Tracy Chapman's 'Fast Car' is the country song we didn't know we had
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As a small-town kid in the 1980s, I fell in love with music via MTV and the ritual of transcribing the American Top 40 every Sunday. But I was just out of range of the nearest college radio station, and the grocery store where I worked as a stock boy played only country, so it took a while for me to be struck by two vastly different musical revelations.
The first came courtesy of the aforementioned grocery store, where my attitude toward country music evolved from haughty resentment to deep appreciation and love. , , , , Randy Travis, , Skip Ewing, , Keith Whitley, Michael Johnson... one by one, they'd transform in my mind from curiosities to discoveries to favorites. Sure, I'd recoil at the revanchism of a song like Hank Williams Jr.'s "," but the country hits of the late '80s were just as often forward-looking, especially sonically: Steve Earle dropped bagpipes into the hard-bitten Southern-rock epic "," Lyle Lovett worked heart and humor into the wry ruminations of "," Patty Loveless presided over a two-and-a-half-minute folk-pop masterpiece in "," and on and on. Those songs were, and are, perfect. Stop reading this and ! I'll wait.
