It’s The Nineties: Episode 6 –  Number Ones from Clint Black, Paul Overstreet and Doug Stone

By Jonny Brick

1990 Clint Black – Nobody’s Home

Alongside Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt and Garth Brooks, Black was one of the quartet who were marketed as the Class of ’89, guys with attitude and panache who were set to conquer country music in the 1990s.

This 100%-er, written when he had a fever, gave him a 100% record: three hits, three number ones. It’s a break-up song that takes the phrase ‘the lights are on but nobody’s home’ and runs with it. We get plenty of imagery: Black’s narrator puts on his jeans, boots and shirt; he wears ‘the same cologne’ and drinks his coffee as per usual; he grabs his ‘billfold, my pocket change’; and hops in his truck, which he still doesn’t own outright.

The catch is that ‘there’s pains in my head and pains in my chest’ (did I mention Black had a fever?) because he has lost his beloved. Other people comment on how he is ‘not the guy they’ve known’, and the arrangement fits well around the lament.

1991 Paul Overstreet – Daddy’s Come Around

Along with Don Schlitz, who co-wrote this number one with him too, Overstreet wrote Deeper Than the Holler and Forever and Ever Amen for Randy Travis. His success as a writer led to him getting a record deal out of it, much as how Ernest would graduate from a Wallen hitmaker to an artist in own right, or like Willie Nelson did in a previous generation.

To the accompaniment of plenty of twang, our narrator tells the story of a father whose wife gave him an ultimatum to play by her rules; she changed the locks to stop him ‘staying out all night drinking’, and by the second verse he’s doing the dishes and ‘might just get to be a daddy again’.

The message for a listener is to place priority on ‘meeting in the middle, working it out’ in a relationship or marriage. Given that few listeners in the early 1990s would want to be so domesticated, Kevin John Coyne of Country Universe calls the plotline ‘the least plausible’ of the year’s hits…

1992 Doug Stone – A Jukebox with a Country Song

…While he declares that this one ‘makes no sense!’

Having gone out for a drive to clear his head after his ‘first big fight’ with his own wife, Stone’s narrator heads to a favourite spot ‘out of town’ but the clientele is in ‘suits and ties…can’t believe my eyes’. Coyne’s point is valid: why do the bar’s new owners only redecorate the inside and not, at the very least, put up a sign to show they are under new management?

The chorus takes 80 seconds to arrive and it’s full of complaints about the ferns that have replaced the sawdust and swinging doors: ‘I guess I’m somewhere that I don’t belong,’ Stone sings in a voice that recalls Garth, John Anderson and Keith Whitley. And what’s with the ‘clown’ of a DJ who has replaced the jukebox with records that are ‘too fast, too long and too loud!’

Fun fact: Stone was born in Marietta, Georgia, the very same town as Travis Tritt.

1993 Doug Stone – Too Busy Being in Love

Yes, two Doug Stone chart-toppers on the same day a year apart! Gary Burr and Victoria Shaw wrote this soft rock ballad, the second single from the album From The Heart, which was so called because it was released after Stone had a heart bypass.

With a delivery that is 99% Garth, which makes sense because the songwriters have plenty of credits for him too, Stone wishes he had ‘given old Mr Shakespeare a run for his money’ by writing a ‘play so sweet and so funny’. If only he hadn’t been swimming in the love of his good lady, he could have written down ‘brand new phrases’ and ‘reached for a pen’.

Don’t miss the couplet that rhymes ‘the poem to make young lovers crazy/the movie for Hepburn and Tracey’.

Chad J Country plays one of Jonnys selection each week in his Wednesday Chad J Country radio show

Follow Jonny through The Nineties episode by episode.

For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).

Any Given Songday and Stuck at Two, the pair of series which celebrate the centenary of the Grand Ole Opry, can be found at CountryWOL.com