Dissecting "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool" by Barbara Mandrell (featuring George Jones) - 1981

We wrap up this podcast with as tidy a bow as we can muster, with our ultimate answer to our ultimate question of what makes 80s & 90s country music particularly work. We also tackle some listener questions, indulge in some personal divulgences, and try to send you away with some ideas on where to go from here. Thanks so much for listening to Nashville Anthems: Dissecting 80s & 90s Country Music.

We round out the 90s, and round out this podcast, by filling the most glaring hole in our back catalogue, with a signature song by the artist that dominated the end of the decade: the Dixie Chicks' (as we knew them then) 1999 hit, "Cowboy Take Me Away". The trio seem to re-channel some of the sentiment of their earlier hit "Wide Open Spaces" in this whimsical follow-up. But how have the protagonist's feelings changed since she left home in 1998, and how do the Chicks use theiir perfect blend ...

We start to round out the 90s with a lighthearted, neotraditional turn from a pre-I-Hope-You-Dance Lee Ann Womack. It's her hilarious late-1998/early-1999 hit: "I'll Think of a Reason Later". The slightly tongue-in-cheek lyrics set the stage, but how does Womack charm us with her down-to-earth delivery of them? And what does the Dolly Parton have to do with it?

1997 takes us back to a moment in time when it made sense for a Nicholas Cage movie to have two different divas record the same Diane Warren song for it. And we're taking advantage of the opportunity for a two-fer, as we look at both Trisha Yearwood's & LeAnn Rimes's parallel hits: 1997's "How Do I Live". Though the different renditions seemed like a big deal at the time, we admit that in hindsight, the two are nearly interchangeable, and neither is particularly "country" in any meaningfu...

Here's a bonus mini-episode on Dwight Yoakam's haunting 1993 hit "A Thousand Miles from Nowhere," by request from A Symposium of Popular Songs. Enjoy!