1964 Connie Smith – Once a Day
Later in her career, Connie Smith would lean towards Christian music before coming back around to country with the encouragement of her husband Marty Stuart. In the 1960s, she took this Bill Anderson composition to number one as her debut release, and it is still her best-known song.
With a female perspective, although channelled through the male writer, the narrator admits that the heartache hits her ‘once a day, all day long, and once a night, from dusk till dawn’. It’s a punchline to a song where the joke is on her; she sings that she is lucky that, unlike another girl who ‘slowly lost her mind’, at least she herself has not ‘cried her life away’.
Only the pedal steel is evidence of her pain beyond the wretched lyric, which is set to a bouncy beat and melody in the major key of F-sharp. There is also a brilliant decision at the end of the chorus to separate out the short phrases of ‘once a day, every day, all day long’, with band and vocal parts dying away into brief moments of silence. Such is the power of the best country music to stir the soul and put the listener’s heartache into song.
1974 Charlie Rich – She Called Me Baby
Talking of which, this song does exactly the same thing from a male perspective, though it works for a female voice too. Patsy Cline and Mickey Gilley both recorded it, as did Rich, with Chet Atkins producing, in 1964. It was rescued from the vault by RCA and it topped the charts a decade later.
A Harlan Howard composition from the early 1960s, the writer was initially told the song was too dirty and sexy for mainstream consumption. This might be because the narrator croons that his former beloved ‘used to hold and kiss me till the dawn’. Indeed, he adds, she ‘held me up so high and made me strong’.
We do not know the identity of the song that goes ‘baby baby’ in the narrator’s dreams; it can’t be You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ because that came out three years after Howard wrote this one.
1984 Earl Thomas Conley – Chance of Lovin’ You
One of the biggest stars of the 1980s, who died in 2019, Conley is almost completely forgotten today. The tenor of this song, which he wrote with Randy Scruggs, is akin to a John Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen rock song, but it sounds far more anodyne, almost like a primetime TV version of rock’n’roll.
For his part, Conley didn’t like either the mix or the drums; the latter are mixed very high in the opening bars of rimshots, while there is a chintzy synth riff in between the first chorus and the second verse. In the latter, the narrator sings how ‘if it wasn’t for love, you’d still be my friend’, having introduced the lady as ‘a young and courageous fool’ in the song’s opening line.
The chorus (‘that’s the price you pay with a lonely heart’) could be an air-punching arena anthem but instead merely gets the listener nodding along to how the narrator ‘could never refuse’ the risk of playing the game of love. Conley should ask Connie Smith and Charlie Rich how it worked out for them.
1994 George Strait – The Big One
Strait kicked down the neo-traditional door through which dozens of singers followed, rendering the pop sounds of the early 1980s (to coin a phrase) old hat. The lead track from his 15th album Lead On is yet again about love, but this time of a happier sort: ‘there’s nowhere to run’, ‘you don’t stand a chance’ and, in a marvellous chorus, ‘SOS in this situation means “She’s Out of Sight”’.
He warns the listener, before the ‘beep beep beep’ of a Morse code machine, that ‘on the Richter scale of romance, you hit 12…the ground shakes and the oceans roll’. Remarkably, this song charted the same year that an earthquake hit Northridge in California.
There is a Manilow key change up a whole tone from F-sharp to A-flat for the final chorus, where Strait sells the emotion in the lyric with a fine ‘oooh yeah!’ before the final line of the song. It ends two minutes after it started with not a note or moment wasted.
2004 Gary Allan – Nothing On but the Radio
Country music, as with every type of music, needs its sultry songs. Four decades after Harlan Howard was criticised for She Called Me Baby, Gary Allan had no such problems here.
In broadcasting, you are supposed to hear the smile of the DJ; here, Allan is audibly smiling with his languid vocals that recall those of modern rock singers like Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20. Allan and his beloved (‘two lovers dreaming of forever’) are ‘a fire wrapped up in flames of desire…you and me and the lights down low’. He opens by singing he hopes for a ‘long night’, to lie ‘in tangled sheets’ and to enjoy ‘every tender little kiss’.
The song starts with a chromatically descending opening intro riff before adding fiddle, pedal steel and a solid groove which is augmented by bongos, which add an off-beat rhythm. The listener is probably locked in a dance with their partner, mimicking the characters in the song, who may well be enjoying a different kind of dance.
2014 Carrie Underwood – Something in the Water and Keith Urban – Somewhere in My Car
By the end of 2024, both Carrie and Urban would be the people’s country stars; the latter had previously been a judge on American Idol, while Carrie’s place on the panel was announced for the 2025 series.
Ten years into her career, Carrie put out a two-CD hits compilation that included this opening track. As mentioned, Carrie is her own genre, which brings in elements of pop, rock, country and contemporary Christian music. Her musical idiom straddles the line between religious and secular; here, it is more explicitly the former as she sings one chorus over lines from Amazing Grace before taking the lead and interpolating the song herself (‘was blind but now I see’).
Carrie tells of a baptismal experience over banjo flecks, power chords and a digital loop which thwacks on every eighth beat. Having seen the light and ‘felt love pouring down from above’, she has ‘joy in my heart, angels on my side’. She shows off her magnificent vocals, holding the vowels in the words ‘changed’ and ‘stronger’.
The listener cannot help but feel the same, and the aim is to boost the heart with the same sort of charge as a choral hymn. Like the singer they might be moved to ‘live every day’ and ‘trust in someone bigger’ than them.
Over on the radio, they will have something to accompany their drive to or from work, in between the car commercials. Written with J. T. Harding, whose father was an actor on Cheers, it was the fifth of six singles, and the opening track, from Urban’s eighth album Fuse.
The two writers have found another way to set heartbreak in song. Over a digital drum loop peppered with guitar melodies and vocal tics, the chorus explodes to match the memory of how Urban’s narrator and his ex were ‘gasoline on fire’, kissing and touching and ‘steaming up the glass’. These days, he is so lonely that he stops at red lights so he can stay both on the road and in the memory-strewn car, all the better to avoid his ‘cold and empty bed’. When he does sleep, in a room where he has not yet taken down the pictures, he doesn’t get up until noon.
The final minute includes a guitar wigout and some arena-ready ‘woah-oh-ohs’. Moments like this must have led to comedian Bo Burnham calling Urban a practitioner of ‘stadium country’.
A Country Way of Life 