It’s The Nineties: Number Ones from Mark Chesnutt, Travis Tritt, Collin Raye and Brooks & Dunn

By Jonny Brick

1991 Mark Chesnutt – Brother Jukebox

This is the first of Chesnutt’s eight number ones, the last of which was overshadowed by Aerosmith’s gargantuan rock version of I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. This is a cover of a song written by Paul Craft which was a very minor hit in 1977 for Don Everly. Keith Whitley also cut it (in the key of C rather than Chesnutt’s D-flat), but with Whitley deceased, Chesnutt had the hit with a version which became the sixth biggest country song of the year.

Signed to MCA, who were flush with Garth cash, Chesnutt’s voice was in the neo-traditional ballpark, a hybrid of Alan Jackson, George Strait and Garth himself. We open with the chorus and the famous rollcall of ‘the only family’ Chesnutt has left: ‘brother jukebox, sister wine, mother freedom, father time’.

As with dozens of other country songs, the lonely narrator sits alone in a café because ‘it beats staying at home’ in a house without his former beloved in it; he thus gets to be with his ‘new next of kin’. It’s sad yet tuneful, like all the best country music.

1993 Travis Tritt – Can I Trust You with My Heart

As Garth rode to international megastardom, Tritt’s fame was more domestic. This was his third number one, which he wrote with Stewart Harris, and it’s a Garthian ballad; like The Thunder Rolls, it even had a music video that got people talking.

Tritt’s narrator needs to check that his new friend (‘that certain someone’) will assure him that he can ‘cast my cares upon you…count on you to walk me down that long and winding road’. It’s a wedding song, as shown by mentions of ‘a new love full of passion’ and ‘a perfect union’. This song would guide ‘two lonely hearts’ who might ‘surrender’ to one another.

1995 Collin Raye – My Kind of Girl

Here’s the other kind of love song: a chugging rock’n’roll tune sung with stadium rock passion by Raye. Country and rock have always been cousins in some capacity, and the rise of Garth (whose influence on country in the 1990s is more or less unsurpassed) led to more rock’n’roll sounds landing on country radio. This was no surprise: contemporary listeners had come of age in the 1960s and 1970s and were accustomed to massive drums and anguished singers reaching to the bleachers, just as today’s country fans are conversant with hip-hop flow and ebonics.

At Country Universe, however, Kevin John Coyne wrote that he had finally found a chart-topper that was ‘actually painful to listen to’. Perhaps it was just overplayed at the beginning of 1995, where it shared radio playlists with Pickup Man by Joe Diffie and Gone Country by Alan Jackson. Coyne summarises the song as ‘a bewildering collection of character traits and comeback lines’: the lady buys women’s magazines, listens to Merle Haggard, supports the Atlanta Braves, quotes American writer William Faulkner and remembers James Dean.

Raye loves how, like him, she likes ‘to colour outside of the lines, we’re peas in a pod’. So befuddled is his head that he repeats how it is ‘spinning like a Tilt-a-Whirl’ at an amusement park. The backing vocalists add heft to the track by repeating ‘my kind, my kind of girl’ in the song’s coda.

1997 Brooks & Dunn – A Man This Lonely

It speaks volumes about Kix & Ronnie that no duo has properly replaced them since they stopped making new music in 2009, and indeed they have become both a big live draw and country treasures, even as they approach retirement age (retirement? Pah!)

Written by Dunn with Tommy Lee James, this is one of their slower numbers, and was a follow-up to their first song not to reach the top ten. Our poor narrator Dunn had his world ‘torn in two’, but he has found salvation in his new woman, ‘someone to hold’ and ‘somewhere to go’, and she has proven that love is not ‘a lie’. There is a key change.

The song did not make the cut for either of the recent Reboot compilations that rework the pair’s catalogue, perhaps because Brooks & Dunn do not include it in their setlists. They really should.

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.

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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