Robbed hit of the week 9/13/21 - Billy Ray Cyrus' "Busy Man"...
"Busy Man" - Billy Ray Cyrus
from the album Shot Full Of Love (1998)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #46
This week's "robbed hit" comes from country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, who came out of the gate massively with his debut single "Achy Breaky Heart", which rode the country line dance craze and became a top ten hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 "pop" chart in the summer of 1992. His first album Some Gave All spent a whopping seventeen weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 all-genre sales tally, going on to sell over nine million copies. Five of the record's tracks made the country radio charts. But with the runaway success of "Achy Breaky Heart", came the downside; considered a novelty because of the line dance connection more than any lyrical or musical content, Cyrus was pigeon-holed into the sideshow role, as mainstream radio who even gave "Achy" some spins relegated him to "one-hit-wonder" status, and Nashville, probably jealous of his sudden rise, also put Billy on the side. Despite his second album It Won't Be The Last spending a week at #3 on the Billboard 200 and selling over a million copies, and lead single "In The Heart Of A Woman" going to a respectable #3 on the Country Singles list as well, the track stopped down at #76 on the pop Hot 100 in 1993, and would be his last top five country radio hit for five years. Cyrus' third release Storm In The Heartland stalled at #73 on the Billboard 200, and the title track only managed to get to #33 on the Country Singles chart, while "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #108. His next effort, Trail Of Tears, did even worse, with neither of the two singles even making the country top-40. Despite Billy taking the high road and not falling on the novelty trope and putting out serious music with weighty subjects, radio just had such a prejudice against him, to the point that his record company Mercury pre-emptively put out The Best of Billy Cyrus - Cover To Cover, foreshadowing his release from the company. However the compilation did manage to get a moderate country radio hit with "It's All The Same For Me", which peaked at #19 on the Country Singles list in 1997.
Cyrus owed one more album to Mercury, and Shot Full Of Love was released in the fall of 1998. The lead single was a cover of Jude Cole's top-40 pop hit from 1990 "Time For Letting Go". His version stiffed with Nashville, toppng out at #70 on Billboard's Country Singles list. The follow-up, however, ended up breaking Billy's bad luck streak. "Busy Man", written by Bob Regan and George Teren, was a simple parable about a man too involved with his career to appreciate what really should be important, his family. Luckily, in this case there's a happy ending with him coming around by the weekend. It's nothing big and flashy and ambitious, and perhaps that's why it got the shot on radio that it did...
"Busy Man" returned Cyrus to the Country Singles top ten, spending three weeks at #3. The song also climbed the pop Hot 100, and while it was his biggest success since "Achy Breaky Heart", it stopped short of the top-40 in March of 1999. Internationally, the single went to #5 on the Canadian Country chart. The Shot Full Of Love album, released in November of 1998, didn't ride on the success of the single, though, peaking at #33 on Billboard's Country Albums chart and becoming his first studio set to miss the Billboard 200.
A third single from Shot Full Of Love, "Give My Heart To You", stopped just short of the top-40 on the Country Singles radio chart at #41.
(5/10)
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