It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Garth, John Michael Montgomery, George Strait

By Jonny Brick

1991 Garth – The Thunder Rolls

The four songs profiled in this week’s entry are all stone cold classics. This one is one of Garth’s sombre songs, whose reputation pivots around a video that CMT banned for documenting domestic violence. Tanya Tucker recorded it but never put it out, giving Garth the chance to imprint its message on to his enormous fanbase.

The song’s arrangement reflects in a musical manner how the city looks ‘like a ghost town on a moonless summer night’. There is menace in the air, with the lady waiting for the arrival of her husband, ‘praying it’s the weather’ that has caused his delay. She smells ‘a strange new perfume’ and the man ‘knows that she knows’; Garth has set up the betrayal by singing how he is returning ‘from somewhere that he never should have been’.

The lightning of the weather is imitated by the storm that ‘flashes in her eyes’ and the thunder that echoes ‘deep in her heart’, as ‘another love grows cold’.

1993 Garth – That Summer

And two years later, by now the biggest thing in American music let alone country music, Garth was on top again. This time he sings of when he worked for ‘a lonely widow woman hellbent to make it on her own’, and how she took a shine to him, ‘a comet burning bright’.

The second chorus changes the ‘she’ to a ‘we’. Garth’s narrator ‘learned so much’ from her and her ‘hungry arms’; he is reminder of her with every wheatfield he passes.

1995 John Michael Montgomery – Sold

Could a country chart-topper in 2025 focus on a man auctioning off his heart as if it were cattle? Montgomery rattles off the chorus in his desire to be at the ‘beck and call’ of a woman with ‘ruby red lips, blonde hair, blue eyes’.

His enthusiasm and bonhomie is infectious, especially in how he sings ‘goodbye’ at the end of the chorus, a resolution to the thrillingly fast-paced lyrics.

1999 George Strait – Write This Down

Here’s one of Strait’s most ebullient copyrights which, alongside Lonestar’s wedding ballad Amazed, dominated Summer 1999.

‘Use it as a bookmark,’ he tells his lady of a note that reminds her ‘I love you and I don’t want you to go’. The song opens, however, with her threatening to leave him. ‘I’ll swear under oath’ is his promise to her, which he is willing to carve in stone.