Ricky Skaggs – Country Boy
The year is 1984. Country radio, often a bellwether of American cultural shifts, was vibrating with a complex energy. The…
Oak Ridge Boys – Make My Life With You
The year is 1984. The landscape of country music, once defined by the grit of Bakersfield and the weeping steel…
Bee Gees – Woman in Love
The year is 1980. The embers of the disco inferno, fueled so brightly by the Bee Gees themselves, were cooling…
Keith Whitley – Don’t Close Your Eyes
There are songs, and then there are cornerstones. Alan Jackson’s “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow” is decidedly the latter, a declaration…
Terri Gibbs – Somebody’s Knockin’
It is a sound that lives in the liminal spaces: the dim light of a late-night radio dial, the long,…
David Allan Coe – The Ride
It’s 2 AM on an interstate somewhere between nowhere and the next gig. The truck radio is tuned low, a…
Tanya Tucker – Two Sparrows in a Hurricane
The year was 1992. Country radio felt like a battlefield of fresh-faced neo-traditionalists and the new crop of polished, pop-friendly…
Kathy Mattea – Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses
The radio glowed a low, hypnotic orange against the pre-dawn blackness of the interstate. It was an hour when the…
Trisha Yearwood – She’s in Love with the Boy
The sound was a fire-engine red truck idling on a gravel road, waiting for a girl named Katie to climb…
George Strait – You Look So Good in Love (1983)
The hum of the highway at two in the morning is a universal sound of lonesomeness. It is, perhaps, the…