It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Ricky Van Shelton, Toby Keith, Clint Black , George Strait

By Jonny Brick

1990 Ricky Van Shelton – I’ve Cried My Last Tear For You

Raised in the town of Grit, Virginia, Van Shelton was a hit-making singer between 1987 and 1992 before, as it always does, fashions changed.

Here, his narrator confidently declares he has ‘wasted my last year’ on a former flame who made his ‘pillow soaking wet’. The arrangement is appealingly old-fashioned, with violin, piano and pedal steel poking through with some merry melodies.

1993 Toby Keith – Should’ve Been a Cowboy

This was the monster smash which introduced the world to a big voice and personality who (fun fact) was promoted alongside Shania Twain in that year’s launch of new talent.

You should know the song well: written by Keith himself, it runs through familiar images of outlaws from TV and film. ‘I should have learned to rope and ride,’ Keith sings, ‘just like Gene and Roy’, ie Autry and Rogers, figures from five decades before. Marshal Dillon, who ‘stole a kiss as he rode away’, comes from Gunsmoke, a series which ran for 20 postwar years.

1995 Clint Black – Summer’s Comin’

This song’s chart run was timed to peak at the end of May. It’s a bit of fluff, driven by a heavy backbeat and some twangin’ guitars.

Black wants to ‘get that old work monkey down off my back’, hopping in the car and catching some waves, ‘humming like a heatwave’ as he does so.

1998 George Strait – I Just Want to Dance With You

This song was co-written by an Englishman, Roger Cook, alongside John Prine, who recorded it in 1986. Daniel O’Donnell also took a version of it into the UK top 20.

It’s a slow dance about slow dancing, with wire-brushed drums, fiddle, pedal steel and flamenco guitar sound tracking a gorgeous lyric full of warmth: ‘I got a feeling that you have a heart like mine…let it shine’, ‘if this was a movie we’d be right on cue’. Everything about the song is lovely, especially the declaration that twirling someone around the floor is ‘what they invented dancing for’.