It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Alabama, Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood, Mindy McCready.

By Jonny Brick

1990 Alabama – Jukebox in My Mind

Beginning with the sound of a coin being inserted into a jukebox and a record starting, Alabama deny needing those quarters and dimes because every memory is a soundtrack ‘to the days when you were mine’.

The song proper starts with the chorus, adds a single verse and returns to the chorus after reiterating the second half of the verse. The coin sound recurs, and the song starts again, doomed to replay for hours in the poor singer’s mind. There are four twangin’ bars of electric guitar in the middle of the song to soundtrack the sadness of Randy Owen’s narrator, driven ‘insane’ by memory rather than by ‘old melodies’.

1992 Alan Jackson – Love’s Got a Hold on You

Here’s a throwaway honky-tonker where the poor narrator calls up the doctor to tell him his symptoms: ‘my hands are sweaty and my knees are weak, I can’t eat and I can’t sleep’. The diagnosis is love and it is a helpless case.

The chorus breaks from the 4/4 rhythm of the verse by throwing in bars of 3/4. In the middle of Brent Mason’s guitar solo there is a very faint ‘ah!’ that recalls Bob Wills, the doyen of Western Swing; the song fits in snugly with those of that genre too, as advanced by Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam.

1994 Trisha Yearwood – XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)

Written by Matraca Berg and Alice Randall, this song was intended for Wynonna. Yearwood recorded it after their original choice fell ill and it’s a song that appeals to country’s enormous female audience who, like the protagonist, exist in their ‘daddy’s world’.

The first verse uses quickfire imagery – ‘phone rings, baby cries, TV diet, guru lies’ – to create a sense of busyness. Without a ‘live-in maid’, it falls on our hero to do housework and yardwork, with the knowing tag ‘if you get paid’. The kisses and hugs of the title refer to how the woman signed letters, something she cannot do as an adult. At least she has music from Aretha and Patsy to soundtrack her days, and wine to drink after a hard day balancing the demands of ‘love and money’.

1996 Mindy McCready – Guys Do It All the Time

By now, at least when it came to country music, American girls and women could take on the characteristics of men. Here, McCready gets in at 4am after a night of beers with the girls.

Now it is the woman’s turn to take her man’s money, leave her clothes lying around, watch baseball and leave the lawn unmowed. It is all delivered with a twang in her voice, which is matched by a seductive guitar solo, and the putdown ‘get over it, honey!’