Songoftheday 11/14/21 - Been one tough week dead on my feet, but I've made plans for tonight...

 

 

"A Night To Remember" - Joe Diffie

from the album A Night To Remember (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #38 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 3

 

Today's song is from Joe Diffie, who grew up singing with his parents in Oklahoma before pursuing a music career as a side job to a series of blue-collar jobs. At first getting some work as a songwriter, he penned Holly Dunn's top ten hit "There Goes My Heart Again" before finally being signed as an artist to Epic Records in 1990. Joe's debut single, "Home", went all the way to #1 on Billboard magazine's Country Singles chart that summer. That was one of the songs on his debut album A Thousand Winding Roads that he didn't have a hand writing, as was the third single "If The Devil Danced (In Empty Pockets", which also reached the top of the chart. The album made it to #23 on Billboard's Country Albums chart. 

Diffie returned the following year with his sophomore effort Regular Joe, which was his first to reach the Billboard 200 sales tally at #132, going on to sell over a half million copies. He also appeared on Mary-Chapin Carpenter's Come On Come On album on the stellar love duet "Not Too Much To Ask", which went to #15 on the Country Singles chart and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals (his only Grammy nom), losing out to Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt for "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'". That was followed in 1993 by Honky Tonk Attitude, which sold over a million and got to #67 on the Billboard 200 while making the top ten on the Country Albums list at #10. While the second single from the record, "Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox (If I Die)", "bubbled under" the crossover Hot 100 at #122, the third, "John Deere Green", did the trick, finally placing him on the tally for the first time at #69, while getting to #5 on the Country Singles chart.

In 1994, Joe released his fourth record Third Rock From The Sun, which spent over a year on the Billboard 200 and was his highest rank there at #53, as well as on the Country Albums list at #6. The lead single, "Third Rock From The Sun", spent a pair of weeks at #1 on the Country Singles chart, while the second, "Pickup Man", spent four, his biggest hit on the country radio chart of his career. Both of those songs also made the Hot 100, the former at #84 and the second at #60, as well as the third single "So Help Me Girl", which spent two weeks at #2 on country radio and #84 on the Hot 100, and was covered by Take That boy-band singer Gary Barlow for a single that nearly missed the pop top-40 at #44 in 1997. 

Joe returned to the top of the Country Singles chart in 1996 with "Bigger Than The Beatles", the first single from his Life's So Funny album, but after that his songs were getting a cooler response at country radio. "Texas Size Heartache" did manage to place Diffie back in the country top ten at #4, but that was from his Greatest Hits set for Epic, and Joe had just one more album with the label. 

That album, A Night To Remember, was released in the summer of 1999. The title track, written by Max T. Barnes and Terry Welborn, was released that spring as the first single. produced by Don Cook and Lonnie Wilson, the midtempo song has Joe singing the part of a man spending an evening eschewing the real world to wallow in the memories of his ex, hence the play on words with "a night to remember". As is a lot of his songs, Diffie has a knack for finding and interpreting songs with a real story behind them, and even without a music video you can picture what's going on in the lyrics...

While "A Night To Remember" wasn't one of Diffie's big country radio hits, stopping at #6 on Billboard's Country Singles chart, the song was by far his biggest crossover success, landing Joe his first and only top-40 hit on the Hot 100 in August of 1999. Internationally, the single got to #10 on the Canadian Country chart. The Night To Remember album, released in June of that year, spent a week on the Billboard 200 sales tally at #189, while making it to #23 on the Country Albums list. 

Joe's next single from the album, "The Quittin' Kind", stalled down at #21 on the Country Singles chart, but did manage to place on the Hot 100 at #90. That was followed by "It's Always Somethin'", which did much better, rising to #5 on the Country Singles chart and #57 on the crossover Hot 100. 

After this album Diffie moved over to the Monument label (still under the same Sony Records umbrella as Epic was). His sole record on the imprint, In Another World, produced Joe's last top ten country hit, "In Another World" at #10, that also was his final placing on the Hot 100 at #66 in 2002. 

With Monument going bust after that album, Joe went indie, signing with Broken Bow for his next album, and what would be his last solo country studio album Tougher Than Nails, in 2004, which rose to #42 on the Country Albums chart. The title track "Tougher Than Nails" got to #19 on the Country Singles chart, while "bubbling under" the Hot 100 at #110. Follow-up "If I Could Only Bring You Back"got to #50, and was Diffie's last to make the Country Singles list. 

In 2010, Diffie recorded Homecoming: A Bluegrass Album for the Rounder label, which went to #10 on Billboard's Bluegrass Albums chart. Three years later, he joined up with fellow 90's hitmakers Aaron Tippin and Sammy Kershaw for the collaboration album All In The Same Boat, which popped on to the Country Albums list at #70. 

Diffie continued to tour, but sadly he was one of the first music celebrities to pass away from having the COVID-19 virus in March of 2020. 

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Here's Joe performing his biggest hit "Pickup Man" and "A Night To Remember" live in 2008...

and lastly, Differ in concert in Las Vegas in 2013...

 

 Up tomorrow: An industrial giant ponders into the abyss.