It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Alabama, Garth Brooks, Mark Chesnutt and Jo Dee Messina

By Jonny Brick

1990 Alabama – Southern Star

The fourth number one from their album of the same name maintains the Alabama sound which has been refined to perfection a decade into their hit-making career. We’ve got mass harmonies, a guitar solo and a country-rock arrangement with both fiddle and a driving rock’n’roll drumbeat that indicates how the narrator ‘can’t slow down’.

As ever, he is a working man, ‘blue-collar branded’ and for whom ‘hard work is a way of life’. There’s also some lovely catnip for country radio because Randy Owen addresses the second verse to his ‘DJ friend’.

1992 Garth – What She’s Doing Now

This song was cut by Crystal Gayle, obviously as What He’s Doing Now, but propelled by his status as the biggest star in country music, Garth turned it into a four-week number one, his tenth, and the fourth biggest country song of 1992. By this point, he could boast the top-selling album in the whole USA, and on it were tracks which could equally be called Adult Contemporary, not least a cover of Billy Joel’s power ballad Shameless and this one.

Garth is infatuated by the memory of an old flame whom, last he heard, had moved to Colorado. He dials her old number but the person at the other end doesn’t recognise the name, and he ends up lying in bed thinking of how she’s ‘tearing me apart…emptying my heart’.

1997 Mark Chesnutt – It’s a Little Too Late

Just around the bend was I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing, the country version of the theme from the movie Armageddon, but this first single from his Greatest Hits became Chesnutt’s ninth chart-topper. He dropped out of high school to go pro, learning his chops in the Texas bar scene, a kind of Chris LeDoux figure who became a celebrated singer in the Garth mould.

This hit is similar to What She’s Doing Now in theme, in that it’s a heartbreak song, but delivered with a Footloose-type shuffle, major-key fiddle and hefty guitar riffs. Chesnutt’s narrator gets home at 2.45am to an empty bed, leaving him to rue how he ‘should’ve done this and I should’ve done that’. Although he is now willing to make a change to become ‘the kind of man she needed me to be, instead ‘she’s a little too gone’, his chance has passed. Schmuck!

1999 Jo Dee Messina – Stand Beside Me

Written by Steve Davis, Jo Dee’s third single from her album I’m Alright was her third number one. As so often when it comes to ladies in country music, Jo Dee is an avatar for her audience. Here she articulates the pain of being treated so badly by a man who left her ‘crying…outside of Boulder, he said he had to find himself out on the road’ (that’s the same city Garth thought his former flame was living in).

Working ‘two jobs’ in Memphis, she decides to be ‘strong’ and, as per the declamatory chorus which is in the pop-rock tenor of the time, she seeks a man to stand by her side, ‘not in front or behind me’. In verse two, she and her old beau meet again unexpectedly (‘his eyes were the same old blue’) and he asks what he can do to win back Jo Dee’s heart. Cue the chorus, and a plot twist in the middle section, where our independent woman is ‘true to her heart’. You might say it’s a little too late for him; you go, girl!!

Chad J Country will be playing one of Jonny’s selections each week in his Wednesday 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