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.
A Country Way of Life 