Country Music – Page 2 – Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

TOBY KEITH HAD ALREADY SCORED COUNTRY HITS WHEN HIS LABEL REFUSED TO RELEASE THE SONG HE BELIEVED COULD CHANGE HIS CAREER. HE LEFT — AND “HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW?!” BECAME THE BIGGEST COUNTRY HIT OF 2000. By the late 1990s, Toby Keith was successful but frustrated. His 1993 debut “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” had gone to No. 1, and more hits followed. But years of label changes involving Mercury, Polydor and A&M left Keith increasingly unhappy with how his music was being handled. One point of conflict was “How Do You Like Me Now?!,” a song Keith had written with Chuck Cannon. Keith believed in it. His label did not want to release it. When his relationship with Mercury ended, Keith regained rights to several songs and took the material elsewhere. DreamWorks Nashville signed him, and producer James Stroud—who had worked on Keith’s early records—returned to the studio with him. How Do You Like Me Now?! arrived in 1999. The title track was released as a single and did exactly what Keith had believed it could do. In 2000, it spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and finished as Billboard’s No. 1 country song of the year. More importantly, it began a different phase of his career. At DreamWorks, Keith followed with records including “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This,” “I’m Just Talkin’ About Tonight,” “I Wanna Talk About Me” and “My List,” establishing the run that turned him from an established 1990s singer into one of country music’s dominant stars of the next decade. The song Mercury had declined to back did not simply survive the label change. It became the record that Keith carried through the door to the most commercially powerful stretch of his career.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOBY KEITH HAD ALREADY SCORED COUNTRY HITS WHEN…

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ACHY BREAKY HEART” MADE BILLY RAY CYRUS A STAR ALMOST OVERNIGHT. IT ALSO BECAME SO BIG THAT FOR YEARS, THE SONG WAS HARDER TO ESCAPE THAN THE MAN WHO SANG IT. THEN 27 YEARS LATER, “OLD TOWN ROAD” PUT HIM BACK INSIDE THE BIGGEST HIT IN AMERICA. Billy Ray Cyrus arrived nationally in 1992 with almost no gradual climb. “Achy Breaky Heart” went to No. 1 on the country chart, while his debut album Some Gave All exploded beyond country music. It spent 17 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 and became the best-selling album in America that year. Cyrus was suddenly everywhere. So was the backlash. The song’s line dance, Cyrus’ mullet and the enormous crossover attention turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon, but they also reduced a much broader country career to one image. He kept recording and scoring country hits, including “Could’ve Been Me,” “In the Heart of a Woman” and “Busy Man,” yet nothing could compete with the shadow of those first months. As the 1990s ended, country radio moved on. Then came 2019. A 20-year-old rapper named Lil Nas X had created “Old Town Road,” a short country-trap song that went viral through TikTok. After Billboard removed the original recording from its Hot Country Songs chart, Billy Ray Cyrus joined the remix. It was an unlikely pairing: a young internet-born rapper at the beginning of his career and a country singer still widely associated with a novelty-sized hit from 1992. The remix became enormous. “Old Town Road” spent a then-record 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. For Cyrus, it ended a gap of 26 years and eight months between Hot 100 Top 10 appearances. It also introduced him to listeners who had not been born when “Achy Breaky Heart” was released. The collaboration earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Best Music Video. Cyrus had spent decades being identified with the record that made him famous. Then the streaming generation attached his name to another cultural phenomenon entirely. This time, he was not the young star standing in the center of it. He was the veteran standing beside a 20-year-old newcomer while country, rap and the internet collided around them.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” “ACHY BREAKY HEART” MADE BILLY RAY CYRUS FAMOUS…

Country Music

SAMMY KERSHAW HAD BEEN PLAYING COUNTRY MUSIC SINCE HE WAS 12. THEN DRUGS, ALCOHOL AND YEARS OF HONKY-TONKS WORE HIM DOWN SO BADLY THAT IN 1988, HE QUIT MUSIC AND WENT TO WORK REMODELING WALMART STORES. Sammy Kershaw grew up in Louisiana and started performing professionally as a boy. By his teens, his George Jones-influenced voice was already getting him opening slots for established country acts. But years of clubs, failed relationships, money trouble, drugs and heavy drinking pushed him in the opposite direction from Nashville. By 1988, Kershaw was done. He quit alcohol and drugs, walked away from music, and took a full-time job supervising remodeling work for Walmart stores. For roughly two years, the man who had spent most of his life onstage barely performed. Then songwriter Barry Jackson, who remembered hearing Kershaw years earlier in a Lafayette nightclub, tracked him down and urged him to make a demo. Kershaw gave music one more chance. The tape reached Mercury Records. After a showcase, Mercury signed him in 1990. Don’t Go Near the Water arrived in 1991. “Cadillac Style” reached No. 3 on Billboard’s country chart, “Anywhere but Here” also made the Top 10, and the album eventually went platinum. Two years later, “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful” became Kershaw’s first No. 1. The comeback did not erase the years that nearly ended his career. It gave them a different consequence. The Louisiana singer who had once stepped away from every stage to rebuild his life eventually spent the 1990s carrying traditional honky-tonk back onto country radio — not as the young man who had first chased Nashville, but as someone who had already learned he could survive without it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SAMMY KERSHAW HAD BEEN SINGING COUNTRY MUSIC SINCE…

Country Music

KEITH WHITLEY AND EARL THOMAS CONLEY RECORDED “BROTHERLY LOVE” IN 1987. IT SAT UNRELEASED FOR FOUR YEARS. BY THE TIME IT BECAME A NO. 2 HIT, WHITLEY HAD BEEN DEAD FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS. In 1987, Keith Whitley and Earl Thomas Conley were two of country music’s most recognizable voices. Conley was deep into the extraordinary run that would give him 18 No. 1 hits. Whitley was still climbing, only a year away from the breakthrough stretch that produced “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” “When You Say Nothing at All” and “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.” That year, they recorded “Brotherly Love,” written by Tim Nichols and Jimmy Alan Stewart. The song was built around two brothers who fight, compete and irritate each other, but remain bound by something stronger underneath. Then the recording disappeared into the vault. It was not released as a single. It did not appear on either man’s current album. On May 9, 1989, Whitley died from alcohol poisoning at 34. His career did not immediately stop with his death. RCA still had unreleased material, and records including “I Wonder Do You Think of Me” and “I’m Over You” became posthumous hits. Then, in 1991, someone went back to the duet with Conley. “Brotherly Love” appeared on Whitley’s posthumous Kentucky Bluebird and Conley’s Yours Truly. RCA released it as a single that August. Four years after the two men had stood in the studio together, their voices finally reached country radio side by side. The record climbed to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart, spending 20 weeks on the chart. It later earned a Grammy nomination for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. It also became the final Top 10 country hit for both singers. For Whitley, there could never be another session. For Conley, the result was different. He lived nearly three more decades, but country radio was changing, and none of his later singles returned him to the Top 10. So one recording from 1987 quietly became a dividing line neither man could have recognized when they made it. They walked into the studio with separate careers still moving forward. Country radio finally brought their voices together after one of those careers had already ended.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KEITH WHITLEY AND EARL THOMAS CONLEY RECORDED “BROTHERLY…

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JEFF BATES HAD THE VOICE TO SING COUNTRY MUSIC. METH TOOK HIM SOMEWHERE ELSE FIRST — INTO CRIME, JAIL AND A LIFE THAT NEARLY COLLAPSED BEFORE NASHVILLE EVER KNEW HIS NAME. Jeff Bates grew up in Mississippi with a deep baritone shaped by singers like Conway Twitty, Elvis Presley and Joe Cocker. By the 1990s, he was trying to build a music career, eventually making his way toward Nashville. But while the opportunity moved slowly, his methamphetamine addiction grew worse. Music stopped being the center of his life. Drugs became it. The addiction led Bates into crime and eventually jail. Instead of reaching Nashville as another promising Southern singer, he reached a point where the career he wanted mattered less than whether he could rebuild his life at all. Recovery came first. Bates got sober and began putting the pieces back together. Then music returned. By late 2002, only a few years removed from the darkest period of his addiction, RCA Nashville signed him to a major-label deal. Rainbow Man arrived in 2003. Its breakthrough single, “The Love Song,” climbed to No. 8 on Billboard’s country chart. The voice Bates had nearly thrown away was suddenly coming through country radio nationwide. “I Wanna Make You Cry” followed, and “Long, Slow Kisses” later reached No. 17. Bates never became a stadium-level star, but his past gave some of his later material a weight chart numbers could not provide. “One Second Chance,” in particular, landed differently coming from a man who had needed one himself. He also never hid the musical influence behind that deep voice. In 2014, Bates released Me & Conway, a tribute connecting him directly to Conway Twitty, one of the singers listeners had compared him to for years. But by then, Bates had another reason to keep telling his own story. He began speaking openly about addiction and recovery, including visits to prisons and treatment settings where the people listening were much closer to the life he had once lived than to the country charts he later reached. For them, “The Love Song” reaching No. 8 was not necessarily the most important number in Jeff Bates’ story. The years sober afterward were.

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Country Music

EMMYLOU HARRIS WAS SEARCHING FOR SONGS AFTER GRAM PARSONS’ DEATH WHEN SOMEONE PLAYED HER A FIVE-SONG CASSETTE BY AN UNKNOWN TEXAS WRITER NAMED RODNEY CROWELL. ONE SONG WAS ENOUGH TO CHANGE BOTH THEIR LIVES. Rodney Crowell arrived in Nashville from Texas in 1972 with songs but no reputation. He fell into the circle around Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, learned the songwriter’s life, and landed an early publishing break through Jerry Reed. But he was still largely unknown when a cassette containing five of his songs reached Emmylou Harris. Harris was rebuilding after Gram Parsons’ death. While listening through demos for the album that became Pieces of the Sky, she heard Crowell’s “Bluebird Wine.” She stopped. Harris recorded it as the opening track of the album in 1975, then wanted to know who had written it. Crowell was tracked down. When Harris later passed through Austin, she offered him a plane ticket to Los Angeles. He took it and joined her newly formed Hot Band as guitarist and harmony singer, working beside players including James Burton and Glen D. Hardin. The job changed Crowell’s position in Nashville. Harris kept recording his songs. Then other artists followed. Waylon Jennings cut “Ain’t Living Long Like This.” The Oak Ridge Boys took “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” to No. 1. Crystal Gayle had a No. 1 with “’Til I Gain Control Again.” Bob Seger turned “Shame on the Moon” into a major pop hit. For years, Rodney Crowell songs were more famous than Rodney Crowell. Then Diamonds & Dirt arrived in 1988. The album produced five consecutive No. 1 country singles: “It’s Such a Small World,” “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,” “She’s Crazy for Leavin’,” “After All This Time,” and “Above and Beyond.” More than a decade after Harris first heard his cassette, Crowell had finally become the singer carrying his own songs to the top. The connection between them never disappeared. Nearly forty years after “Bluebird Wine,” Crowell and Harris recorded Old Yellow Moon together. In 2014, it won the Grammy for Best Americana Album. The young songwriter Emmylou Harris once hired for her band eventually stood beside her as an equal partner on an album bearing both their names.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EMMYLOU HARRIS WAS STILL FINDING HER WAY AFTER…

Country Music

BEFORE EARL THOMAS CONLEY COULD SELL HIS OWN RECORDS, CONWAY TWITTY TOOK ONE OF HIS SONGS TO NO. 1—YEARS BEFORE CONLEY BUILT AN 18-NO. 1 CAREER OF HIS OWN. After leaving the Army, Earl Thomas Conley spent years chasing country music while working blue-collar jobs. Nashville did not move quickly for him. When progress stalled, Conley went to Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked in a steel mill and met producer Nelson Larkin. Larkin helped him sign with the small GRT label in 1974. Conley finally had records with his own name on them. Almost nobody bought them. His GRT singles reached only the lower end of the country chart. But something strange was happening to the songs Conley wrote. Other singers were having better luck with them. Mel Street recorded “Smokey Mountain Memories,” co-written by Conley and Dick Heard, and took it to No. 13 in 1975. Then Conway Twitty recorded “This Time I’ve Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me,” written by Conley with Mary Larkin. In early 1976, it reached No. 1. Conley was watching one of country music’s biggest stars stand at the top of the chart with words he had written while his own recording career remained stuck near the bottom. He returned to Nashville and kept going. Warner Bros. gave him another opportunity, and “Dreamin’s All I Do” became his first Top 40 hit in 1979. But the breakthrough still did not come, and Conley left the label. He reunited with Nelson Larkin at Sunbird Records for another try. This time, “Silent Treatment” reached the Top 10. Then, in 1981, “Fire and Smoke” went to No. 1. RCA signed him, and the long wait suddenly turned into one of the most dominant chart runs of the 1980s. Conley eventually scored 18 No. 1 country hits, including “Holding Her and Loving You,” “Nobody Falls Like a Fool” and “Once in a Blue Moon.” In 1984, Don’t Make It Easy for Me made him the first artist in any genre to place four No. 1 singles from the same album. By then, Conway Twitty recording one of his songs no longer represented the closest Earl Thomas Conley could get to the top. Other writers were now trying to get songs onto an Earl Thomas Conley record.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BEFORE EARL THOMAS CONLEY COULD SELL HIS OWN…

Country Music

JEFF CARSON LEFT A NO. 1 COUNTRY CAREER FOR A POLICE BADGE—THEN DIED JUST AS HE WAS MAKING HIS MUSICAL COMEBACK. HIS FINAL ALBUM WAS NAMED AFTER HIS BADGE NUMBER: 448. Born Jeffrey Herndon in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he played in bands, moved to Missouri and eventually came to Nashville. There he worked recording demos, singing songs that publishers hoped to place with established artists. In 1995, Curb Records gave him his own chance. “The Car” became a Top 5 hit, but “Not on Your Love” went even further, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. Carson followed with records including “Holdin’ Onto Somethin’” and continued touring through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then he made an unusual decision. In 2009, Carson retired from country music. He entered law enforcement. Carson joined the Franklin Police Department in Tennessee, trading tour buses and radio promotion for patrol work. For roughly the next decade, the former country star served as a police officer while the records that had made his name remained on country radio playlists. Music eventually found its way back. Carson began recording again and returned to the studio with producer Buddy Hyatt. In 2022, he released “God Save the World,” his first new single in years, with plans for more music to follow. He never got to complete that return. On March 26, 2022, Jeff Carson died suddenly of a heart attack at a hospital in Franklin. He was 58. The recordings he had been making were not abandoned. Friends and fellow artists helped complete 448, a posthumous album named for Carson’s badge number. Michael Ray, Darryl Worley, Mark Wills and Craig Morgan were among the country artists who contributed. Carson had spent years being known by a name printed on record sleeves. The final album carried another number instead: 448 — the one he wore while serving Franklin.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JEFF CARSON LEFT A NO. 1 COUNTRY CAREER…

Country Music

TRACY BYRD WALKED INTO A MALL STUDIO TO SING ONE HANK WILLIAMS SONG FOR A FRIEND. THE OWNER ENTERED HIM IN A CONTEST—AND THAT SMALL DECISION EVENTUALLY LED TO TWO NO. 1 COUNTRY HITS. Tracy Byrd was studying business at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, when a friend persuaded him to record a song at a small studio inside a local shopping mall. Byrd chose Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He was not making a professional demo. There was no Nashville executive waiting outside. But the studio owner heard the recording and believed the voice deserved a larger room. He entered Byrd in a local talent contest. Byrd won. That small victory pushed him toward the clubs around Beaumont, where a thriving country scene was already producing another traditional singer: Mark Chesnutt. Byrd began playing the same Texas honky-tonk circuit, gradually building an audience while abandoning his original college plans for music. Then Nashville came looking. MCA Records signed him, and his self-titled debut album arrived in 1993. The first singles did little. Then “Holdin’ Heaven” reached No. 1. Byrd followed it with “Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous,” but his second album, No Ordinary Man, pushed the career much further. “Watermelon Crawl” became one of his signature records. Then came “The Keeper of the Stars,” a ballad Byrd initially had not expected to become the defining song of the album. It became a major hit and won Song of the Year at the 1996 Academy of Country Music Awards. Byrd went on to record more hits, including “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo,” which gave him another No. 1 in 2002. By then, the business student who walked into that mall studio had spent nearly a decade on national country radio. The studio owner never had a record contract to offer him. He only had a contest application. For Tracy Byrd, that was enough to get the first door open.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TRACY BYRD WALKED INTO A MALL STUDIO TO…

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BUDDY JEWELL SANG MORE THAN 4,000 DEMOS SO OTHER COUNTRY SINGERS COULD FIND THEIR NEXT HIT. THEN, AFTER NEARLY A DECADE IN NASHVILLE WITHOUT A RECORD DEAL, AMERICA FINALLY VOTED FOR THE MAN BEHIND THE VOICE. Buddy Jewell came to Nashville in 1993 expecting to become a recording artist. Nashville found another use for him. By the mid-1990s, Jewell was working steadily as a demo singer. Songwriters needed professional recordings to pitch their material to artists and labels, and Jewell had the kind of country voice that could make an unfinished song sound ready for radio. The work paid bills. It also kept him anonymous. Over the years, Jewell estimated that he sang more than 4,000 demos. Some of those songs eventually found their way to major artists, including George Strait, Clay Walker and Trace Adkins. Jewell kept watching songs leave the demo room and build careers for somebody else. His own deal never came. Nearly ten years after arriving in Nashville, he was married, raising a family and still working behind the scenes when a new television competition called Nashville Star began looking for contestants. Jewell auditioned. He was 41 years old. That mattered in a business increasingly interested in finding young artists it could build for the future. Jewell was competing not only against other singers, but against the years Nashville had already spent declining to make him one of its stars. Then the audience started voting. Week after week, Jewell survived. On May 3, 2003, he reached the finale against John Arthur Martinez and a 19-year-old Miranda Lambert. Jewell won. He received roughly 65 percent of the nationwide vote, finishing more than two million votes ahead of Lambert. The machinery that had refused to move for nearly a decade suddenly moved very quickly. Columbia Records Nashville signed him. Clint Black produced his debut album, and only weeks after the Nashville Star finale, Buddy Jewell was released. It entered Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart at No. 1. “Help Pour Out the Rain (Lacey’s Song),” inspired by a conversation with his daughter, became a Top 5 country hit. “Sweet Southern Comfort” followed into the Top 10. For years, Jewell had stood behind a studio microphone trying to make somebody else’s song convincing enough for a star to record. In 2003, the microphone stayed exactly where it had always been. The name printed on the record was what finally changed.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BUDDY JEWELL SANG MORE THAN 4,000 DEMOS SO…

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