Robbed Hit of the week 1/31/22 - Montgomery Gentry's "Lonely and Gone"...

 

 

"Lonely and Gone" - Montgomery Gentry

from the album Tattoos & Scars (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #46 (three weeks)

 

This week's robbed hit comes from the country music duo Montgomery Gentry, two Kentucky natives who initially were in a band together along with Eddie Montgomery's younger brother John Michael in the early 1990s. After John left for what would be a very lucrative solo career, and Troy Gentry's attempt to do the same failed, Eddie and Troy came back together as Montgomery Gentry, and were signed to Columbia Records. Their debut single under the moniker, "Hillbilly Shoes", became a fan favorite, and while it stopped short of the top ten on Billboard magazine's Country Singles chart at #13, the raucous rock-country song sold quite well and went to a respectable #62 on the crossover "pop" Hot 100. 

For the duo's follow-up, Eddie and Troy released the closest thing to a "country power-ballad", "Lonely and Gone". The song was written by Greg Crowe, Dave Gibson, and Bill McCorvey of the country band Pirates of the Mississippi, who had a moderately successful run in the early 1990's, going as high as #15 on Billboard's Country Singles chart in 1991 with the reflective "Feed Jake", a song that really deserved better than it got and was one of the best songs of the decade in any genre. As opposed to the quiet mourning of that song, "Lonely And Gone" was a guitar-driven barn-burner of a break-up track. This time Eddie takes the lead vocal as the man whose neglect caused his woman to leave him, and he's wallowing in the aftermath. Troy comes in with good backup at the end, along with a guitar solo, becoming the prototype of the rock/country hybrid sound that currently dominates the genre...

While "Lonely And Gone" scored the duo their first top ten hit on Billboard's Country Singles chart at #5, the song stopped just a handful of notches short of the pop crossover top-40 in October of 1999. Internationally, the single went to #11 on the Canadian Country chart. Their debut album, Tattoos & Scars, was released in April of that year, and rose to #131 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #10 on the Country Albums list, going on to sell over a million copies.

The third offering from the album, "Daddy Won't Sell The Farm", was a fun line dance-friendly track in the spirit of Kenny Chesney's "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy". It was a moderate hit on the Country Singles chart at #17, while placing at #79 on the Hot 100. That was followed by another break-up song "Self Made Man", which rose to #31 on the Country Singles list. Lastly, a fifth single, the party swing number "All Night Long", a collaboration with country music veteran Charlie Daniels, also peaked at #31 on the Country Singles chart. The B-side of that physical single,a cover of Robert Earl Keen's  "Merry Christmas From The Family", also got to the Country Singles top-40 at #38, and ended up becoming a holiday standard in that format. 

(7/10)

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Here's the duo performing "Lonely and Gone" live in New Hampshire in 2005...