It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Ricky Van Shelton, Brooks & Dunn , Alan Jackson , Garth.

By Jonny Brick

1991 Ricky Van Shelton – I Am a Simple Man

‘Why don’t you give me a break!’ Van Shelton cries in a song that will chime strongly with its intended audience. He doesn’t think he’s ‘such a mystery’; ‘what you get is what you see’ foreshadows what Luke Combs would sing, roughly, three decades later.

This is the simplest possible sort of country song, pure radio filler. Van Shelton is a country boy who wants ‘a piece of land’ and ‘three squares in my frying pan’. The last thing he wants is to get into an argument with his beloved after a hard week at work.

1992 Brooks & Dunn – Boot Scootin’ Boogie

The first of two evergreen line-dance numbers profiled this time which are still played three decades later. Who could not turn down a trip to a honky-tonk with ‘whiskey, women, music and smoke’, a hangout for ‘outlaws, in-laws, crooks and straights’, who are all united on the dancefloor.

Ronnie Dunn sounds jubilant as he calls out the steps (‘heel, toe, do-si-do’) and throws his voice upwards each time he sings the title of the song. Given that it was climbing up the charts while Achy Breaky Heart was on top of it, this could not have been a better-timed line-dance smash. It makes room for a barroom honky-tonk piano solo as well as a couple of opportunities for people to play some air guitar.

1993 Alan Jackson – Chattahoochee

Really, Brent Mason should have got a featured credit here. Jackson blethers on about love and fishing while the guitar lick reoccurs to make the world a better place.

Like Strawberry Wine, this song has the narrator reminiscing about happier times down by the river in Georgia, sharing beer and conversation with friends; ‘never had a plan, just living for the minute’. He wants to consummate a relationship and put into practice the ‘little bout love’ he has learned, but his girl wasn’t ready’, so he instead settles for ‘a grape snow cone’.

1998 Garth – To Make You Feel My Love

In the 1990s, there used to be pop and country versions of the same song given to separate artists working in different formats. Aerosmith and Mark Chesnutt didn’t want to miss a thing, LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood wanted to be told how they could live, and Billy Joel had the Adult Contemporary version of this song, which was written by Dylan.

Because country music was still ghettoised, Garth got the country version. It’s one of Dylan’s plainer lyrics, with a direct set of stanzas. In a warm vocal tone, Garth offers ‘a warm embrace’ to a woman, promising he will ‘never do you wrong’.