1996 - I still remember when thirty was old ...

I realize that “go wrong” is a subjective term in music, but 1996 in hindsight looks like evidence that things don’t go wrong all at once. A lot of this stuff is downright non-excruciating. Some of it’s even pretty great. Kicking off with Bryan White and the mewling wholesomeness of “Rebecca Lynn” isn’t promising; it sounds entirely like a love song for children, by children, which is not the country music I’m looking for then or now. Faith Hill was pretty damn country-pop with “It Matters to Me,” but she sure sounded like an adult with adult problems, with an empathetic voice to drive it home. Shania Twain was also a full-grown adult but willing to abdicate it for big doses of sugar-rush escapism like “(If You’re Not in It For Love) I’m Outta Here!” We were entering the heavily-punctuated-title phase of Twain’s career, leaning hard on the big sexy pop moves; Twain was far from the vocal artistry of a Whitney Houston, but her voice did have a warm insistence to it that could carry the right hook. Her personal aesthetic continued to carry the day, a foxy dream-gal for the guys and a self-assured aspirational figure for the ladies.  

Aesthetics were kind of beside the point for Joe Diffie; he was more of a John Conlee for his day, a guy with a bighearted twang and regular-joe appeal. But he was already on his way back through the revolving door of mid-‘90s country; “Bigger Than the Beatles” was his fifth and final #1, a cheerful lightweight singalong that’s far from his “Ships That Don’t Come In” best. Diffie would ease back onto the honky-tonk circuit and writer’s appointments, a happily low-key part of the business for decades until late March of 2020 when he became one of the first reasonably-well-known entertainers to pass on from complications of COVID.

Martina McBride, meanwhile, was on her way up. “Wild Angels” finally snagged her a #1 after a couple years flitting near the top of the chart. She’d prove to be a long-haul presence, a tiny brunette with a huge voice that she was capable of tastefully reigning in if she just had to. “Wild Angels” gave it room to soar, though. And not to come off like some sort of leering dork (I know, too late), but between McBride, Hill, Twain, and others we’ll talk about soon enough, female stars with conventional, only-occasionally-overdone sex appeal were really having a moment in the mid-‘90s. The male stars who’d sort of hogged the focus at the turn of the decade were still in the mix: Alan Jackson’s simple, earnest “I’ll Try” was still good enough for a week at the top, and Garth Brooks scored his 15^th #1 with “Beaches of Cheyenne.” A midtempo country-rock ballad about the grieving lover of a gone-too-soon rodeo cowboy, it struck just the right balance of ambitious songcraft and fist-pumping catchiness.

Patty Loveless wasn’t the most obvious candidate to be hitting a mid-‘90s career peak; she’d been at it for about as long as some of the guys who’d already been replaced on the charts, and certainly could’ve been filed alongside other folks like Marty Stuart and Dwight Yoakam who split the difference between preserving traditions and pushing envelopes, building impressive bodies of work but mostly falling shy of the top spot. But she had a knack for finding just the right material for her voice, smart hooks like the chiming, resilient “You Can Feel Bad” that sounded timeless instead of self-consciously retro. Wynonna was a less-constant presence by this point: I don’t recall “To Be Loved By You” at all, and only dimly remember her previous few top ten hits, which is pretty rare for me regarding ‘90s country. It’s a nice song but hardly the stickiest, a slow-rolling river of dusky adult contemporary balladry, and Wynonna rolled out of the top ten for good immediately afterwards. She wasn’t done or anything, and she’s still not … eventually her mom Naomi was well enough for a Judds reunion tour, there’ve been albums exploring gospel and blues roots, she’s probably gigging somewhere as we speak. Her run of solo smash hits was sort of short but high-quality, so she shuffled on to the next chapters with her head held high.   

One leaves, one enters … Lonestar, a pack of native Texans that met up in Nashville and formed a band, scored their first #1 with “No News.” It was the sort of punchy, twangy but rock-inflected stuff Brooks & Dunn were regularly topping the chart with, made distinct by a bunch of off-the-wall lyrics about alien abductions and Grateful Dead tours, speculating about the whereabouts of a lover who ghosted the narrator before that was a popular way to put it. Fun song but not necessarily indicative of where the genre or even the band was headed; for better or worse, they’d be one of the more malleable acts of the era, amiably shifting gears from single to single in search of the next hit. There was plenty of gear-shifting in the racecar video for Shania Twain’s “You Win My Love,” the sort of song that seemed like an invasive pop trifle at the time but looking back just seems like some harmless fun.

Brooks & Dunn were about as consistent as hitmakers got in the day, without sacrificing their downhome charm in the process. They certainly had the clout to cut something like “My Maria” if they wanted to; obscure ‘70s Texas songwriter BW Stevenson wasn’t an obvious source to cover, but his lone pop hit was ripe for rediscovery and Kix & Ronnie were just old enough to have been influenced directly by that whole “Cosmic Cowboy” scene. Turns out Dunn could flex his hearty twang into a pretty fetching falsetto on command, giving the jangly folk-rock number the romantic reverie it deserved. It was a nice break from some of the generic stuff they’d been stumbling into. The evergreen George Strait had a shade more pop in his mix than before; stuff like “Blue Clear Sky” veered close to the NG/AG blend that was big on the mid-‘90s charts, but along with producer Tony Brown he always managed to steer the arrangements and instrumentation towards the country side of the mark. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever been as gifted as Strait at relentlessly hunting down hits while still keeping their dignity and integrity remarkably intact.

Tracy Lawrence scored a career highlight with “Time Marches On,” earning three weeks at the top with a number written by Bobby Braddock, the man behind such landmarks as “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” This isn’t quite that huge, but its attention to folksy detail in service of a song about the inexorable charge of the eras was a neat and memorable trick. Shania Twain took a moment to remind everyone, including possibly herself, that she was a country singer with the sweet little shuffle of “No One Needs to Know.” I don’t know if it was to scratch a sincerely-held artistic itch or just a cynical sop to the audience, but either way it’s pretty good. I can’t say as much for Ricochet’s “Daddy’s Money,” which is one of the biggest piles of dog shit to ever get cleared for airplay. A generic harmony act from Oklahoma, they somehow ended up with a piece of half-baked upbeat pandering wordplay from three lifer songwriters who were probably just hosing all the dumbest ideas off of their internal filters and catching them in a leaky bucket clumsily labeled “Daddy’s Money” so they could say they at least knocked out something on a late Friday afternoon in a Nashville cubicle somewhere. Hot damn it sucks.

Ugh, “Don’t Get Me Started.” Actually that song’s not half as bad; it was the only #1 for Rhett Akins, who was on a nice little young-gun run there for awhile. He’s probably better-remembered for “That Ain’t My Truck” (or possibly for being the father of currently-famous Nashville guy Thomas Rhett) but this one was OK as far as breezy recollections of youthful romance go. George Strait continued to be the king of relatively mature romance with stuff like “Carried Away.” Strait’s got that cool trick of not having what appears to be a huge vocal range so when he reaches for those big notes – which he invariably nails – it resonates like he’s reaching out to the listener as well. As with most good-to-great country music, it’s the gravity that makes it soar.

Tim McGraw was less concerned about steering clear of lightweight adult-pop moves, perhaps confident that his tenor was twangy enough to keep things recognizably country on stuff like “She Never Lets It Go to Her Heart.” A reverent ode to a faithful beauty, it’s got a certain warmth to it even if it’s not your cup of tea. But then it was time for some flat-out gimmickry again: newcomer Mindy McCready with a shameless Shania ripoff “Guys Do it All the Time.” She’d already cracked the top ten with the fine-enough “Ten Thousand Angels,” but shifted gears from sweetheart-next-door to over-the-top sass factory for an “Any Man of Mine” retread full of lame jokes about gals drinking beers, watching sports and ignoring home responsibilities. You know, like a guy! It wasn’t hard to play up the attractive blonde’s sex appeal for a video splitting the difference between empowerment and objectification. But it was hard to keep McCready healthy; if five decades of country songs haven’t depressed you by now, read an account of her life sometime. It’s a bleak and sordid chain of abuse (substance and otherwise), personal traumas and legal run-ins peppered by suicide attempts until a final one in February 2013, only 37 in age but tragically high in mileage. I’ve got no jokes about this one … I hope a couple of hit songs brought her some happiness while they could.  

Bryan White, for what it’s worth, finally scored with an upbeat tune: “So Much For Pretending” was more brisk pop jangle than country-rock, but it still felt like an attempt to broaden his audience past adolescent girls. They even butched him up a little for the video, hanging out in ballparks and stuff, probably aware that his image was inviting some homophobic disses that were unfounded by anything in his actual personal life. The relatively square-jawed Ty Herndon, meanwhile, was still on a modest roll with the NG/AG (but not-unpleasant) “Living in a Moment” gliding to #1, even though rumors were starting to creep around about him too. It took a little longer with these sorts of things back before widespread internet usage kicked in, but in Herndon’s case there was actually something to it: about two decades later, well after his career had hit the footnote stage, he went ahead and went public about being gay. He reclaimed a blip of relevance and a big dose of dignity; good for him, good for everyone to some extent, but a decade and a half later it’s still hard to imagine a mainstream country star hitting the prime of their career as an out gay male. So much for pretending, indeed.

Keeping the accidentally-relevant song titles going, Trisha Yearwood racked up another smash with the breezy, Linda Ronstadt-esque “Believe Me Baby (I Lied).” Clint Black continued to diverge from the ambitious takes on hard country that brought him fame in the first place: “Like the Rain” is a well-considered piece of songcraft, alternating between an easy-to-follow central metaphor and some twistier wordplay around the edges, with plenty of dynamic shifts and high notes to show off one’s vocal chops, twangy or otherwise. Black’s were still twangy as all hell, giving some down-to-earth grit to offset the arena-pop showiness of the whole thing. Patty Loveless came off like much less of a tryhard on the sweet-and-sour “Lonely Too Long,” a full-grown reflection on last night’s one night stand … you can almost see the awkwardly affectionate glances and smell the hazily-prepared morning coffee, it’s good stuff.  

Honestly there was plenty of good stuff to celebrate, despite the Ricochets of the world trying to ruin things. Deana Carter eased right out of the gate with “Strawberry Wine,” her first big single and one of the era’s best and most enduring hits. A beautiful blonde rehab therapist whose dad Fred had been a Nashville jack-of-all-trades, she shifted gears as her 30^th birthday neared and took an honest shot at singing stardom. Matraca Berg would be a (the?) go-to songwriter for female country stars for quite awhile and it’s clear why: the blend of romanticism and earthy reality is hard not to love, heightened by Carter’s slightly-cracked, emotionally-rich twang. Carter wouldn’t have a huge career, but she’s still touring off the strength of this one and deserves to be. It’s one for the ages.

Alan Jackson’s take on Tom T. Hall’s “Little Bitty” was a welcome breath of country-fresh air (with a touch of Cajun flavor in the fiddles and vocal fills) too. A cover of a late-career work by legendary singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall, it manages to be cute without being cutesy, folksy without being pandering, lots of neat little tightrope tricks that artists like Hall and Jackson pull off better than most. Newcomer LeAnn Rimes seemed like she was gearing up to be a hard-country aficionado herself: she’d made a hell of a splash early in the year with “Blue,” an old late-‘50s tune from Bill Mack that ended up on the desk of a singer barely in her teens. Rimes’ rendition was hailed by fans and media as some sort of precocious miracle, this cute Texas kid who could nail all the notes and most of the spirit of the Patsy Cline era, a sprouting resistance to modern country’s slow rotation back to crossover pop emptiness. Well, joke’s on you, fans and media. Somehow that song barely cracked the top ten (surprising in retrospect, I’d assumed it was a smash) and Rimes’ lone #1 to date ended up being the wan NG/AG anthem “One Way Ticket (Because I Can).” A generically OK kiss-off number, its two-week run bridged into 1997, enough to convince Rimes that her short-lived country wunderkind phase was best left in the ditch en route to slicker, poppier pastures. It’s probably just as well. She’s still fairly famous and barely 40. This is one of those rare cases in this project where I’d feel justified in saying it’s the artist’s only and/or last #1 so far.

THE TREND?    

The trend is the blend, I guess, as it often is in the Nashville mainstream. It’s a turn-and-burn kind of business but it’s more straggler-friendly than most. You need new songs, you want new stars, but there’s no rush to push the old guard offstage when they haven’t even quite hit middle age themselves. You don’t have to kick Strait and Garth and Alan out just because this new Shania thing’s working out; might wanna keep them around, just in case it goes the way of Billy Ray Cyrus. The urge to please everyone (or at least as wide a swath as possible) remains palpable, with different sounds and approaches and longevities getting their turn at the top. Even if I don’t like it all, then or now, I can acknowledge how that’s healthy. But you know that old cliché I’m probably paraphrasing about how the enemy of “great” isn’t “terrible,” it’s “good enough”? That sure seems to apply to the mid-‘90s, and ’96 is as glaring an example as any. You might take issue with my highly scientific rankings but, to my taste, you don’t hit any total stinkers until the bottom three or so. But: you also run out of anything resembling a classic past the top three (and two of those are covers of tunes by much older artists). Maybe country music was still the prevalent voice of Middle America, but that sure made it look like we all thought medium good was good enough.     

THE RANKING

1. Strawberry Wine – Deana Carter
2. Little Bitty – Alan Jackson
3. My Maria – Brooks & Dunn
4. It Matters to Me – Faith Hill
5. The Beaches of Cheyenne – Garth Brooks
6. Carried Away – George Strait
7. Wild Angels – Martina McBride
8. Lonely Too Long – Patty Loveless
9. You Can Feel Bad – Patty Loveless
10. Like the Rain – Clint Black
11. Blue Clear Sky – George Strait
12. I’ll Try – Alan Jackson
13. No One Needs to Know – Shania Twain
14. You Win My Love – Shania Twain
15. No News - Lonestar
16. Time Marches On – Tracy Lawrence
17. She Never Lets It Go To Her Heart - Tim McGraw
18. If You’re Not in It For Love (I’m Outta Here!!) – Shania Twain
19. Believe Me Baby (I Lied) – Trisha Yearwood
20. To Be Loved By You - Wynonna
21. Bigger Than The Beatles – Joe Diffie
22. Living In A Moment – Ty Herndon
23. Don’t Get Me Started – Rhett Akins
24. One Way Ticket – LeeAnn Rimes
25. Guys Do It All the Time – Mindy McCready
26. So Much For Pretending – Bryan White
27. Daddy’s Money - Ricochet
28. Rebecca Lynn - Bryan White

DOWN THE ROAD ...

At this point I usually just go straight to folk-rock stalwarts American Aquarium's two recent albums of '90s country covers to see if they did anything on these mid-'90s lists (fun as the project was, it's hard to remember for sure sometimes which ones they tackled). Sure enough, they did do "Strawberry Wine," and given the tongue-in-cheek nature of the records and AA's general (healthy) irreverence, it's not surprising they didn't bother gender-flipping the lyrics. Don't know whether that was meant to be amusing or just a winking "love-is-love" narrative twist (frontman BJ Barham does not have a remotely unmasculine voice), maybe it's both. They cover plenty of other women but most major recent hits by female artists aren't as strikingly, wistfully sexy as "Strawberry Wine" so they don't jump out at you quite so much.

A few unremarkable years after the cutoff point for this little writing project, Sam Hunt became a major player on the country charts with the massive hit "Body Like a Back Road" among others. Unabashedly coopting bits of pop, hip-hop, and EDM into his sort-of-suave, for-the-ladies approach, he probably had more to lose if he kept things ambiguous. But still, despite happening on the Bobby Bones Show his rendition of "Strawberry Wine" was dignified enough, recasting the narrator as the studly grandkid with the car and imagining he's pining just as much for his beautiful young summer love as she might be for him. Awww.