Robbed hit of the week 12/3/18 - "A Bad Goodbye" from Clint Black and Wynonna Judd...
from the album No Time To Kill (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43
This week's "robbed hit" comes from two huge country stars of the early 1990s that paired up for an emotional duet. Clint Black was born in the coastal New Jersey town of Long Branch, but his family up and left for the Houston suburbs of Texas before he even turned one. As one of the troubadours of the neo-traditional country music movement that included Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Travis Tritt, and yes, Garth Brooks, Black released his debut album Killin' Time in 1989. That record would spin off four consecutive #1 country hits beginning with "Better Man", with a fifth release, "Nothing's News", getting to a respectable #3. A year later, his second effort, Put Yourself In My Shoes, landed Clint four more top ten country singles, with two of them, "Loving Blind" and "Where Are You Now", topping the list. A third record, The Hard Way, earned him three more country top ten hits with "When My Ship Comes In" becoming his lucky seventh #1 airplay format hit. That made twelve top ten country entries out of nine tries in just his first three years out.
For the first single from Black's fourth disc, No Time To Kill, he paired up with Wynonna Judd, the former daughter half of the Judds, the duo that dominated the late 1980s country scene. Releasing her first solo album in 1992 (conspicuously dropping the "Judd" Madonna-style), her first three singles all hit #1 on the country chart beginning with "She Is His Only Need". Two of the songs from the record got some airplay enough to reach Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") chart, with "Need" hitting #25 and "No One Else On Earth" getting to #35 and becoming her first to break the pop Hot 100 at #83. At the time of Clint's No Time To Kill's release, Wynonna was also putting out her own second solo set Tell Me Why, with the title track going to #3 country, #24 Adult Contemporary, and #77 pop. But at the same time, their collaboration was climbing the charts, eventually becoming an even bigger hit. "A Bad Goodbye", written by Clint who produced the track with James Stroud, was an emotional breakup ballad that used the singer's deliveries to best effect. It was Clint's first to finally break the American pop chart...
While "A Bad Goodbye" scaled to #2 on Billboard's Country Airplay chart, the song stopped just a few notches short of the pop Top-40 in July of 1993. (It did hit #1 on the Canadian Country chart, though.) Four more songs from Black's No Time To Kill album would reach the top ten on the country airplay tally, with "A Good Run Of Bad Luck" going to #1, but none of them scraped the pop Hot 100 in America. He would eventually reach that level in 1999 with "When I Said I Do", another duet (with wife Lisa Hartman Black). As for Wynonna, she also continued a lucrative career through the decade, but never returned as close to the top-40.
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