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 15th 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.
A Country Way of Life 