The Class of ’89 arrived during a major authenticity crisis in the genre. Technically, ’90s country began in 1989, the year four confident performers who would define the next decade (and beyond) in the genre debuted on the charts: Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, and Travis Tritt, known as the “Class of ’89.” “Their distinctive voices and nuanced music - at once undeniably modern and deeply rooted in the genre’s past - showed the world there was more to country music than overalls and tobacco spit,” the Tennessean declared in a 30th-anniversary reflection from 2019. “Jo Dee, we wouldn’t have this song without you making the original song a hit,” Swindell said when he accepted his first trophy. Hailey Whitters, winner of New Female Artist of the Year, did “Everything She Ain’t,” a song indebted to the Chicks’ 1998 album Wide Open Spaces - both the plucky sound of “There’s Your Trouble” and the lyrical come-ons of “I Can Love You Better.” Oh, and one of the night’s biggest winners? “She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” which took home Song and Single of the Year. Luke Combs sang the sentimental, fiddle-led ballad “Love Me Anyway,” which sounds like a lost Alan Jackson or Vince Gill cut. May’s ACM Awards were co-hosted by Garth Brooks, while his wife and fellow ’90s star, Trisha Yearwood, dueted her biggest hits with a new torchbearer, Carly Pearce. That’s all happening on top of splashy returns from a few of the period’s biggest names. “They’re thinking about the Jo Dee Messinas and the Tim McGraws and the Sammy Kershaws.”įrom top: Shania Twain in ‘96 Garth Brooks in ‘93 Photo: Paul Natkin/WireImage Photo: Paul Natkin/WireImage “Millennial or Gen-Z artists, of course they know who Waylon Jennings is and Hank Williams is, but they’re not thinking about those people as the legacy artists for their generation,” says Taylor Lindsey, head of A&R at Sony Music Nashville. Who isn’t right now? In Nashville, the style of the ’90s hasn’t been this cool since, well, the ’90s - the era when country finally figured out how to balance its dueling impulses toward old-fashioned integrity (fiddles, steel guitar) and mainstream appeal (pop-oriented hooks). On the record, you can hear Swindell grinning as he croons, “She’s a ’90s country fan - like I am.” Swindell and his co-writers spun it into “ She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” their own story song, where a guy falls in love with a girl after watching her sing Messina’s version at karaoke. Interpolating “Heads Carolina” wasn’t his idea - Rusty Gaston, CEO at Sony Music Publishing Nashville, suggested it knowing Sony already owned a cut of the publishing. 1s, he felt compelled to write an ode to the music he grew up with. “I remember being able to relate to songs, just knowing that, Man, that’s pretty crazy, somebody else out there knows how this feels.” After he became a singer and songwriter years later and bagged his first few No. “It literally was every artist,” says Swindell, now 40. Growing up in southwestern Georgia, he loved George Strait, Reba McEntire, and Tim McGraw. Those stories drew thousands of fans to country music in the ’90s, including a young Cole Swindell. Sanders’s lyrics told a crisp, affecting love story about a couple skipping town together - “We’re gonna get out of here if we gotta ride a Greyhound bus / Boy, we’re bound to outrun the bad luck that’s tailin’ us.” “There were a lot of great story songs in the ’90s,” Messina tells me. 2 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart, behind Brooks & Dunn’s “My Maria,” another of the era’s definitive hits.) Tim Nichols and Mark D. It was an archetype of the era’s sound, slipping traditional-country signifiers like mandolin, steel guitar, and organ into a pop-oriented anthem with a hefty chorus. In 1996, Jo Dee Messina’s debut single, “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” shot up the charts.
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