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.
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