No Kinda Answers ...

Just to get some things out of the way before we get going here ...

Why are you qualified to judge, critique, etc. decades of classic country music?

Well I have been paid modest amounts of money on numerous occasions to write album reviews – mostly in the country and Americana fields – for multiple print and online publications.  So I’m technically a professional music journalist.  Plus I’m a lifelong country music fan who grew up in a family of similarly-inclined listeners who, intentionally or not, made sure I heard a lot of country music from different eras growing up.  I guess it stuck … I liked it enough to keep seeking it out.  Hank Williams Jr. and Willie Nelson were bigger childhood heroes to me than any athlete or comic book character.  As a high schooler I was enamored by the whole “new traditionalist” thing with folks like Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson etc. putting new spins on old sounds.  In and around my college years I was a regular patron at beer joints like the Dixie Chicken in College Station, TX that loudly acknowledge that most truly great country music was made before 1985 or so.  I still listen to it on a near-daily basis (background or otherwise), As a performing musician, I’ve covered Hag knows how many songs as a musician onstage or just for grins among friends, it’s right there in the fabric of my life and always will be.  I like other kinds of music, sure.  But country music of various eras and subgenres is always going to feel like home.

What inspired the blog?

Aside from just fandom in general, around 2021 I became pretty enamored with a column on the Stereogum website by the hilariously excellent pop-culture writer Tom Breihan.  Among his other writing pursuits among various outlets, he tackled the Billboard Hot 100 charts, one #1 at a time, with his column aptly named The Number Ones.  This is highly recommended reading … Breihan is a full-timer and it shows.  His articles show a breadth of knowledge, rigor of homework, blend of the objective and subjective, and knack for finding just the right anecdotes and context to bring the stories to life. 

That being said, you’re not necessarily going to get that here.  For one, I’m not a full-timer, I’m self-publishing and squeezing this into the margins of other employment and family life so my research might not make it much past Wikipedia, YouTube and my own beer-stained memory.  Also, a lot of the artists who’ve managed a #1 pop hit only made it to the top of that wildly diverse mountain once or twice, meaning that sifting through the years gives Mr. Breihan a lot of fresh stories to tell.  If you try doing this with the country music charts … how many times can you reiterate the Ronnie Milsap or Conway Twitty story and make it feel new?  So instead of a nice long article on each song, I’m tackling this thing one year at a time, which starts off easy enough in the days of months-long reigns for top-tier hits and eventually gets long as hell when more-than-one-week runs become rare and there’s 40 or more songs to at least mention in any given year. 

A ranking?  Based on what?

It seemed fun to try to rank the #1 hits of every year in order of, for the most part, just how much I like them.  But I do try to keep in mind things like cultural relevance and durability in the collective memory and how well it represents its era, or at least the best and most salient qualities of its era.  If a song’s a cover of a better-known version it’s less likely to be all that high on the ladder.  In some years even the stuff knocking around the bottom is pretty solid, for the most part; in other years, anything outside the top five or so may well be unlistenable to some ears.  If it seems like I’m being overly hard on one of your favorites, keep in mind that taste is subjective and if someone’s got a spot on any of these lists at all, then they’ve already had more #1 hits than I have. 

So what’s your “taste”?

I’m no strict purist, but I do usually like country music with a more traditional feel. Willie Nelson is probably my favorite all-around artist, in terms of songwriting and personality and delivery and just the general soul of his work. John Prine is up there too and certainly my favorite songwriter, although he doesn’t factor in all that often on a specific discussion of #1 country hits. Some of my most frequent go-to’s as a listener that actually factor in to such a discussion include George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Gary Stewart, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Strait, John Anderson, Dolly Parton, Ray Price, Rodney Crowell, Buck Owens, Clint Black, Dwight Yoakam, you probably get the idea. But I’m not immune to the charms of some country-pop here and there and will gladly concede that weaving other genres into the music goes back to Hank Williams and beyond. Imagine if Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys didn’t like jazz. Country music has been so big for so long that it’s unsurprising that it draws from almost everything, just like pop and rock and folk always have.

As far as modern stuff, I do tend to lean towards Americana and singer-songwriter stuff. I like Jamie Lin Wilson, Walt Wilkins, Steve Earle, Turnpike Troubadours, Courtney Patton & Jason Eady, Emily Wolfe, Shinyribs, John Evans, Adam & Chris Carroll, Mark Jungers, Drew Kennedy, hot damn there’s a lot of ‘em. I got into what was usually called alt-country in the ‘90s, stuff like Son Volt and Old 97s and the Bottle Rockets. I love old-school soul and R&B (Otis Redding, Al Green etc.), the earthier side of classic rock (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rolling Stones, etc.), big-name singer-songwriter rock from guys like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, Texas folks like Guy Clark and Billy Joe Shaver and Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen … I love bits of heavy metal, hip-hop, and punk even if I’m less qualified to speak on them.  

And yeah there are some country artists, including long-term successful ones, that I think it’ll become clear aren’t my cup of tea. No disrespect to folks like Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Tim McGraw etc. I still like some of their stuff, it’s just not in my wheelhouse. Sometime around the mid-2000s it might all be so far out of said wheelhouse it’s time to call it a day.

Any politics here? I don’t like politics in my music.

There are a few songs and artists that’ll be impossible (or maybe just boring) to discuss if we don’t at least mention the political content, context of the times, etc. I’m going to try to keep it as evenhanded and non-partisan as possible without totally subsuming my own point of view (which is pretty politically moderate anyway). So I can’t promise people of any political persuasion that they’ll never be exposed to a viewpoint they don’t like, whether I’m stating my own opinion or just playing a little devil’s advocate. For what it’s worth, though, it’s become clear in writing this that although songs that could be considered political aren’t entirely uncommon in country music, aside from a few key cultural touchstones they don’t usually end up on the top of the charts. A lot of songs have a generally conservative “vibe” (or less frequently, a liberal one) without being in-your-face divisive; we might make a note of that here and there, but bottom line: I’m not writing with an agenda.

What tends to get left out in the discussion?

Given the timeframe of when a cohesive Billboard country music chart started, a lot of people whom country music history would be unimaginable without are minimized or left out entirely. Not much Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, The Carter Family, Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, Webb Pierce, etc. Bluegrass doesn’t factor in much; some artists with bluegrass roots broke through to the top, but for the most part bluegrass records remained a niche. Some major artists like Johnny Cash and Lefty Frizzell were already at least a little past their hitmaking prime by 1959 when the consolidated chart started, so they won’t come up as much as you’d think.

Plus for a long stretch there was at least one other major publication-based chart competing with Billboard, the Radio & Records chart. There was a lot of methodology overlap but just enough difference that sometimes a record would hit #1 on one but not the other. R&R was merged into Billboard circa 2006 so this isn’t really an issue anymore, but for years the R&R chart was used for various prominent syndicated radio country countdown shows. So you may well remember something as being a #1 hit that’s not mentioned here … we’re not ignoring it intentionally, it’s just a different chart. And the R&R stuff isn’t archived on Wikipedia or – far as I can tell – anything else easily accessible on the internet, so I can’t throw around examples or anything. I have some vague recollections of songs like Pat Green’s “Wave On Wave” and Steve Wariner’s version of “Tips of My Fingers” being #1 hits, but hell if I can prove it.  

And in 2012 the Billboard chart split again, into a “Country Airplay” ranking that only took airplay on country-specific stations into account and “Hot Country Songs,” which also factored in downloads, streaming, and play on non-country stations. If I can somehow power through the early 2000s in general, that’d probably be a good spot to eventually call it a day on this project.