflower, is a song about enjoying life. All three are made more emphatic by the backstory of its singer, who is set to return to Europe in 2025 by playing very high up the bill at the inaugural Roadhouse Weekender in Bodiam, East Sussex over Independence Day weekend. Should anyone not already be aware of his genius, he will certainly convert the remaining few to his cause.

Kassi Ashton – Made From The Dirt

Like Drake White, Kassi Ashton has popped over to the UK to play music that is hard to pigeonhole. I really thought she had the makings of an Amy Winehouse-style talent after her debut single California, Missouri, which came out in (get this) January 2018. She was nominated for the ACM New Female Artist award…in 2024.

Kassi has cut songs written by Miranda Lambert’s pal Natalie Hemby, including the kiss-off Taxidermy, and by her publisher Luke Laird of Creative Nation: Field Party, Black Motorcycle, Heavyweight and the breezy Dates In Pickup Trucks. None of those songs make her debut album Made From The Dirt, which she and Laird co-produced. The title track puts her life in a very melodic song, just as California, Missouri did: ‘I never fit the mould so I did it my way,’ sings Kassi with confidence that is far too appealing to ignore.

The pre-released singles include the anthemic Called Crazy, where Kassi plays the kind of femme fatale dozens of men have sung about over the years; the bouncy Drive You Out Of My Mind, which namechecks the song Mama’s Broken Heart, which is more or less an inspiration for the character Kassi inhabits across the album; and the chugging Son of a Gun, a song about her parents co-written by Jason Nix who wrote Things A Man Oughta Know with and for Lainey Wilson.

Two Chase Rice collaborators also contributed to songs here: the Lori McKenna co-write The Straw and the slinky I Don’t Wanna Dance (‘if I ain’t dancing with you’), written with his producer Oscar Charles. The great Barry Dean, another Creative Nation writer, helped out on the waltz Angels Smoke Cigarettes, where Kassi sings of being guided by a darker kind of angel. Music Row’s Mr Dependable Rhett Akins was there for The Stars Know, a recollection of love long ago (‘time is a thief’) where Night Moves by Bob Seger is turned into a saucy theme song.

The self-written closing track Juanita is a celebration of Kassi’s grandma, and an extended metaphor on how a person can be like a tree ‘with roots of love, tough and tender’. I am duty bound to say grandma Juanita would be mighty proud of little Kassi. I just hope this album, almost seven years in the making, finds its audience; playing the main stage at C2C 2025 will help her cause.

Shawna Thompson – Lean on Neon

I came to country music a couple of years after the Taylor Swift period, which brought in a slew of acts with female singers including Lady Antebellum (as was), The Band Perry and Thompson Square.

Shawna and Keifer Thompson will feature in the Any Given Songday series eventually, thanks to their two number ones Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not (which they didn’t write) and If I Didn’t Have You (which they did); in an interview with Country Music People Shawna said they played over 250 shows the year they were hot HOT HOT!

Shawna was promoting her album Lean on Neon, which came out on Sun Records, the old Memphis label which has been dusted off for a modern age. As Lainey Wilson has also done, Jones on the Jukebox (‘and you on my mind’) mentions George Jones in the title and namechecks old songtitles in the chorus; there is a key change, and a final flourish of pedal steel.

This ain’t no pop-country, this is proper country, as shown by the fiddle introduction and shuffle beat to The Doctor’s Always In, where ‘it’s happy hour all the time’ offers a clue to the honky-tonk A&E room. The theme is more explicit on the heartbreaker I Don’t Know Why and the infectious Honky Tonk Hurtin’, for which Shawna respectively drafts in Leona Williams and Pam Tillis.

The title track has the sort of Pig Robbins piano part which made dozens of classic country songs eternal; perhaps the writers of those songs will applaud the line ‘when your jukebox is your only friend, that quarter drops and the heartache spins’. After all that drinking and partying, meanwhile, church is the setting for Small Town Wreck: ‘Lord if you love a sinner, I might be the best,’ Shawna sings.

Other guests include Sunny Sweeney, Rhonda Vincent, Jim Lauderdale, Patty Loveless and, on the baptismal Bama Clay, both Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs. The album closes with interpretations of Hank Williams Jr’s Outlaw Women and Buck Owens’ Together Again, because that’s what you can do if you’re independent of the Nashville system.

I hope Shawna, and husband Keifer, come over to the UK soon to surprise their old fanbase. They would be the highlight of any festival.

Torn from the Hymn Sheet: September 2024

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in September 2024, I round up albums from Dylan Schneider, Reckless Kelly and Midland

Dylan Schneider – Puzzled

This coming Friday, Dylan Schneider releases his long-awaited debut album Puzzled, which he’ll promote via opening slots for Luke Bryan and Mitchell Tenpenny, who also have new albums this month. He also came over for Country2Country this year, where he played his ballad Daddy Drinks Whiskey and the radio-friendly pair Bad Decisions and Ain’t Missin’ You.

These three tracks previewed the album on a six-song set released in April, which also included the album’s opening track Carhartt. Among the new additions are his version of Momma’s House, which he wrote for his Broken Bow labelmate Dustin Lynch, in whose musical wheelhouse Schneider finds himself. Like Lynch or Jason Aldean, Schneider has a voice that is functional rather than pyrotechnical, and he sells the songs well enough.

Halfway through the album, though, it had become too similar in sound and theme to hold my interest, reminding me of an album by Nate Smith, where every track seemed to be about how breakups made him miserable. The new Jelly Roll record, which I’ve reviewed for next month’s issue of Country Music People, is also thuddingly repetitive. Are people even listening to whole albums in one go these days?

Having already put out Buy That Girl A Beer, a song about seizing the moment that crams an entire life into the chorus, Schneider tells us two tracks later to Put The Whiskey Away, ‘one shot at a time’. Here Comes the Sun (‘we’re good in the dark but when daylight breaks you’ll break my heart’) was written with Steph Jones, who has worked with Sabrina Carpenter.

That track is one of several that marry strong melodies to digitally enhanced beats, which proves the dominance of the Morgan Wallen sound. Pitching to its intended audience, plenty of songs have romantic themes: Bad At Breaking Up, Gone Is What I Get and, in a song which oddly nicks the title of a Mickey Guyton one, Better Than You Left Me,

The title track, which Schneider wrote himself and puts his life in a song, closes the album: ‘I just sing songs on my phone,’ he recalls, before going on tour at the age of 16. Frighteningly, he’s still only 24.

Reckless Kelly – The Last Frontier

There’s something about the rural rock’n’roll of acts like Reckless Kelly that puts me in the right place. They have been plugging away for 30 years as their type of country, known as Americana, has grown in popularity. They have a fan in Bob Harris, who 20 years ago hammered their song Ragged as the Road on his overnight programme.

The band put out The Last Frontier, their 11^th album and their first studio recordings since a double album in 2020, last Friday. This one lasts 31 minutes, with each track coming in at around three minutes or under. Whenever I like the sound of an opening track, as in Keep Lookin’ Down The Road, I always sigh in contentment.

The title track, a duet with Kelly Willis, does not waste a note or a phrase, perhaps because the band have been working on how best to entertain people for three decades. They can do soft, as on You Were The One, Dance To The Beat Of My Drum and the philosophical Long Lonesome Ride, which includes the phrase ‘canyons of our civilizations’.

They can also do hard, as on the stomper Fired Up Ready To Go, and hard with soft elements, as on Miserable City, What’s Left of My Heart (‘a little jump-starter’) and Romantic Disaster (‘gone are the dreams of happy ever after’). Thanks to the rich arrangement with guitar, pedal steel and band harmonies, I Know A Place is a musical blanket to match the ‘Western skies on the edge of the pines’ it describes.

Reckless Kelly have made noises about spending less time on the road after their tour ends next year. I have been assured that this is not their final studio release, which I thought was hinted on closing track Lightning In A Bottle by ‘You and I were one…I hope we made you proud’. This is a magnificent set of songs that deserves a wide audience; when it finished, I put it on again immediately.

Midland – Barely Blue

From one band to another. Midland are basically the country Mumford & Sons, well-schooled kids playing as musicians (the Mumfs’ former banjo player has a billionaire media mogul for a father). In Midland’s case, one of the trio, Cameron, directed the music video for Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars and his wedding made the pages of People magazine. Singer Mark, meanwhile, lived in London with TV presenter Fearne Cotton while trying to make it as a model.

But never mind the backstory. Their debut album On The Rocks filled a gap at a time when no traditional acts could elbow aside the bros, and their following three sets included moments of excellence, like Sunrise Tells the Story and Cowgirl Blues. One album was a soundtrack to a movie called The Sonic Ranch, which documented the recording of a set of songs in 2014 a few years before they broke through.

Trigger from the website Saving Country Music once wrote a piece headlined ‘The Midland Authenticity Dilemma’ but came round to them as ‘a mainstream country music bright spot’, albeit one masterminded by Music Row A-Listers Josh Osborne and Shane McAnally. Trigger concluded that they were in a ‘no man’s land… too country for the mainstream, but not country or authentic enough for many independent fans’.

Even though they contribute to the writing process, in my mind Midland are akin to those 1970s studio bands like Boney M or Blue Mink, who sold songs written by producers or backroom figures. It’s great, and it makes money for Big Machine, but it’s not the truth.

I listened to the Radio 2 coverage of their 2023 Country2Country set and enjoyed the eclecticism: interspersed with their own cuts, they chucked in plenty of covers from Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old, Wichita Lineman, Wicked Game, The Boys are Back in Town and a memorable take on Eastbound and Down (which more people ought to know was written by transgender writer Deena Kaye Rose, who was then credited as Dick Feller).

Anyhow, the trio promoted their eight-song fourth album Barely Blue with a decent interview in Country Music People and launched it in Nashville with a show sponsored by country site Holler. They went out to Georgia to make the album with Dave Cobb, which is very generous of Big Machine to pay for, so I expected it to have the Produced by Dave Cobb sound that has given Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton and Zayn from One Direction some kudos, as well as the magnificent debut album from Cassandra Lewis.

Three tracks trailed the album: Old Fashioned Feeling, which sounds exactly like its title and benefits from the natural studio echo; Vegas, a spin on the old cliché about the city written by some folk who have been behind Eric Church’s stuff; and melodic album opener Lucky Sometimes.

Halfway to Heaven is the best distillation of the new sound, which is helped by a pronounced guitar line and sounds less like country radio than like Reckless Kelly’s Americana. There’s a pretty middle section to album closer Lone Star State of Mind, while the title track has a looser feel than their previous work. Both Better Than A Memory and Baby It’s You use pedal steel to excellent effect. Thanks be to Cobb.

They’re still the country Mumfords, though.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in September 2024, I big up albums by Jackson Dean, Corey Kent, Muscadine Bloodline and A Thousand Horses

From the September 1 Hymn Sheet: A Thousand Horses, Muscadine Bloodline plus more on branding and marketing

A Thousand Horses – The Outside

So many bands and artists share the same war story: they move to Nashville, work hard to get a record deal, are spotted by an A&R rep, sign a deal, are assigned a stylist and producer and manager, send singles to radio and do a long tour of dozens of stations to introduce themselves to market, get some decent support slots, put out an album and find a loyal audience who buy their merch and like and subscribe to their social media channels.

But, due to balance sheets and EBITDA, they often lose the deal and are back where they started, leaving a fanbase hungry for news and new tunes. Take A Thousand Horses, a Southern rock band who had deals first with Interscope then with Republic and then with what was at the time called Big Machine. At one time they had the biggest song at radio with the Dave Cobb-produced number one Smoke. They followed it up with a very similar tune called (This Ain’t No) Drunk Dial which stalled at 23, and then missed the top 40 entirely with their next two singles.

In 2022, they put out their third album Broken Heartland on their own Highway Sound imprint and last month they followed it with The Outside, produced by Jon Randall, who will forever be known as the man who wrote Whiskey Lullaby. The opening track is named after the label, or the other way round, and is a perfect example of what the band do across the album: inclusive singalong rock’n’roll with little to tax the listener, where every instrument and harmony is in the right place.

Given that A Thousand Horses were on the scene in the 2010s, they have some famous friends who were drafted in to help write many of the 11 tunes. Keith Urban’s musical director Jerry Flowers is involved in a couple, while The House That Built Me writer Tom Douglas and Luke Combs’ producer Jonathan Singleton were there for the romance reminiscence Summer and breakup serenade Roll On respectively. The latter song is preceded by a sync-ready Southeastern Stomp, which doesn’t even need words to convey its attitude.

Chris Stapleton, who galloped away with a similar rocking country sound which next month returns for a third time to the O2 Arena, helped the band’s singer Michael Hobby write Room Full of Strangers, a slight song about drinking in a bar. Jon Nite and Ross Copperman wrote closing track Drift Away, the poppy reminiscin’ song about a girl who had a ‘Rayban stare’.

Sad Country Songs (‘bartender play some old George Jones’) was co-written by and features vocals from Charles Kelley of Lady A, who might be the next act to lose their record deal and then thrive as an indie act. Drake White, who is already indie, was in the room for No News: ‘It feels good to sit and drink a beer,’ Hobby sings with post-breakup contentment.

Indeed, this is an album perfect for a late summer’s day with beverage in hand.

Muscadine Bloodline – The Coastal Plain

Muscadine Bloodline are another indie act on a label called Stancaster which smushes together the surnames of Gary Stanton and Charlie Muncaster. I absolutely loved their last record Teenage Dixie, which I called ‘magnificent’, and was pleased that the duo returned with new music last month, with distribution from Thirty Tigers. Having them on board is always a mark of quality and, as with Jason Isbell, it means an act does not have to compromise to major-label men in suits; a small injection of cash can help the music reach a wider audience.

The Coastal Plain has been previewed by half a dozen tracks, the most popular of which has been the acoustic ballad 10-90, a declaration of love where the guys promise to lift their beloved ‘when you’re at 10…give me sad and pour it on me’. It’s very of the moment and sits comfortably alongside the Zachs and the Baileys and the Wallens.

Mary Riley sets a lyric about daughter of a millionaire who shouldn’t be hanging with Gary or Charlie (‘sposed to be a debutante’) to handclaps, cowbell, harmonica and a crunchy electric guitar solo. There is an added swipe at ‘private school’ and there’s an irresistible half-beat of syncopation on the line ‘sun don’t shine’. It is everything that makes the duo, and country music, great, and comes in just shy of 2 minutes 30. Steve Earle could have had a hit with Mary Riley in 1988.

The instrumentation is organic throughout the album: an appealing mandolin solo on Daffodils, fast acoustic guitar underpinning hoedowns Low Hangin’ Fruit and Rattlesnake Ridge (‘you can’t outrun your raisin’), duelling acoustics on Weyerhaeuser Land, and harmonica on Earle Byrd from Mexia. Plus, in a very meta touch, fiddle from Kyle Nix of Turnpike Troubadours on the song Tickets to Turnpike.

Pay Me No Mind has tremendous harmonies and a lyric full of pathos, both of which reappear across the album. On Airport & McGregor the pair are ‘sitting in a parking lot but shoulda been chasing you down’, while album closer Good In This World is one of those songs where the narrator is reminded of the importance of love, here by a widowed veteran and a struggling gas station employee whom he tells to ‘keep the change’.

With melancholy and machismo in equal measure, this is such an appealing album with so much to enjoy. It’s another winner from Thirty Tigers. Seek it out this week if you need a break from Lainey and TR.

—

Russell Dickerson thus has a strong brand that has won him the support of radio stations and festival bookers, having moved up from a previous Indigo2 show to the main arena for Country2Country 2022.

I have, as you may have learned from a year of reading these Hymn Sheets, developed a sense of how big a role the boardroom plays in country music. This is based on how Marty Stuart, who will be supporting Chris Stapleton at the O2 with his superlatively fabulous band The Fabulous Superlatives, described country as ‘a man with a briefcase in one hand and a guitar case in the other’.

Marty’s own brand is as a keeper of the country music flame, and he has just created a link between his Congress of Country Music and the Country Music Hall of Fame, who will co-manage hundreds of legendary items from his extensive collection. They include instruments, costumes and manuscripts.

I was keen to outline the nature of branding when writing about new albums from Lainey Wilson and Thomas Rhett, which both stuck to the formula that keeps them selling concert tickets. Lainey is Eric Church with a Louisiana twang, while like Dickerson TR is as close to pop as you can get while being a boy from Tennessee whose dad, in his case, used to be a country star in the Garth era. (By the way, in terms of numbers, the piece has gone down very well, which I will put down to Bank Holiday boredom.)

As with jeans or alcohol, country music stars are brands. Post Malone is trying to convert his own from one associated with one kind of music to another, perhaps because there’s more money in country or because this is where his heart lies. Postie passes the pint test: spending time drinking with him would be a good use of a few hours.

If you look like a good hang, as Luke Combs or Kenny Chesney do or as Jimmy Buffett and George Jones did, you can make millions from people who buy into the brand. TR, a doting father and husband, and Lainey, a lady with attitude and panache, both get this buy-in and justify their labels’ investment. I maintain that Whiskey Colored Crayon, the closing track of Lainey’s album Whirlwind, is her career song; TR will never be able to top Die a Happy Man.

From the September 8 Hymn Sheet: Corey Kent and Jackson Dean

Corey Kent – Black Bandana

Are there too many guys called Corey or Jackson in country music? No, you can never have too many guys called Corey or Jackson.

Corey Kent is already booked in for a UK tour in February, the pre-Country2Country spot in the calendar. Ever since I heard tell of the story behind how he cut Wild As Her, written by Morgan Wallen and a Canadian chart-topper for Tyler Joe Miller, I have been negatively disposed towards him and his team.

His 2023 album Blacktop was full of power ballads Produced by Jay Joyce, who is not involved this time around (it seems he’s been working with Jon Pardi). The campaign for the ten-song Black Bandana started in January with the release of This Heart, an outside write about that old perennial, a boy missing a girl, set to an arena-rock arrangement.

I thought we’d had enough of Lauren Alaina popping up to sing with a token bloke but here she is on Now or Never (‘break my heart, get it over with’), written by recent divorcé Ryan Hurd. Maybe, like Ash Ketchum with his Pokemon, she’s ticking off every radio act, having already snared Lainey Wilson, Dustin Lynch, Kane Brown, Hardy, Chris Lane and Jon Pardi.

Kent also put out Rust, an extended metaphor on enduring the amorous equivalents of rain, grit and dirt, and the power ballad Never Ready, which showcases a marketable voice first showcased on The Voice. Notably the song was written by two women, which might have something to do with the emotional content in the lyric, and the same pair were involved in Nothing But Neon (‘I got a lot of lonely to think on’).

Damn Good Country Song sums up the sound of the album: both Stapletonish and Wallenish. Perhaps this is at the behest of his label RCA Nashville, and you can really hear the marketing plan.

Jackson Dean – On the Back of My Dreams

It’s harder to hear the marketing plan while listening to On the Back of My Dreams, the second album from Jackson Dean. He came over to the UK this time last year and, from what I read, made an instant impact with a London show. His song Don’t Come Lookin’ was synched to TV show Yellowstone and went top three at radio and top 50 on the all-genre Hot 100. A version of his song Fearless, subtitled The Echo, took a phenomenally long time to clamber up to number 11 on radio.

As with Kent, Dean’s voice is equal parts Stapleton and Wallen, and it sells songs like wide-open opener Big Blue Sky, meditative closer Another Century, family tribute Daddy Raised and emotive fan favourite Heavens To Betsy.

Nine of the album’s 13 tracks were co-written by the album’s producer Luke Dick, which means guitars are cranked up and souls are poured out just as they were with Eric Church and Miranda Lambert, who have both hired Dr Dick. There’s the bluesy Duct Tape Heart, the groovy Long Goodbye, the questing Real Real and Train, which has the punchline ‘that can hit as hard as you’.

It does sound like Dean is a durable artist, and certainly one of the best on the Big Machine roster. No wonder he played Nissan Stadium during CMA Fest and has spent the year opening for Lainey Wilson in enormous venues this year, both in the USA and Australasia. I had him down as a cert for C2C 2025 but instead he’ll be over after Easter, with dates including Kentish Town Forum.

From the September 15 Hymn Sheet: WTF

Quick country radio update: there are more Post Malone songs in the top 20 than there are songs sung by women. Only Austin by Dasha makes it for the gals. There are also more songs that reset old melodies than there are sung by women: the number one song, Chevrolet by Dustin Lynch and Jelly Roll, rewrites Drift Away by Dobie Gray, while Chris Young is on his way down the charts with a song that repurposes Rebel Rebel by David Bowie. So there are as many David Bowie melodies than there are songs by women.

Then, of course, there’s the Tipsy quotation in A Bar Song by Shaboozey. So there are as many hip-hop interpolations in the top 20 at radio as there are songs sung by women. This is what happens when Lainey Wilson’s last song has fallen off; her new single 4X4XU will whizz up the chart soon enough.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in August 2024, I discuss new releases by 49 Winchester, Kyle Daniel, Ella Langley, The Hanseroth Twins and Josh Turner

Ryan and Rory EP

A few years ago I had on regular rotation a clip of Ryan Folleé singing Something Like That, the Tim McGraw smash that was written by his parents Keith and Adrienne, and was then hung up on Hung Up, the Hot Chelle Rae teen-pop smash from the early 2010s where Ryan is on lead vocals. He put out an album on Big Machine in 2017 and is now signed to Broken Bow, who have released a six-track EP which he recorded with Rory John Zak. Hence the Ryan and Rory EP.

Aside from the poppy by-numbers opener Pour Decisions, Ryan wrote the EP with his family; brother Jamie and sister Ann are also in the family business. Thanks Mama is a few months late for Mother’s Day but if I were a Hallmark executive I’d build a campaign around it.

These are all very commercial songs with hummable melodies and country instrumentation. State I’m In is a mix of McGraw and label mate Dustin Lynch, the lush Cowboy Cry has brushed drums and a vocal full of praise for a lady who is ‘an angel most of the time’, and the barroom meet-cute Drunk and Lonely adds some fiddle to a lyric full of melancholy. Stay for the tempo change in the final chorus. I expect R&R to visit the UK for C2C, so maybe I’ll get to sing along to Something Like That in person.

49 Winchester – Leavin’ This Holler

There’s a certain kind of American band which will always be welcome in the UK: earthy, rifftastic, melodic and full of heart and heft. I can think of half a dozen such bands who have come over in the last ten years, from Zac Brown Band and Shane Smith & the Saints to Mike and the Moonpies, Flatland Cavalry and 49 Winchester.

Those last two bands may have been introduced to folk by Luke Combs or by an algorithm which filled in a playlist of Combs-type music. 49 Winchester follow their O2 Arena support slot for Combs, where they promoted their excellent album Fortune Favors the Bold, with ten new songs collected on Leavin’ This Holler.

I caught their London headline show in 2023 but not their recent one in May when they previewed some of the album at KOKO. They encored with Hillbilly Happy, which has a magnificent minute-long jam as a coda; rather than closing the album, the track is placed second in the tracklist to show the band’s intention to give the listener a great time from the off.

Other new tracks in the setlist include the head-noddin’ Southern rocker Yearnin For You (‘keep those home fires burnin’), the hortatory and melodic Make It Count (‘the older I get, the more I regret’) and the slower six-minute title track, which is full of pathos. The narrator’s desire to break free that would resonate with listeners stuck in a rut and hesitant to move on.

The second half of the album emphasises the variety in the band’s catalogue. Traveling Band rewrites the Creedence Clearwater Revival one with new chords and lyrics, including the narrator pining for his dog, and a touch of pedal steel. Fast Asleep switches time signatures and layers acoustic guitar and violins underneath a narrator who chastises himself for disappointing his beloved, whereas Rest of My Days adds some minor chords and Southern horns to a jubilant proclamation of love.

Tulsa has him flicking his ‘trusty Bic’ lighter to ponder how much better Oklahoma is than Texas, with some barroom piano and chunky electric guitar backing him up; ‘I wish that I had never been stoned’ is as rock’n’roll a regret as you can get. Closing track Anchor is an emphatic rock ballad which again makes great use of the orchestra.

This is what used to be called real music, full of heart and soul. Singer Isaac Gibson has swallowed entire albums by the Allman Brothers, Steve Earle, Reckless Kelly and The Band to come up with his take on American roots rock. It is aurally appealing and perfect festival fare.

Kyle Daniel – Kentucky Gold

Kyle Daniel had, from what I could tell, planned to put out his album Kentucky Gold at the end of June, but it came out in the middle of July.

Kyle is independent but has some famous friends who help him out: the dirty blues of Fire Me Up features Maggie Rose, was written with Will Hoge, and was produced by Jaren Johnston, whose band The Cadillac Three pop up on the frothy and fun rocker Summer Down South (‘we got three months of HELL YEAH!’). Kendell Marvel, meanwhile, wrote and takes the second verse on the anthemic Southern Sounds, which complains about the pointlessness of a window fan.

Kyle came over to play Nashville Meets London in 2022, offering Southern rock sung from the back of the throat, and he’ll be back over here to promote the album this summer. Doubtless his set will begin with the pulverising album opener Can’t Hold Me Back, which is better than any of Jason Aldean’s similar ‘let’s go, guys’ songs.

I remember Runnin’ From Me, which here has a cappella sections and bottleneck slide guitar slides, and Everybody’s Talkin’, which in its studio version has a loping groove and a fine solo from Sarah off of Striking Matches. Watch out for that false ending, where I think both Kyle and Sarah start a duel.

I like the disparaging tone he offers on A Man Like That, which disguises ill-treatment of a woman by singalong guitar parts, and the self-conscious reminiscin’ song Wild, Free and Easy, where he notes in the opening couplet that it has all the old clichés.

The melancholy acoustic track Following The Rain, meanwhile, seems a self-conscious attempt to sound like Bruce Springsteen, who really trademarked gruff introspection. Springsteen was also prone to getting on his soapbox, as Kyle does on closing track Divided We Are, where the line ‘faded stripes and fallen stars’ leaps out amid the come-together rhetoric.

Me and My Old Man is the album’s centrepiece, with its long guitar-driven coda and empathetic lyric. I hope fans of Luke Combs’s album of paternal tunes will find their way to a song full of warmth and heart. Kyle hits similar beats to Zach Bryan without having to try hard at all, and Kentucky Gold is a terrific album.

From the August 11 Hymn Sheet: Ella Langley, The Hanseroth Twins

Ella Langley – Hungover

I first heard Ella Langley on a version of Adam Hood’s song Buzzes Like Neon and then on Kameron Marlowe’s Strangers, and remembered the name. Her debut album Hungover, which follows last year’s eight-song EP, came out at the start of the month on her own Sawgod imprint. Columbia Records have helped her push her pickup song You Look Like You Love Me to radio. As of the publication of this Hymn Sheet it is the 53^rd biggest song in America.

I can’t quite get my head round the advert in last week’s Billboard Country Update for the song which boasted of its 1.2 billion(!) TikTok views, mainly on account of the ‘excuuuuse me’ hook and not the spoken-word verses that surround it, but I’m closer to 40 than I am 30 so I know very little about such things.

This album fits my made-up genre of Gal Country, which I predicted would take over after the success of CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson. There are elements of Lainey, Ashley McBryde and Miranda Lambert across the album where guys and girls fall in love or fall apart: Love You Tonight (‘gonna hate me tomorrow’) sings of an alcohol-enhanced hookup with an ex; Cowboy Friends is a kiss-off driven by a train-beat shuffle and has a fine ‘yee-ha!’ in the middle; and Girl Who Drank Wine is the story of an anonymous stranger who comes to the bar and ‘was gone in a flash’.

Co-writers include heavyweights Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear, who teamed up with Carrie Underwood for Blown Away and Jesus Take the Wheel, on the sombre title track. Four other hitmaking A-listers help out: Jon Nite was in the room for the man-as-cigarette slow burner Nicotine, Brett James for the punchy girl-done-wrong three-chord marvel Better Be Tough, Rhett Akins for heartbreak song Paint the Town Blue and Laura Veltz for People Change.

A few years ago that last song would have been a song written with and for Laura’s friend Maren Morris; with Maren now over in California, a vacancy has emerged for a voice that can articulate heartbreak and pain for a country audience. See also Monsters (‘living inside my head’), a topical song about anxiety that will comfort many listeners. At a time where country artists follow the Wallen route of heartache and personal demons, it is nice that Ella gets a happily ever after on closing track Closest to Heaven.

As on her 2023 EP Ella offers two acoustic tracks: Broken In and Cowgirl Don’t Cry, where she sings of how a cowboy riding away is ‘just another cliché’. There’s a reason Columbia has invested in Ella, who introduced herself to a UK crowd opening for Wallen last month; like her labelmate Megan Moroney, she cannot fail. Just like Lainey and Megan, expect Ella to be headlining the Kentish Town Forum within 18 months.

The Hanseroth Twins - Vera

Tim and Phil Hanseroth are the non-Brandi Carlile elements of the band that bears her name, much as Sade and Jamiroquai refers to the band rather than merely to the singer. ‘Our band is like a triangle,’ Tim quotes Brandi as saying, ‘and she’s at the top and we’re on the bottom.’

The bald twins, who did sing in their own band in Seattle before joining the Brandi express train, have just brought out their superb debut album Vera on the famous Elektra label, whose president asked them to record it in a month so it could come out in August. Handily, aside from supporting Stevie Nicks at Hyde Park, Brandi and band are not on a touring or album cycle, so the side project can take precedence.

On the tearjerking lead single Remember Me, the string arrangement matches the intimacy of the guitar part; it is universal folk music with an easy melody. There’s an enormously long fade-out at the end of Counting The Days, the closing track of the first side, to allow the listener to linger on the message and the chord sequence.

It’s all effortless. Opening track If Everyone Had Someone (‘the sun would shine a little brighter’) is a plea where the high vocal reminds me of Kermit the Frog’s from his hit Rainbow Connection. I’ll Always Know I Do is a magnificent acoustic ballad about love remaining strong though the body and mind grow frail and old. The piano-led pair of The Loyal Soldier (‘take me to your leader’) and Under the Weather, a song about uncertainty and toil, are sung with heart and humanity.

The twins also chuck in a falsetto-laden cover of Erasure’s A Little Respect, which is followed by the Neil Youngish electric pair of The Poor Side of People and Somewhere Between. I hope the album, as eclectic as it is excellent, finds an audience beyond acolytes of Brandi Carlile’s work.

From the August 18 & 25 Hymn Sheet: Country on the pop charts and Josh Turner

Josh turner – This Country Music Thing

in 2023 Josh Turner put out an 11-song greatest hits set. This week he continues to perform This Country Music Thing, as per the title of his tenth album, his first of original secular material since 2017. Being quite new to country then, I didn’t know Your Man or Long Black Train or Why Don’t We Just Dance, but I loved the single Hometown Girl. All four of those tracks are on the hits set, along with the delightful Time Is Love which is the truest summation of Turner’s style of grown-up country music for grown-up country fans.

The title track of the new album and Unsung Hero, which celebrates the type of soldier who does his duty without seeking fame, are both, like his nice little earner Long Black Train, compositions with words and music by Turner alone; the former puts his life and career in song, lightly tossing in mention of John Anderson, Randy Travis and his Opry membership, plus, of course, ‘the Man’. There’s also, a la This Is Country Music by Brad Paisley, an extended coda where Turner crams in as many country classics as he can, which might set up a nice medley in his stage show.

Big names are all over the credits of the other eight tunes: Tyler Booth on album opener Down in Georgia, Rhett Akins on Somewhere With Her, Jon Randall on Pretty Please and Jon Nite on I Just Wanna Kiss You. That last song could have been included on any of Turner’s albums, with a warm arrangement and vocal that, like his bass voice, never goes out of style.

Turner co-wrote Whirlwind (‘my head is spinning from the gale force love’) with Mark Narmore, who first had a credit on a Turner album in 2006. So did Marv Green, who was in the room for If You Ain’t With Me and, alongside Luke Laird, the album’s groovy single Heatin’ Things Up.

Country music needs its young whippersnappers and interloping ex-rappers, but it also needs grown-ups who enjoy Two Steppin’ on the Moon and reckon their best side is ‘you being right by my side’. It might not be hip but it’s classy and sophisticated and will provide some new material for Turner to sprinkle in between the aforementioned hits.

Kudos too to Kenny Chesney’s pal Kenny Greenberg, who produces the album sensitively.

—

It is interesting to see how many country songs are among the top 30 biggest songs on the all-genre Hot 100: Kane Brown (Miles on It), Ernest (Cowgirls), Luke Combs (Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma, Guy For That), Zach Bryan (Pink Skies, 28 and I Remember Everything) and our old friend Morgan Wallen (I Had Some Help, Lies Lies Lies, Pour Me A Drink). Plus Shaboozey (A Bar Song).

There are relatively few hiphop songs in the top 30, which include Houdini by Eminem and two former US number ones Like That and Not Like Us, which both feature Kendrick Lamar. Plus Shaboozey (A Bar Song).

The top ten are all radio hits that are unabashedly pop, which is an old-fashioned moment of consensus for popular music where hits are capital-H hits. Kudos to radio consultant Sean Ross who pithily summarises country music as ‘I’m a Loser’ and pop as ‘You’re a Loser’.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in July 2024, I celebrate Lauren Watkins and Johnny Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson’s new project) and interrogate country music’s crossover appeal

From the June 30-July 7 Hymn Sheet: Lauren Watkins and Halle Kearns

Lauren Watkins – The Heartbroken Record

I know ‘girl’ isn’t a genre but it pays to notice the gender imbalance of country music and the efforts made by labels to market music sung by women to mostly female audiences. I notice this with Tenille Arts, Tenille Townes and Lauren Alaina, who all make regular visits to the UK where they are treated with more respect than in their home market. Without any label support, Chapel Hart have become UK festival headliners. CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson is shortly to put out her third album, and trailing her bell bottomtails come a peloton of singers who operate in what I call Gal Country.

Lauren Watkins was part of the Introducing Nashville lineup alongside another Karley Scott Collins, another Gal Country act whose EP came out over CMA Fest. Unlike her, and alongside the trio of Lauren Alaina, Zandi Holup and Mackenzie Carpenter, Lauren Watkins is on the Big Loud roster and her album The Heartbroken Record is thus Produced by Joey Moi. It follows a pair of 2023 EPs that, as per their titles, introduced Lauren to the market with a voice that can fit on playlists beside Lainey and Kacey as snugly as Kelsea Ballerini and Sabrina Carpenter.

Eight of the 17 tracks are carried over from those projects, including the Carter Faith duet Cowboys on Music Row. In a point I think Big Loud are quietly making, the song is credited to fully six women writers, though if Lauren is looking for a cowboy, hat-wearing Texan Jake Worthington, who appears on Fly on the Wall, is on Big Loud too! Let’s not let the truth get in the way of positioning and market segmentation.

Two other duets make the cut here: the melancholic Pretend You’re Coming Home features Ashley Monroe, and Sheryl Crow appears on the smoulderingly passionate Set My Heart on Fire. The last of these, in a point I think Big Loud are quietly making, is credited to fully four women writers.

Early adopters to Lauren’s cause are reminded of her early tunes in her catalogue. Her biggest copyright Anybody But You was written with Big Loud golden boy Ernest. Then there’s Mama I Made It, Stuck In My Ways, Jealous of Jane and Shirley Temple, which has a surprisingly long 30-second intro and is brought to us by the woman who co-wrote Tequila, Nicolle Galyon.

Lauren’s album has nine songs that didn’t appear on either EP: opening track Leavers Leave, which as with Jealous of Jane was written with those experienced Warren Brothers who know their way around a diminished chord; One Trick Pony, which kicks off the album’s second side with double-tracked vocals that warn someone to watch out for a ne’er-do-well; Burn The Bridge, which is ‘boy bye’ set to mandolin; and closing track Too Much To Dream, which is very Bluebird-y and contains some almightily lush chords to match the mood of the lyric.

Lauren wrote the smart title track (‘that needle keeps dragging slower’) with her older sister Caroline and her husband Will Bundy, which is another lovely story, although I hope they split the copyright sensibly. Lauren Hungate, who contributed to songs on Carly Pearce’s new album, appears in the credits of the meditative pair of Sad Songs and You, and Settling Things; the latter is a bit too close musically and thematically to Merry Go Round, but then Another One Bites The Dust by Queen was a bit too close to Good Times by Chic.

Gatlinburg puts the Tennessee town on the map in a way I can’t believe nobody has before. In a point I think Big Loud are quietly making again, the song is credited to fully six women writers including Hungate, Jessie Jo Dillon and the aforementioned Ashley Monroe. In Lauren Watkins, Gal Country has another useful addition to its roster.

Halle Kearns – Quarter Life Crisis EP

I caught Halle Kearns’ C2C 2024 performance upstairs in the shopping centre, where she competed with tannoy announcements and introduced me to the magnificent Homemade Margaritas, which I had on a loop for the few days after the festival.

That song is one of the half-dozen on Quarter Life Crisis, her third independently released EP. Three different producers shape her sound, which is a mix of Kacey Musgraves and the Pistol Annies, a good example of which is the toe-tapping kiss-off The Boot. Clothes On The Line, meanwhile, is a loping song about doing nothing.

I remember High School Friends and Settlin’ Kind from C2C; the former is an angst-ridden song in which Halle’s narrator attends a school reunion as if she is putting on a show for customers, like a Nashville-based musician/waitress, the latter a chirpy wedding song that shows how Halle has learned to enjoy the sanctuary of domestic life.

I choose to treat the acoustic closing track Carries Me as showing the first half of Halle’s Instagram biography: ‘Followin Jesus and making country music’. What a smart thing to do, although I am sure it would be excised were Halle on a major label like Priscilla Block is. If you’re in charge of your career, you don’t have to compromise, or you can compromise less. I hope we see Halle Kearns over here again soon.

From the July 14 Hymn Sheet: A Bar Song and crossover appeal, and Everette

Call me cynical, but if the music industry had wanted a song about drinking to succeed, they would need to target kids between 16 and 29, get social media influencers plug the song on their feeds, send it to radio so people over 30 can hear it, then add it to a variety of streaming playlists to be exposed to people who listened to individual genres.

The song, ideally, would thus be a bit pop and a bit rap and have guitar and fiddle on it too. Its melody would be infectious and inescapable, while the lyric should turn it into a meme. If it recalls a beloved hit from 20 years ago, as per the Twenty Year Cycle of pop, so much the better.

The song’s popularity would peak across Independence Day weekend where people have a chance to sing along to it in public places. And lo, it came to pass that A Bar Song (Tipsy) is the number one song in America. The plan has worked.

Will Shaboozey have another hit, or will his song be the modern equivalent of Tequila or Whoomp (There It Is)?

—

I recently came across a line said by a CMA executive in 1992. ‘Instead of country music crossing over, people are crossing over to country’ is a line that applies as well today as it did in the time of Garth, Reba and Brooks & Dunn.

What is Morgan Wallen’s success if not exhibit A, Zach Bryan exhibit B and Lainey Wilson, who really ought to have an international smash as part of the rollout of her third album, exhibit C?

There are hundreds of people employed in Nashville for this purpose, many of them working with or for Wallen, Bryan and Lainey, to gently entice people to a genre rather than copy whatever is going on in New York or Los Angeles. It’s bundled into the tourist industry too; Lower Broadway used to be a shadow of its present self, but the bachelorettes go to Nashville aka Nash Vegas now.

Dasha, who will play both Reading/Leeds and The Long Road on her UK visit next month and whose new song Didn’t I is excellent, has made much of saying that she is now making the music she wants to make, inspired by her childhood love of country music.

Taylor Swift has done what Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks couldn’t do and filled Wembley Stadium with country music, albeit sandwiched in between pop songs. Shania Twain brought not one but two fiddles, as well as Lindsay Ell on guitar, to fields in Somerset and West London this summer.

I wonder if history will accord Shania the reputation her diamond-selling albums merit, even though she was a literal example of country crossing over. Ditto Amazed by Lonestar, Islands in the Stream by Dolly’n’Kenny and I Honestly Love You by Olivia Newton-John. Perhaps the genre benefits from traffic across both ends of the highway, with Florida Georgia Line and Sam Hunt aping pop and Post Malone wanting someone to pour him a drink.

Meanwhile, there’s Zach Bryan as the modern-day Waylon Jennings or Eric Church, the cool kid who attracts people who don’t want to follow the crowd yet who has commercial success too. Last week The Great American Bar Scene was Radio 2 Album of the Week!

Everette – Keys To Kentucky EP

Everette are no longer signed to Aldean’s label Broken Bow and, like Willie Nelson, are proudly independent. This spring they teased their Keys to Kentucky EP with three tunes: the jolly High and Lonesome, which went down very well at both Buckle & Boots and The Long Road; the tender ballad Keys to Kentucky, which is soaked in empathy and dominant-seventh chords; and the groovy Picnic Table, which is good fun thanks to its singalong chorus. It puts the image of ‘sweet potato pie’ into the listener’s mind and will sit well in a DJ set alongside Two Piña Coladas and Red Solo Cup.

Three new tracks complete the set. No Vacancy is a meditative acoustic song which celebrates a forgotten rust-belt town where even the welcome sign is ‘worn out’, while Trippin is a two-chord groove where the duo’s harmonies wrap round one another to mimic how the narrator seems tied around his beloved (‘I can’t feel my feet!!’).

Closing track Another Man Down is a mostly spoken tale of opioid addiction, the sombre chorus noting the plight of ‘another casualty treated casually in a no-name town’. The arrangement is outstanding, especially the middle section where the fiddle briefly takes the lead.

Keys To Kentucky is a really varied EP which celebrates every facet of human existence, good and ill. Broken Bow may be making millions from Lainey Wilson but it is a shame they could not hold on to Everette, who will gain even more fans with another excellent project.

From the July 21-28 Hymn Sheet: Johnny Blue Skies and the Red Bull Jukebox

Johnny Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson) – Passage du Desir

You might know Johnny Blue Skies better as the cantankerous Sturgill Simpson, who has come out of retirement. He’s basically Waylon Jennings redux, and thousands of people have championed him and his music, which has swung from rock to bluegrass.

For his latest trick, on the album Passage du Desir, Sturgill offers a tour of American music from the rock era, channelled through his familiar croon. If The Sun Never Rises Again, Scooter Blues, Right Kind of Dream and Mint Tea respectively have the feel of lovesick Muscle Shoals, domesticated Laurel Canyon, heartland rock with a string section and Band-style Americana, as if Sturgill is mimicking different bits of his record collection.

Of the eight songs, the intimidatingly titled Jupiter’s Faerie is over seven minutes long and closing track One For The Road nudges nine. The album opens with 45 seconds of accordion to set the mood before our narrator rambles on about being in a Swamp of Sadness. He’s actually quite happy throughout the album, which makes for a lovely listen.

Produced as ever with David Ferguson, who has also worked with Zach Bryan, this is a rich and rewarding album. Sturgill is still complaining, on Who I Am, that country radio doesn’t play him, but why do they need to when he exists outside of commercial gatekeeping and puts out albums via Thirty Tigers?

—

I have seen rock’n’roll future, and it’s corporate.

In the mid-1970s Jon Landau of Rolling Stone magazine saw Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band in a club near Harvard University. In the 1980s, Landau’s management propelled Bruce and his crew into stadiums, where they still play today even though Bruce turns 75 in September.

In 2024, rock’n’roll present is Taylor Swift holding mass stadium rallies for her brand of popular music. In a way, she’s only doing what Bruce did, and the length of her shows seem an homage to those of her Jersey forefather. Also due up in October is a pilot for live shows that seems like it is a proof of concept for something that will come to big venues around the world.

On October 2 in Nashville, a package of modern country acts will play the Red Bull Jukebox show, with tickets sold by Live Nation: new names The Castellows and Tucker Wetmore, old stalwarts Breland, Brothers Osborne and Priscilla Block, indie duo Muscadine Bloodline, and, playing A Bar Song and other songs, Shaboozey. There you have the ‘unique and diverse landscape that country music embodies today’.

Plus unnamed guests to keep people interested. The event’s host is the celebrated Ward Guenther of Whiskey Jam, which has partnered with Red Bull for smaller events before this one, and there’s a house band steered by the equally great Derek Wells.

It sounds like an NME tour, but the twist is that we the audience can pick some of the setlist, either before the show or even during it, thanks to Swift-ish wristbands. And don’t forget to check the artists’ social media feeds to find out what we’re voting on.

For instance: should Brothers Osborne play with a marching band or a bluegrass band, and should Priscilla Block cover a song by Riley Green, Jason Aldean, Keith Urban OR PARAMORE PICK PARAMORE! (Surely a bluegrass band makes more sense for BrosOs.)

To show that Red Bull acknowledge grassroots songwriters, there’s another vote to determine which of five songs will enable their composer to win a trip to LA for help with writing, publishing and hopefully the chance to play it at the gig too. They will thus be human billboards for the Red Bull brand which has already taken over football, Formula 1 and rap. Tickets to the Wednesday night event are $70 at the back, $90 in the middle or $120 near the front, which seems awfully expensive.

In a climate where musicians earn more in merch than they do in streaming, corporate partnerships are the way to go. It sure makes Red Bull look good to be partnering with a beloved Nashville institution and it enables the seven acts to get in front of a big crowd much as how Country2Country puts them in front of 16,000 people in one go.

All of this does make me wonder if Bruce Springsteen would have been part of a package tour in 1974 with, say, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and a lad from Arkansas who won a competition to play his song for a crowd smoking a doobie. Actually, the Doobie Brothers would have been there too.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in June 2024, I celebrate Shaboozey, Sara Evans and Nashville’s Tom Petty tribute album

From the June 9 Hymn Sheet: Shaboozey

The other notable album released on May 31 came from Shaboozey, who is so hot right now thanks to his country version of J-Kwon’s song Tipsy. I didn’t see it coming but the bumpf declares that he is ‘set to become the new face of modern American country music’.

As I keep saying to the point of boredom, country music needs to look more like its audience or it will die; Morgan Wallen, Carly Pearce and Luke Combs are not archetypal figures in the way Willie Nelson is, and there has been absolutely nobody like Shaboozey aka Collins Obinna Chibueze. Like English pop writer MNEK, or indeed Jon Bon Jovi, the stagename is a corruption of his real name.

Incidentally, Darius Rucker has a memoir out now in which he says country radio actively blocked black voices when he was touring over 100 of them to launch his debut single. Shaboozey’s parents are Nigerian, which I hope comes up in discussion of this album; country, via the banjo, has strong African as well as Scots-Irish roots. He first signed to Republic Records in 2017 and Where I’ve Been Isn’t Where I’m Going is his third album, which follows in the wake of his appearance on Cowboy Carter.

Lil Nas X was once put in the genre of ‘internet’ and I’d put Shaboozey in it too. Some of it is campfire-ready acoustic pop with a country bent, like Highway, Finally Over and Let It Burn; the last of these has a singalong chorus and a rapped bit in the middle which makes it seem like Ludacris has gotten lost in the algorithm. Ben Burgess, until recently an artist on Wallen’s label, contributes some hooks to Steal Her From Me, which should be further up the tracklisting.

Overall Mr S mumbles a bit too much for my liking and is closer to Chance The Rapper than Jelly Roll. What’s really novel is that three of the tracks are in triple time, which is seldom heard in mainstream pop music, but by the time the album ended all I could think was that Breland was already doing this sort of thing in a higher register.

It, and he, will continue to get an audience via A Bar Song, which will be played on a loop at CMA Fest this weekend, but I fear Shaboozey will be the equivalent of Owl City or Plain White Tees: best known for one massive hit and able to turn up to play it at outdoor events for the rest of his life.

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Well done to Kelsea Ballerini for finding a new job as a coach on TV show The Voice, but will anyone be watching a format which is now 15 years old and is competing with TikTok?

From the June 16 Hymn Sheet: Matt Stell, Rock the Country

Last week Postie and Wallie held off Eminem to stay on top of the US Hot 100 for a fourth week. The rest of the top ten, barring the wonderful Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, is sung by male voices. No wonder the music industry are so keen to point at Taylor Swift and say, ‘See! We do have a woman!’

The album chart, headed by Swift, only has Billie Eilish as the other female representative in the top 10, so I hereby pledge to lay off country’s gender inequity. Taylor is a pseudo-independent act now, although one who licenses her records to Republic Records, who also hold some equity in Postie and Wallie. Invest now, I say!

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Apart from being taller than the average country star at 6 foot 7 inches, the most interesting thing about Matt Stell, who put out his album Born Lonely on the Friday of CMA Fest week, is that he is signed to the RECORDS label. It is run by Barry Weiss, the son of another record mogul, who helped Jive Records become a key player in hiphop when they brought KRS-One, Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and A Tribe Called Quest to mass prominence. Weiss is a member of what writer Nelson George called in his book Hip Hop America the ‘permanent business’, industry pros who survive and thrive while acts like Matt Stell are signed and dropped according to taste, trend and market forces.

Stell is a nice tall guy from Arkansas whose debut album follows the pattern set by Travis Denning: EPs to introduce the act to market, radio success and international travel. Matt will never be a superstar but he will fill a gap on a playlist or a festival stage, and will whip up the crowd of a major artist.

As with those old rap records, Weiss has partnered with a major label, in this case Columbia, to distribute Stell’s album to a wide audience; in 2024, however, he can do that himself via popping it on to the digital shelving of a streaming service. Four singles were issued in advance of the album, with Breakin’ In Boots sent to radio; after 21 weeks it has just snuck into the top 40, which is not magnificent, although it does have 12m Spotify streams. Lady A, for whom Matt opened on tour this week, stalled at 47 after six months and has just had its promotion pulled; their time may have passed, but what a good 15 years they have had.

The first half of Born Lonely comprises five versions of the same power ballad, which is known as the Aldean Method. The Chris DeStefano co-write Smooth gets very interesting with some politically engaged lyrics, but the funky jam What We Do Best and Dan + Shay-ish Take The Girl seem parachuted in from a different album entirely. There are some enjoyable moments but not nearly enough, and at 30 minutes at least it crams its melodies into a tight package. But will anyone listen, especially when Barry Weiss will be looking for the next big star any time soon.

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The Sunday Times Culture section ran a piece a fortnight ago on the Rock The Country festival, where Jason Aldean and Kid Rock are wandering from city to city to support a party whose presidential candidate is a felon under US law. Pieces like these always run through the edited highlights of country music’s relationship to race and politics: drink if you see Toby Keith, Ray Charles, Oliver Anthony, the Chicks and God Bless The USA.

The interesting part was quotation gathered from festival attendees, some of whom are free to wear Trump paraphernalia and anti-Biden merch. What joy that the USA allows its people to wear ‘Biden Sucks’ hats with impunity; ask people in Russia or China if they could do that. One person says that ‘country is a way of life’ in the context of how Beyoncé, whom lest we forget is from Texas, ‘wouldn’t know what a cow was if she saw one’. What joy that the USA allows its people to be so prejudicial, ignorant and hospitable.

I will also never be able to forget the terrible gag that LGBT actually stands for Liberty, Guns, Beer and…breasts. One drunken punter swears because he can’t read the smallprint, only the acronym, which forces the journalist, who is ultimately paid by the same people who run Fox News – the Sunday Times is owned by the Murdoch family – to comment that this ‘assault on his safe space, at a festival where he thought could be among like-minded people, has clearly triggered him’.

And what are people free to do at Rock the Country that they can’t do back in their hometowns? The journalist doesn’t get a valid answer besides ‘they want to take our rights away’. What joy that the USA has made speech free at the point of use. The election preamble continues, with added Hunter Biden news; only five months left.

From the June 23 Hymn Sheet: Petty Country, Sara Evans and the business of country music

Various Artists – Petty Country

The big mainstream album release from Nashville this week, which coincides with a Lower Broadway takeover, is another one of those tribute albums to a rock’n’roll act. They don’t need to do it, but it keeps them in touch with rock fans. In the last few years country stars have paid tribute to Elton and The Rolling Stones and this time it’s Tom Petty, the Florida-born singer/songwriter who did a lot of drugs and wrote a lot of hits before he died at the end of 2017.

Petty Country had its release date pushed back three weeks and has been partly rolled out track-by-track over the last few months. There are 20 cuts which, as is typical on these projects, mix the hot young stars and the legends. Chris Stapleton, who carries the Southern rock flame passed to him by Petty, opens the album with the rifftastic I Should Have Known It, which Petty and the band recorded for Mojo, their last but one studio album.

Margo Price duets with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, with whom Stapleton wrote the boogie Arkansas, on another deep cut: Ways to Be Wicked was a song recorded in 1986 which found a home on the sixth disc of a 1995 box set called Playback. I don’t know if Margo and/or Mike chose it or if the people at Big Machine behind the tribute album wanted to satisfy hardcore Petty fans and prove it wasn’t just a cash-in.

The song is representative of the set’s dual purpose, and it mostly succeeds. Inessential filler comes from some of that label’s stable of radio-friendly acts whom I bet Petty would describe with his criticism of modern country as ‘bad rock with a fiddle’: Justin Moore (Here Comes My Girl), Midland (Mary Jane’s Last Dance) and Lady A, who put the soft into the soft-rocker Petty/Stevie Nicks duet Stop Draggin My Heart Around.

Eli Young Band cover Learning to Fly in what must be a nod to how Eric Paslay nicked it when he wrote the band’s smash Even If It Breaks Your Heart. Thomas Rhett’s interpretation of Wildflowers is set to mandolin and fiddle because he’s country again.

Other big hits are present and correct. Dierks Bentley adds a mountain music feel to American Girl, Brothers Osborne get the heartland rocker I Won’t Back Down, which they take down a few steps from G to E, and Luke Combs wraps his million-dollar larynx around Runnin’ Down a Dream, which ends with guitar runs that remind me of how exciting rock’n’roll can be.

To cram even more stars into the project, there are four duets which pair Wynonna and Lainey Wilson (Refugee), Ryan Hurd and Carly Pearce (Breakdown), Rhiannon Giddens and former Heartbreakers organ player Benmont Tench (Don’t Come Around Here No More, with cello from Yo-Yo Ma) and, most pointlessly of all, The Cadillac Three and Breland, who get to sing countless permutations of how they are free, free fallin’.

George Strait closes the set with You Wreck Me, which he played live in tribute to Petty in 2018, and Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives put on their rockstar leather for a version of I Need to Know. Jamey Johnson pops up for I Forgive It All, Steve Earle offers Yer So Bad and HRH Dolly Parton croons Southern Accents on top of an orchestra.

Finally, in a move that I reckon is a precursor to a full duets album, Willie Nelson and his lad Lukas take on Angel Dream #2, which uses the same shuffle as On The Road Again. How incredibly sad that Willie outlived Petty.

Sara Evans – Unbroke

Another act who slipped out a new album this month, which I absolutely missed, was Sara Evans, Opry member 225. Sara is now independent but she would be a great get for Country2Country thanks to all those old hits, including No Place That Far which fans of early Westlife will remember.

Over CMA Fest weekend, one of the Ladies of 90s Country put out Unbroke, her first album of original material since 2016 and her first album at all since 2020’s covers album Copy That, which featured a top version of 6^th Avenue Heartache, a Wallflowers tune.

As ever, especially with the music of Carrie Underwood, I have a personal preference for tempo tunes over the ballads. The former include the groovy 21 Days (‘to break a habit’), while among the latter are the tortured torch song Mask and piano ballad I Wanna Be Wrong. Listen out for the very last note of Sorry Now, which is worth the price of admission, and the Aimee Mannish closing track Gypsy Ways.

Throughout the album Sara’s voice is somewhere between Carrie and Jennifer Nettles, a mix of restraint and freedom, which makes for a great listen. What a shame that, because it is released independently, it lacks the millions of promotional dollars that will propel Lainey Wilson’s forthcoming album to success. If Lainey sung the explosive Downfall, it would be number one. Such is the country music business.

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Big up Luke Combs, whose album Fathers & Sons was the 14^th biggest album in the UK last week. In the US, Carly Pearce could not break through 10,000 physical or streaming equivalent units with first week sales of her Hummingbird, which did not make the top 25 of the country album chart.

I know there’s no such thing as the record industry in 2024, but this is a genre which prided itself on selling hundreds of thousands of units for big albums, some of which stay in the charts for a decade. If a B-List act like Carly can’t make an impact over CMA Fest week, then who on earth can?

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in May and June 2024, I celebrate Ernest, interrogate the perils of overexposure and marvel at country music being cool again (agaaaaain)

From the May 19 & 26 Hymn Sheet: Ernest

Sorry to bang on about this but let me get this right: after a drunken binge you get caught on camera using a nasty word, then you chuck a chair out of a window, and you STILL manage to have a number two UK hit with I Had Some Help, which may well top the US Hot 100 tomorrow [NB: it did]?

It’s also on the Radio 2 playlist, the BBC station that broadcasts to a wide range of parents and kids. Big Loud are either really clever, or they are stringing us all along before they drop Wallen after one too many misdemeanours.

Also, did you see the subtle US flag in the video?

I know Post Malone is a sort of Trojan Horse to get pop and rock fans towards country, but it’s no surprise that his song I Had Some Help is excellent. As they did with Last Night, the trio of Morgan Wallen, Ernest and the man known as Charlie Handsome (and to his mum as Ryan Vojtesak) have brought their talents to bear, while Postie’s producer Louis Bell was also there to add that annoying digital vibrato to Postie’s genreless voice.

The song itself is a bit MOR, a bit pop, a bit country and a lot ka-ching! Postie, who is from Texas, has picked his moment. Will he be welcomed fully into the fold by Music City, like his country equivalent Jelly Roll, will he be the latest interloper, following the path of Ray Charles, John Denver, Jerry Lee Lewis and Olivia Newton-John? [NB: see the piece about F-1 Trillion which went up on the site in August.]

When they money is right, Nashville will let you do anything. Like say a nasty word and allow you to take some time to work on yourself. Then chuck a chair out of the window of your friend’s new Broadway bar.

What must Ernest K Smith, one of the top staff writers on Wallen’s label Big Loud, think of his buddy? After putting it off for a fortnight I finally sat down to listen to Nashville, Tennessee, the bloated 26-track album which comes with a stellar recommendation from Duncan Warwick in Country Music People, who calls Ernest ‘your latest songwriting hero’ who delivers an album ‘that will stun you’.

He wasn’t wrong. He suggests we start at the final track, Dollar to Cash, which is everything a fan of the traditional sound loves. It seems calculated but, as ever, I cannot complain that country musicians are playing country music. If anything, there are two albums here: a pop-leaning one, and a country-leaning one. Big Loud have successfully synthesised the two, just as Big Machine had done before them.

There are covers of Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer, Creep by Radiohead (featuring Hardy, because you can’t have one without the other) and, sung a cappella with his son Ryman (come on!!), the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. They all seem suspiciously like algorithm-greasers but fall under the album’s mission statement to share the power of the song and the songwriter.

Wallen pops up on Hangin’ On, which must have been too similar to one or more of the 36 tracks on Wallen’s 2023 album to be included on it. The sound of Did It For The Story and Small Town Goes both have the same ingredients (and writers) as Big Loud’s MVP. There’s plenty of fiddle and twang across the album, which makes me wonder if Wallen will also be allowed to do something more traditional, even in EP form, sometime soon.

Ernest’s very old friend and fellow ex-rapper Jelly Roll remembers his time in incarceration on opening track(!) I Went To College/ I Went To Jail, where oddly Luke Bryan has a writing credit and Jelly does not. The lovely Life Goes On is the inevitable Ashley Gorley co-write, while Nicolle Galyon is credited on Bars on my Heart and, in what must have been a fun session, the Beck-in-the-country Redneck Sh*tt, on which Ernest raps the line ‘white trash redneck choir’.

You Don’t Have To Die (‘to lose your life’) and If You Don’t Know By Now are respectively written by Chris Stapleton and Clint Daniels (She Ain’t In It by Jon Pardi is one of his), which shows that Ernest knows his contemporaries. He has also found an old Dean Dillon composition called Would If I Could which is astonishingly good, and would be so without the presence of (stand by for her full name) CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson.

And what could be a better way to spend the Wallen money than having Dillon and his daughter Jessie Jo in the room for Ain’t As Easy, which fills the second slot on the album, and the neo-trad One More Heartache (slot four). The faithfully Texan honky-tonker Why Dallas (‘did you take her from me?’), featuring Lukas Nelson, comes in between. There are at least four instruments doing solos throughout that song, and I bet Bob Harris gives it a spin soon.

Ernest proves himself a student of country music on the perky love song How’d We Get Here, which is like Brad Paisley rewriting Gentle on My Mind, and the barroom lament Honkytonk Fairytale. I love how Ernest uses the full palette of chords, going beyond I-IV-V and into diminished chords; whether written by himself or someone else, every song is well structured and sung by a believable narrator.

It doesn’t need to be 26 tracks long though.

From the June 2 Hymn Sheet: gender parity, the rise of country music, overexposure and Travis Denning

An update on gender parity on country radio: only three women – Ashley Cooke, Carly Pearce and, with two songs, Megan Moroney – are in the top 20, a 15% figure that lays bare the issues of the format. Carly’s duet with Chris Stapleton We Don’t Fight Anymore came out just after CMA Fest 2023 and will trail her album Hummingbird, out next week. Megan’s song I’m Not Pretty is coming up to TEN MONTHS at radio and is itself promoting her album, due just after Independence Day.

—

In journalism, one is a number, two is a trend, and this has informed two pieces in the last fortnight about what the headline of Michael Hann’s Spectator piece calls the ‘unstoppable rise of country music’.

Alexis Petridis in the Guardian noticed that Austin, A Bar Song, Texas Hold Em and Stick Season are all in the chart at once, so why is everybody going country? Or, rather, making ‘country-adjacent’ music, or what I call Honky Tonk Pop.

I can give one rea$on, which is similar to every trend ever adopted by the music industry. What happens is that something is popular, and then we get 20 of the same model. I wrote that when Morgan Wallen had his number one, we’d get many more Wallens, climaxing in the odd career of Redferrin, a jobbing songwriter whose own material is so close to Wallen’s music as to be actionable.

The Guardian article mentioned Wallen’s female fanbase, which to me puts him in the lineage of other heartthrobs: John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Kurt Cobain, Carl Barat from the Libertines, Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys. Eye candy and ear candy, united once again, although Petridis did predict big things for the anti-heartthrob Jelly Roll.

Michael Hann, who sometimes writes for the Guardian, wrote a piece to promote Wallen’s Hyde Park show. He quotes the man who runs Loose Music, the UK-based label for hip, trendy rootsy acts, and Tom Bridgewater’s quotation will be added to my Rolodex of criticism: ‘Modern country is like punk for the Hannah Montana generation…There’s no way a Morgan Wallen fan is going to know who the Handsome Family are.’

Yes, and then some more adventurous people like me get bored of people called Luke, Thomas or Carrie and go and explore Loose’s acts including the Handsome Family and Israel Nash. The Long Road, where Loose Music take over a stage, has room for them as well as the big-ticket acts like Russell Dickerson. You start at Country2Country and The Long Road; you move to AmericanaFest and its UK equivalent, Black Deer. Fans go to popularity first and to prestige later, but community cohesion is always there.

—

Maisie Adam is everywhere. You might not know who she is, but if you watch or listen to any comedy, you will have seen or heard her. Before her came Tom Allen, Katherine Ryan, Jack Whitehall and Jimmy Carr, or Rylan from off of X Factor who is quietly becoming a national treasure and a walking billboard for private dentistry.

I went to see Romesh Ranganathan last month at the O2 Arena, which I would not ordinarily do: laughing in a hangar with 14,000 people appeals less than doing it on a sofa with one person. Romesh has been overexposed, with sitcoms, stand-up shows, quiz show hosting jobs and now a three-hour Radio 2 show in the slot Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton made their own. ‘Even I think I’m overexposed,’ Romesh joked. ‘I walk past a mirror and want to change the channel!’

I emphasise overexposed comedians before I turn to CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson who, right plum in the middle of CMA Fest, will become Opry member number 229 on Friday night. I was struck by what could well be a straw man argument when I found out the news via Saving Country Music: that some people think Lainey is taking up all the available oxygen and might face a backlash through her ubiquity.

Too much success is not a good thing but, having waited a decade for any morsel of it, Lainey is now thrown flowers wherever she goes, whether it’s the USA or Europe, where she sold every seat on her recent tour in lieu of a Country2Country slot. I maintain that she is merely the latest figure Produced by Jay Joyce, and new song Hang Tight Honey does seem like a combination of Brothers Osborne, Eric Church and Ashley McBryde, Joyce’s fellow clients.

But if country music is going to have a face, it shouldn’t be one who (and I know your eyes will glaze over, but it’s true) chucks a chair out of the window of a Lower Broadway bar and goes on drinking benders that end in him being caught on camera saying an unsayable word.

Country music, at the CMA level, is about keeping up appearances: Reba McEntire and Dan + Shay were both present when Lainey was announced as an Opry member after she performed the new song on the season finale of The Voice. Interestingly, the Opry has a partnership with NBC, which airs that TV show, so it stank of synergy. Not that Lainey will be complaining as she becomes the latest star to be elevated to a modern superstar.

Will the chatter around the forthcoming album, due in August, affect how it is received by people outside her strong, growing fanbase? Will it give her, like Wallen and Combs, a top 40 hit? [NB: it did not, but there’s time to push one to coincide with her Country2Country 2025 headline set.]

Travis Denning – Roads That Go Nowhere

There has been a lot of immature noise about Apple Music’s attempt to remind people it exists with their Top 100 albums, topped by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I think we should call a halt to Best Album Ever lists; Rolling Stone had one last year, putting What’s Going On on top, and they just named Jolene as the Best Country Song, with I Walk The Line following. I suppose the BBC will probably do one next year, but it’s like asking if Ronaldo is better than Pelé: a pointless effort.

The big omission was that no country album, except tenuously Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves, made the list. But country is not an albums genre, as seen by the presence of Traveller by Chris Stapleton in the upper reaches of the charts for nine years, and the recent domination of streaming kings Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen.

The career of Travis Denning is illustrative here: having emerged in 2018 with a fun single about fake IDs called David Ashley Parker from Powder Springs, his next song After A Few was worked at radio for FIFTEEN months, funded by a label who at that time were still in thrall to radio and had not yet switched to streaming services. I remember being surprised when Morgan Wallen used the term ‘DSPs’ while promoting his second album, and recognising that change was on the way.

After three EPs in the last five years, Denning finally gets his own full-length release. Roads That Go Nowhere is the equivalent of three EPs strung together, and it’s full of songs that were made in Nashville’s writing rooms for a young audience who like hearing gritty-voiced chaps sing about life, love, loss and self-reflection. It’s worth a listen and worth the investment from Mercury Nashville, which has made millions off Chris Stapleton.

Better At Leaving is a copper-bottomed country smash full of empathy and emotion that you can tell has the production touch of Paul DiGiovanni, who has crafted the sound of Dan + Shay and Jordan Davis. Both those acts put out albums but are not album acts, having had humungous singles like Speechless and Buy Dirt.

Denning’s album has radio-friendly reminiscin’ songs like Strawberry Wine and a Cheap Six Pack (I think we can stop referencing that Deana Carter tune) and songs that fall under the genre Breakups Make Me Miserable: Someone That Isn’t Me, Things I’m Going Through and Add Her To The List, which is a rewrite of Rewind by Rascal Flatts.

The title track and Ocmulgee River are the type of personal soul-baring tunes which all young songwriters must write, and Southern Rock, featuring Hardy, is a songwriting exercise which is simultaneously about small town life and the power of rock’n’roll. There’s also a kiss-off called Can’t Find One which suffers from being very, very dull. The Sound of a Beer Getting Cracked is smart in how it uses popping a top as a hook, and it’ll be a pillar of Denning’s live set, but it’s basically Beer Can’t Fix/Half of Me.

I think Nashville’s labels don’t trust people to listen to full albums, perhaps given the singles-heavy consumption, but they need to let the artists do as their predecessors did and let them say ‘My new album is out now’. For how much longer will this happen, given that acts coming up will not have the same attachment to the old methods of delivery?

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in April 2024, I celebrate Charley Crockett, investigate country chart-toppers in 1984 and look at how to brand country music as one of many American idioms

From the April 7 Hymn Sheet: more on country radio

Not that it matters, but on the day Beyoncé put out Cowboy Carter, not one of the top ten songs on country radio was sung by a woman. One of them was sung by a man who was caught on film using a racist slur. There is, as in the UK chart, statistical mitigation: five of the tracks lying between 11 and 20 were by women: Lainey Wilson, Ashley Cooke, Carly Pearce, Megan Moroney and Carrie Underwood.

We Ride by Bryan Martin has been on the charts for six months and is at number 21. A full-throated sex jam which nicks the Wonderwall chord progression, it comes out on the Average Joes imprint that runs the career of Colt Ford. It’s fine but nothing I haven’t heard before.

Happily, there are only seven duets in the entire top 60, which shows that labels are having more confidence in solo acts selling their songs. Dasha, a popstar who has just signed to Warner, is in the UK top 20 with Austin and is being played on country radio, which shows that radio still responds to TikTok dances.

From the April 14 Hymn Sheet: stop filming at gigs!, outsiders and The Man Who Threw A Chair

Right, I’m going to put this at the top of the Hymn Sheet because it’s important. At both Live In The Living Room and Royal South’s London show, a member of the crowd had their arm in the air filming most of the events. Why?! Why do people film most of a gig?

I’m not talking about DC Brown, who does it as a public service and with the permission of the artist, but seemingly crowd members doing it for posterity and for personal use. Stop it! It creates unnecessary light in the crowd, probably irritates the performers and creates a barrier between fan, performer and song. Stop it, I say! Please, unless you’re Danny.

—

Here are some outsiders who have been accepted by Nashville in the last 75 years: Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Olivia Newton-John, Michelle Branch, Jana Kramer, Bobby Bones and Taylor Swift. Lana Del Rey, Post Malone and Beyoncé are thus continuing the trend of being coopted by Music City to take advantage of eyeballs and earholes.

In many ways, Nashville is the centre of popular music in the USA, given that Los Angeles and New York are both more massive and more expensive. It is also, to remind you, a focus for right-wing blowhards like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro. Don’t forget there’s a presidential election this year. I dare musicians to speak out and get political, starting with Taylor Swift in the one interview she does this week to launch her album. [NB: few artists did, and arguably celebrities trying to marshal support for Kamala Harris got egg on their faces.]

—

I see Morgan Wallen’s done his criminal activity (allegedly) again. I maintain it was to publicise his pal Eric Church’s new bar, just as it must have been a plan that the pair’s duet Man Made A Bar hit the top at radio this month. At this point you might as well call him Morgan Wally. What a fine example he is setting for his fans and his own child.

In any case country music lionises its outlaws: Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones. None of those acts, who are on country music’s Mount Rushmore, had anything to do with drum machines. Wallen is just a naughty boy whose success is holding up not just his label Big Loud but country music itself. He will be given as much pastoral care, and as many chances, as he needs, until he stops making money for the industry.

I hate to compare him to some convicted or suspected criminals, but the reason R Kelly and Michael Jackson were able to succeed was as much because of the support from the industry as from their undeniable talent. As soon as he stopped having hits, R Kelly started to release everything himself in-house, including his Trapped In The Closet operetta; Michael Jackson lived in Bahrain and stopped putting out music entirely. I can confidently say there will never be a Broadway and West End musical about either R Kelly or Morgan Wallen, but Michael Jackson is uncancellable.

Do you know how much money he keeps making, even 15 years after his death at the age of, incredibly, 50? I often say that a melody never committed a crime, and for this reason we can enjoy Billie Jean and Bad and Beat It without thinking of the deeply disturbed man behind the self-proclaimed-King-of-Pop throne. Likewise I still sing along to Last Night, the unexpectedly enormous hit by Wallen. It’s a bit of what Chris Rock has called ‘selective outrage’, but the market has already spoken by making Kanye West a chart-topping act in spite of his quite repulsive views. We all miss the old Kanye.

[UPDATE: delete the allegedly because, in December 2024, Wallen was convicted of reckless endangerment and was sentenced to two years’ probation and a seven-day education centre visit. Three weeks previously he was named CMA Entertainer of the Year. Do you know how much money he keeps making for people?]

—

Did you know Fearless (The Echo) by Jackson Dean has been in the chart for 63 weeks? It’s still not even in the top ten and is still climbing. How sick must the people at Big Machine promoting that song to radio be of that song? Maybe they’ve got AI machines promoting it now.

From the April 21 Hymn Sheet: country as an American musical idiom, Charley Crockett and country chart-toppers in 1984

Last weekend I sprinted through a collection of essays about music and musicians written by New Yorker editor David Remnick. Holding the Note is available in hardback and ebook at the moment, with the paperback due in October.

As well as containing his 50-page profile of Bruce Springsteen in the middle of the book, there’s a brilliant essay on Mavis Staples, who has found herself as one of the chief Americana performers, and one on Buddy Guy, the last link to the great Chicago bluesmen of the 1940s and 1950s.

I wonder whether blues will be incorporated into the many-tentacled genre of music known as Americana, and if jazz will as well. And what about bluegrass, an unabashedly old-time music which is meant to be played on acoustic instruments? Americana, surely.

For its part, country might well continue to splinter off into commercial and independent directions, which leads people down one lane marked Jelly Roll and the other marked Zach Bryan. Country music, which is all things to all people, will soon celebrate its centenary as a genre of American music. It relies on new stars to pull people to live events, much as the Opry and Country Music Hall of Fame exist to put these stars on a pedestal. Having been formally inducted last night Scotty McCreery is now, as you read this piece, the 227th member of the Opry, and he’s a fine ambassador for the genre.

All country music is, really, is branding. One of Remnick’s pieces was about Luciano Pavarotti, whom I bet will conjure in your mind the word ‘vinceeeeeeeeeero!’ He wasn’t the most gifted tenor, but he was marketed better than any other, including the other Two Tenors Carreras and Domingo. Likewise Taylor Swift isn’t the best songwriter in the world, but she sure markets herself as an artist who writes songs that resonate with millions of people. Which other solo songwriter can sell out a stadium in 2024?

Likewise, was Shakespeare the finest dramatist of his era, or just the one with a patron who could put his plays on at a top London theatrical establishment? Is Andrew Scott the best English actor of the moment, or does he just take some very fine roles and have a very good publicist? Is Garth Brooks the finest country musician of his era, or just one who used his marketing degree very well indeed?

We are drawn as listeners both to odd things that sound a little (but not too) different from the norm, and also for tribal reasons towards what everyone else is listening to. There is a reason Lainey Wilson – sorry, CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey-Wilson – has sold out two dates at the Kentish Town Forum in 2024 when she had no chance of doing so in 2022: it takes consensus to emerge, the odd award and two really, really good albums that showcase a winning personality.

At the same time, Tyler Childers has been over to the UK this year and he doesn’t hold the CMA Entertainer of the Year award; indeed, when he won an AMA Award, he famously said he was a country musician and ‘Americana ain’t no part of nothin’. People are drawn to Childers for his voice, his songs – Jersey Giant has become a modern standard – and because he is outside the Music Row star system.

As with Bill Hicks’ famous skit, some acts deliberately take the ‘anti-marketing’ angle. Willie Nelson failed as a rockabilly star, went back to Austin and was marketed as one of the outlaws who were the antidote to soppy, gloopy showbiz country. Hank Williams Jr could not escape the shadow of his dad, who was one of the big stars of the postwar era, but he also became a cipher for the outlaw. Interestingly, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2020, proving that there’s room in the tent for those who make the brand look edgy.

Country is about gatekeeping but also about the listener. Garth did so well because he connected with an audience, millions of them, who bought his albums and went to see him live. Ditto Kenny Chesney and Taylor Swift, and ditto Morgan Wallen, who seems to have been accelerated to stardom to push listeners towards streaming services.

What comes next in country music is being plotted in boardrooms and Zoom rooms on Music Row. The time is right to return to traditional instruments, but as in the early 1980s eyes and ears are on Nashville and capitalism dictates that ‘country’ is the hot thing of the moment. Let’s see how long it lasts before, as in the mid-1980s, there is a slump and consolidation.

I am also less than sure about Lainey Wilson’s view, expressed in a Guardian interview to promote her sold-out tour, that country is cool again because people want ‘to feel warm and embraced…I just see people for people’. She risks coming across as a politically neutral Dolly Parton-type figure, less for preaching unity than for agreeing with what Rupert Murdoch said before giving away $787m as an apology for propagating claims of electoral fraud: it’s not red or blue, it’s green. Green is good.

But hey, I’m sure the CMA has no problem with its Entertainer of the Year repping the brand.

—

Mmmbop by Hanson was released this week in 1997. The number one song in country music was Rumor Has It, the sixth and final chart-topper by Clay Walker, a hat-wearing guy who rode the Garth slipstream. I’ve just heard the song, which pivots around the hook ‘rumor has it you love me too’ and which also has the Garthish hiccupped delivery. Despite the charming arrangement with pedal steel and fiddle, I won’t be rushing to put it on again.

It remains a fun game to go back over country charts from days gone by and see which songs and acts have resonated beyond their moment. Given that I was just talking about the last time country made loads of money, let’s go for 1984, the year after Islands in the Stream, and see how many chart-topping songs are played in any capacity in 2024.

Three George Strait songs – Let’s Fall to Pieces Together, You Look So Good In Love and Right or Wrong – are certainly heard these days, but Slow Burn by TG Sheppard and In My Eyes by John Conlee are lost to time’s mists. In 1984 major-label priorities Ronnie Milsap, Ricky Scaggs and Exile all had more than one number one that year; heck, Exile had three! But nobody hears the likes of Show Me, Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown or Woke Up in Love by Exile today.

The year 1984 also saw number one hits by Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty and Willie Nelson. Even the guy from Dukes of Hazzard, John Schneider, topped the charts with I’ve Been Around Enough to Know, a distinctly average barroom tearjerker. Willie’s duet with Julio Iglesias remains deathless because there are always previously loved girls needing a song.

Of that year’s chart-toppers, only that one and Why Not Me, the follow-up to the Judds’ hit Mama He’s Crazy, stayed at number one for over a week, and for the latter that’s probably because Nashville was closed for Christmas. The death of poor Naomi Judd led to a recent tribute album to the duo, while a few years ago Josh Turner revived Vern Gosdin’s I Can Tell by the Way You Dance, which was number one across Independence Day Weekend 1984.

Tunes by Janie Fricke (Let’s Stop Talkin About It and Your Heart’s Not In It), Earl Thomas Conley (Don’t Make It Easy For Me and Angel in Disguise) and The Oak Ridge Boys (I Guess It Never Hurts to Hurt Sometimes, good title) are also stuck in 1984. But if you’re gonna play in Texas, Alabama still sing, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.

So by my count, of the 50 number ones from that year, we hear eight of them, a 16% ‘future hit’ or ‘recurrent’ rate. Incidentally, the number one song 40 years ago today was the theme to the TV show The Yellow Rose by Johnny Lee (the Lookin’ for Love guy) and Lane Brody, whose husband Eddie Bayers is one of the most reliable drummers in town who played on 9 to 5 and backed Chris Gaines on his album.

In 2022 Bayers was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Yellow Rose was cancelled after one series, which perhaps accounts for the song being lost to the eighties.

—

It has been rather a long gap between albums for Charley Crockett, who sometimes puts out two in a year with a schedule that replicates The Beatles or The Beach Boys.

After a fallow 2023 for new music, Crockett has returned with $10 Cowboy. His sound combines different American musics like soul, country and blues, making him in the lineage of someone like Ray Charles or Chris Stapleton. There are reflective songs and picaresque – and obviously Dylanesque – narrative songs. The middle of the album is brilliant: the card game described in Spade, fiddle-and-pedal-steel-y Diamond In The Rough and, best of all, Ain’t Done Losing Yet.

Charley is in Hoxton, East London for three dates in early May, and I’ve been invited by his PR at Thirty Tigers to the second night. After missing his visit in 2022, I look forward to seeing him and have the gist of what he is to do because he put out a live album last year taken from a show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. Does that make him a star?

It makes him a ‘niche star’, a term given to someone like Carly Rae Jepsen who is beloved seemingly by everyone who knows who she is and totally unknown to the general populace who do not. The Shires, perhaps, are niche stars, given that they can tour the UK and fill big theatres; ditto The Wandering Hearts or Rob Vincent or even Emilia Quinn. Radiohead, I would suggest, are the biggest niche stars of all; they were so successful that when they went independent they gave away their album In Rainbows and said fans could pay them anything they liked.

It used to be that country music was a niche genre in the UK, certainly when I joined the party in the mid-2010s. It was big enough that the cast of Nashville could come over once a year, and for the O2 Arena to play host to lots of country cosplay. With Wallen playing Hyde Park this July, it does seem like the business end of things is working out and the niche is growing. Taylor Swift – who has the number one song and album in the UK and, surely when the Billboard charts are announced tomorrow, the US too – has helped too [NB: yes and yes].

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in March 2024, I recap radio coverage of C2C, celebrate the old guard and mourn the lack of interest in artists making albums

From the March 17 Hymn Sheet: Recapping radio coverage of C2C and why no albums?

I liked much of what I saw and heard at Country2Country 2024, but I had some cavils. Allow me to expand here on Radio 2’s coverage, which tried to do too much and left me wanting more.

Having secured five hours of airtime which gave Rylan and Gambo the week off, the station’s festival coverage started off with two mispronunciations: Bob Harris hesitated over co-host Alana Springsteen’s name and Alana got her vowels wrong while she introduced Colbie Caillat. Throughout the shows Bob was forced to throw over to Bobbie Pryor in the arena, to Edith Bowman in Glasgow and to Connor Phillips in Belfast, which falls under the BBC’s remit now the festival comes from there and not Dublin, which falls under RTE in Ireland.

On one occasion Bob apologised to Hannah Dasher for not having time to fully dip into her back story, and then introduced a song which contained many, many mentions of the word ‘ass’ at 5pm. On top of that, they were 15 seconds late for the news on a station where ‘crashing the pips’ is a grievous offence.

Because Bob and Alana were onstage introducing Priscilla Block, the afternoon coverage repeated Bob’s interview with Brad Paisley from Thursday’s Country Show, which itself included an apology for noise on account of poor soundproofing. It also seemed like they dangled a mic in the crowd for Old Dominion’s set; some piece of kit obviously packed in and I can only imagine how angry and upset their label are, given that they had 20 minutes of their set broadcast in iffy quality around the world. To their credit, they did fix it for the highlights show on the following Thursday.

Sticking with radio, and it pains me to say this, but the only people who care about this new UK Country Radio Airplay Chart are radio people. It seems to have been created to run alongside CountryLine – The BIG 615’s own Top 20.

Thom Yorke once called Spotify ‘the last desperate fart’ of the music industry; this chart seems to be radio’s last gasp. Just because you shuffle things into a chart and give, say, Creek Will Rise some legitimacy the very week Conner Smith is in the UK, that doesn’t mean the ordinary person will care.

Then again, that’s what awards are meant to do too and why we must refer to CMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Lainey Wilson and six-time BRIT-winner Raye (who headlined the O2 Arena herself this week) for the next year. It works for UK acts in country music too: Matt Hodges is now BCMA-Entertainer-of-the-Year-Matt-Hodges: it’s branding and it’s cynical and, until it stops working, it works.

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Does anyone really bother with the album? I’ve just read David Hepworth’s study of Abbey Road Studios, which he calls the last studio standing. Even in 2000, Hepworth thinks, folk had abandoned the album as a statement; people still aim for cohesive long-players only because Dylan, Elton and The Beatles did. An ‘album’ was originally a set of 78rpm records collected together in one package so, given that vinyl is popular and dance crazes are always in fashion, why not return to singles collections without the need to band them in a single artistic statement?

Country music often had albums with three or four singles and plenty of filler – look at Garth’s run of diamond sellers for proof – so it’s no wonder that acts start with plugging one song on a long, loooong radio tour then release an introductory EP. Conner Smith and Hannah Ellis are the most recent acts to graduate to full albums.

Brad Paisley hasn’t put out an album since 2017, instead choosing to release individual tracks and a 2023 teaser EP to ensure fans had something to sing along to in 2024. Yet Taylor Swift’s forthcoming Tortured Poets Department project and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Part II will dominate cultural conversation, and Dua Lipa’s third album is on the way too.

I suppose when you are The Hottest Popstar on Earth you need more than just one song, but I still don’t know why Morgan Wallen needed 36 of them last year. We felt the width, and it was too wide.

From the March 24 Hymn Sheet: The mighty Hardy and country music’s old timers’ club

Kudos to Kane Brown, who has used the fab poetic technique of zeugma in his song Fiddle In The Band: ‘My phone and my ears were ringing’ has two nouns governed by the same verb. The song itself is yet another of those ‘I’m a little bit this and a little bit that’ ones, with Kane checking off lots of genres and settling on ‘a little bit of bass…a fiddle in the band’.

It’s neither one thing nor the other, and it’s just annoying. He might as well recite the minutes of a marketing meeting and stick one of his beloved 808 beats underneath it. But hey, it’s making him money and people are listening. [NB: I hadn’t seen nothing yet. A Bar Song (Tipsy) was on its way to monogenre monstrousness.]

And kudos to Michael Hardy, whose song Truck Bed is one of my favourites across any genre in the last 18 months. This week it was the most played song on country radio, even though it has a hard rock coda and comes out on the Big Loud Rock imprint. It’s Hardy’s first radio chart-topper not to have ‘beer’ in the title (One Beer and Beers On Me were his previous two) and his second big smash with ‘truck’ in it. Wait In The Truck, which will be his career song, didn’t top the radio chart, which seems anomalous.

Hardy’s career is fascinating: a commercial songwriting graduate from Belmont University, Nashville, he wrote the bouncy Up Down, which thanks to its artists more or less passed the baton from Florida Georgia Line’s Age of the Bro to Morgan Wallen and his streaming-friendly monogenre-tastic sound that I call Big Loud Country. He has also released two Hixtape projects, corralling dozens of artists to sing his songs, sometimes without even stepping into the vocal booth himself; the third Hixtape volume will bring back Joe Diffie in a big way, with Post Malone joining in too. [NB: see the next lot of pieces Torn from the Hymn Sheet for more on this.]

Along with Ernest, a Big Loud staff songwriter who has an enormously long album out next month, Hardy is defining what country music sounds like: a little bit this, a little bit that, and so much the better if it can fill rock venues too. Country was insular in the 1980s and 1990s, which led to George Strait and Garth Brooks, but today anyone can click on an artist wherever you are in the world. This has led to Luke Combs playing Australia and to Chapel Hart, who are completely independent of any label, building a British fanbase.

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Writing in his Substack newsletter, Taylor Goldsmith of the band Dawes, who is married to Mandy Moore, wrote something profound.

Watching Willie Nelson play with Kermit the Frog at his Luck Reunion gig in his 91^st year, Goldsmith realised that ‘the shared experience’ was where the magic was, ‘a hushed awareness’ of being in the presence of Willie, even though some notes were beyond the reach of his larynx. At 90, 99.9% of Americans are retired, but Willie is still planning albums; number 75 is The Border and will feature four new songs and six old ones. Rodney Crowell and Allen Shamblin contribute the title track; the latter wrote I Can’t Make You Love Me, one of the ten best popular songs of the last 50 years and a modern-day equivalent of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.

Lukas Nelson already carries the pilot light of his father and will continue to do so after Willie passes on. Watching him perform last year just after the success Miley Cyrus had with Flowers made me think how the links to the golden age of rock’n’roll are passing away, and not just because the Country Music Hall of Fame inductee James Burton is 85 this August.

The youngest act who came up in what is still called The Rock Era is probably Tanya Tucker, who was a teenager in the 1970s when Willie recorded American Songbook standards on his album Stardust in his forties. This Tuesday (March 26) Diana Ross turns 80. Marvin Gaye would have been 85 had he lived. Quincy Jones is six weeks older than Willie and has just turned 91 [NB: he died in December].

Every original inductee into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame from the 1987 class has passed on, with Jerry Lee Lewis the last to go; the class of 1988 includes Miss Ross and her band The Supremes, as well as the man who steered their career, Berry Gordy, who is 94. Of the original Beach Boys, Mike Love is 83 and both Al Jardine and Brian Wilson are 81.

Dion, the teen star of the 1950s, is 84 and has just released a brilliant collaborations album with female blues singers. Bob Dylan is 82 and has already set up a centre for his archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Plus, of course, Beatle Paul and Beatle Ringo are protecting the biggest brand of all; there’s a museum and a tour that will roll on and on and on, and nobody will get tired of Hey Jude, Yellow Submarine or Let It Be.

In this series, I round up some cuttings Torn from the Hymn Sheet, which has gone out on Sundays throughout this year. In this digest, taken from pieces written in January and February 2024, I look forward to UK country activity in the next 12 months, and I also dwell on Opry members and the paucity of women in country music

From the January 21 Hymn Sheet: UK country activity in the year ahead

I’ve been working on an interesting series of pieces that are due to go up on the site the week of January 29 to February 2. It’s also one that I know will generate heat and light, so it is essential that I get every detail right and talk to every stakeholder. I hope it changes things but, given the last year in British country, I fear we need a TV documentary starring Dobby to get anything done. [NB: the pieces were never published under fear of legal action. The reference to Dobby was to Toby Jones, who played the house-elf in the Harry Potter movies and then played Alan Bates in Mr Bates v The Post Office.]

It is imperative that UK acts are supported by each other, and that support also needs to come from the very top. If you know anything about country in the UK, you will be aware of people like Donna Zanetti and Pete Woodhouse, who run a concierge service called ZimagineD and are the hidden figures behind Kezia Gill’s ascent to the stratosphere. [NB: they are also involved with the Roadhouse Weekender, which comes to Bodiam in East Sussex in July 2025.]

You will also know Karl, Jan and Laura Hancock, the brains, brawn and barn behind Buckle & Boots which returns across the second May Bank Holiday weekend and will soon announce its full lineup. Emilia Quinn, Canaan Cox and Maggie Baugh are already confirmed.

You will also know the Chitticks, Gavin and Christine, who put on the Country In The Afternoon event twice annually at the Half Moon Putney. They also help run the Paddock Stage at Buckle & Boots along with Rick from Silverball Country. Rick is based in Birmingham, which is fine, and is a passionate advocate and ambassador for the scene. Ditto James Daykin, who edits the country tab of Entertainment Focus and is also based in the Midlands.

Yesterday (January 20), Sally and Steve from Gasoline & Matches hosted another of their Saturday brunch sessions under the Nashville Sounds in the Round banner, inviting Alan Finlan, Brooke Law, Wood Burnt Red and Yeo & Jory up to Birmingham Symphony Hall. As always, there seems to be far too much talent packed into one room, which is testament to the pair’s pulling power.

As part of his desire to promote country music in Northern Ireland, Gary Quinn is taking it to Belfast this March, swapping the river Clyde for the river Lagan and warming up C2C attendees with a fine line-up of performers including Johnny Brady and The Rising. He’s also taking Jeremy McComb and Dan Smalley around the UK the following week, including a date at The Grace in Highbury & Islington on March 14.

Down in Southsea, next to Portsmouth, Hannah Roper is slowly revealing acts for Country On The Coast, which takes place a fortnight after Easter weekend. Many of the names are new to me, including Laketown, Lianne Kaye, Southbound and Bailey Rae. Jesse Jennings and Dusty Moats are coming over from Texas, having also appeared at last year’s festival, and Hannah wants to set them up with gigs across the UK while they are here.

This is where we need to join the various dots up and down the UK. There are country clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and dozens of venues across the North of England which host plenty of country acts. Two Ways Home have announced a tour, for instance, that takes in Liverpool Jacaranda and West Coast Rock Café in Blackpool, which is not far from Wayne Hadlow’s venue Cowboy and Co.

London is doing its best to kill live music but Omeara, the aforementioned Half Moon, the Lexington in Kings Cross and Bush Hall are all fantastic destinations for country fans. For a sit-down affair, Nashville Meets London books a half-dozen shows a year at the Holborn branch of Pizza Express.

There is also a country scene in Leeds, which seems to be headed by Jackson Lake and Tricia Longford. The talented Luke Flear is also based there, and he is sure to impress thousands of people opening up for GlasVille this year. Morganway dwell on the border of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, and down in Essex there are at least a dozen acts including Hannah Paris, Megan Rose, Liam Cromby, The Jackson Line and Holloway Road.

Broadcaster Maddie Christy and festival organiser Georgie Thorogood are both magnificent ambassadors too. Maddie is six months into her Thursday night slot on Phoenix FM, while Georgie launched a folk and country festival for 2023. [NB: Georgie is now a mummy.]

Who else, and where else? Sarah Yeo is down in Devon and Bob Fitzgerald is over in Cardiff, where Rachel Sellick runs Scarlet River PR as a hobby whenever she isn’t doing neuroscientific things for her PhD [NB: Dr Spicer has just moved to Nashville with her husband, the producer Tyler Spicer]. Robbie Cavanagh and Keywest are both playing the snug Bodega in Nottingham in the next few weeks, and The Sound Lounge in Sutton lives to fight another day after they exceeded their fundraising goal in quintuple-quick time.

In February Jay Rockwell is taking his Yeehaw brunch around the country having achieved proof of concept in Newcastle. There’s an event this coming Friday (January 26) at the city’s Revolution venue to celebrate two years of Yeehaw. Matt Hodges is playing. I predict much messiness.

Now how do we link up all the towns, cities and venues across the country? I don’t think that answer is rhetorical.

From the January 28 Hymn Sheet: country music as art gallery

I expect everyone in the UK has been to the National Gallery, which celebrates 200 years of existence this year. I went with my partner this month and stumbled into the room containing the quintet of van Goghs, including those sunflowers and that chair. They are on a wall that is perpendicular to two Picassos and a Cezanne. The next room had a Monet as big as a recording booth.

The morning after my visit, it hit me that country music is like an art gallery: everyone rushes to the big guys, respectively Wallen and Monet, but people miss the names that aren’t box office. Yet those smaller names are essential to the gallery/genre as a whole. Often the minor artists are reappraised, or given their own exhibition, but everyone takes a picture of the stars, leaving the others in their shadow.

Happily Degas, Pissarro and Seurat have their fans too, much as how people dig Ashley McBryde or Sunny Sweeney. Plurality is key to the success of country music.

From the February 4 Hymn Sheet: Women in music then and now

Throughout this year’s weekly Hymn Sheet, I’ll be telling you what was in or near the top of the country charts on a significant date of music history. Many entries can be found in Justin Lewis’s book Don’t Stop the Music, available now and a must for any music nerd.

This week in 1997, the Spice Girls hit number one on the Hot 100 with Wannabe. The biggest country song in America at the beginning of February 1997 was Nobody Knows, the r’n’b hit by Tony Rich Project that Kevin Sharp turned into a country song. Luke Combs was not the first white guy to use black music to his own advantage.

Two years to the week later, Britney Spears took the Max Martin composition Hit Me Baby One More Time to the top. The country chart number one on this date in February 1999 came from Jo Dee Messina, who followed the Phil Vassar compositions Bye Bye and I’m Alright with Stand Beside Me, which was co-produced by her Curb labelmate Tim McGraw.

In fact, it’s worth showing you how much has changed in country music in the last 25 years: including Jo Dee’s song, five of the first seven chart-toppers of 1999 were by women: Terri Clark (You’re Easy on the Eyes), Martina McBride (Wrong Again), Sara Evans (No Place That Far) and the Dixie Chicks, as they were then, with You Were Mine, which was the fourth single from the album Wide Open Spaces.

Do I need to remind you that just the other week the only woman in the top 20 at radio was Lainey Wilson? Or, as we must call her until November, CMA Entertainer of the Year Lainey Wilson.

Country radio gets a bad rap for not playing women, but judging by downloads, streams and sales there are only two ladies among the top 20 songs on the Hot Country chart, one of whom is not Lainey. Carly Pearce is duetting with Chris Stapleton on a ballad called We Don’t Fight Anymore, while Megan Moroney has put out No Caller ID, a searingly honest song that mentions therapy in its opening line.

It was written with three women not called Hillary, Liz or Lori. What a great thing to see the names Connie Harrington and Jessi Alexander (who both wrote I Drive Your Truck) and Jessie Jo Dillon, who never writes a dud and is daughter of decorated dad Dean Dillon. Nepo-truce?

From the February 25 Hymn Sheet: Opry members

Scotty McCreery will become the 227^th member of the Grand Ole Opry in April. He will be following his American Idol rival Lauren Alaina who was member number 218. Country2Country 2024 will be graced by Opry members Brad Paisley (185) and Carly Pearce (215), while Ashley McBryde (222) has already come over in 2024 and Darius Rucker (200) and Jon Pardi (226) are due later in spring.

Bill Anderson was inducted in 1961 as the 118^th member and is still performing at 86 years old. Leroy Van Dyke (120) is 94 and still pops up too, while I need not mention the durability of 90-year-old Willie Nelson (128). Who has played the Opry more times than anyone else? Come on down, member number 138: Jeannie Seely.

This week member 228 was announced. T Graham Brown has a SiriusXM show called Live Wire and Vince Gill ambushed him with an invitation that made a grown man cry. He was invited thanks to his 300 Opry appearances and several hits in the mid-1980s including three number ones: Hell and High Water, Don’t Go To Strangers and Darlene. Having been a jingle singer and also laid down demos such as On The Other Hand, a career song for Randy Travis, he signed to Capitol Nashville and opened up for Kenny Rogers.

Today, Brown aka His T-Ness is a country version of someone like Level 42 or UB40: the hits have stopped but the reputation remains strong. He described his music as ‘Otis Redding meets George Jones’ so if you like that description, have a listen!