It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Garth Brooks, Wynonna, Reba McEntire & Vince Gill, Trace Adkins
By Jonny Brick
1991 Garth Brooks – Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House
This song captures the might of Garth Brooks: with that delectable catch in his voice, he builds a metaphor for love around a game of poker, getting ‘a real hot hand’. The song’s title intimates that the pair are ready to have kids, and there is jubilation in every line: ‘she’s my little queen of the South’, ‘her strong country lovin’ is hard to resist’, ‘sometimes we fight just so we can make up!’ Plenty of lines are also delivered with a nudge and a wink, as Garth does on ‘we really fit together if you know what I’m talkin’ about’.
Before he became an Adult Contemporary/rock’n’roll star, Garth targeted the country market with songs that paint him as a horny George Strait. ‘I need that little woman like the crops need the rain,’ he sings in one verse, while in the next he seeks ‘some country music on the radio’ with which to accompany some bedroom activity.
It took me until writing this piece to realise that its writer Dennis Robbins had cut the song before Garth did, taking it to number 71 on the country charts. Garth modelled his version on that one, shifting it down a key and adding extra grit to some of the lines. I am sure Robbins has enjoyed the royalty cheques.
1992 Wynonna – She Is His Only Need
In the mid 1990s, Bruce Feiler wrote a pivotal book called Dreaming Out Loud which focussed on the rise of Garth and Wynonna. The latter superstar endured a much more complicated background and career, but like Garth she maintains a loyal and large following.
Written by Dave Loggins, who also provides backing vocals, this was Wynonna’s first single as a solo artist after vast success as part of The Judds. The duo went on hiatus after mum Naomi suffered from hepatitis, leaving daughter Wynonna to start a solo career. It’s a story song about ‘small town loner’ Billy and his beloved Bonnie, to whom he dedicates his life, going ‘overboard, over the limit’. The pair marry and have kids; Billy works his way up the career ladder and Bonnie stays home and works ‘until she couldn’t tie her apron’.
Eventually the pair sit ‘on the front porch rockin’, but even in his dotage Billy still wants to make Bonnie happy, ‘didn’t matter how simple or how much; it was love’. The song is a meditation on the nature of love, which is at its best ‘when it’s strong enough to keep a man going’, and is all the better for being sung by a female narrator.
1993 Reba McEntire & Vince Gill – The Heart Won’t Lie
It’s a common music industry move to match a hot female singer with an equally hot male singer, sticking them together and giving them a copper-plated copyright to sing that cannot fail to hit the top. In the 1990s, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill took It’s Your Love into the all-genre top ten.
Earlier in the decade, Reba McEntire and Vince Gill were paired up here for a ballad co-written by Kim Carnes, complete with a blockbuster video that was a homage to An Officer and a Gentleman and that took four days to film. Reba’s narrator reminisces about ‘empty fears’ of picking up the phone, how ‘sometimes life gets in the way’, while in his verse Gill sings of ‘old desires’ and ‘scattered ashes’. The chorus notes the ‘foolish disguise’ that former lovers must adopt when they see one another ‘across the room’.
Fun fact: Reba originally wanted to do the duet with Kenny Rogers, but abandoned the plan because their voices couldn’t sync up. Recently announced Country Music Hall of Fame member Tony Brown suggested that Gill, whom Kevin John Coyne of Country Universe calls the best harmony singer in country music since Emmylou Harris, do more than just sing backing vocals, and Reba had her 17th country chart-topper. Her next one, Does He Love You, would be an even bigger copyright.
1997 Trace Adkins – (This Ain’t) No Thinkin Thing
An Opry member who may be best known for appearing on the Celebrity Apprentice, Adkins had his first number one with this song. It was written by Tim Nichols and Mark Sanders, who also wrote Heads Carolina, Tails California together.
‘Love ain’t supposed to make sense’ is the opening gambit of a song whose vocabulary is more sophisticated than the average country radio song: ‘the only logical conclusion’, ‘chemical, physical, emotional devotion’, ‘mathematical equations, self-help psychology’. There’s even a reference to the hemispheres of the brain (‘left brain, right brain’), although the song goes down easy thanks to a paucity of chords, a Brent Mason guitar solo and a singalong melody.
Chad J Country will be playing one of Jonny’s selections each week in his Wednesday show
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