Songoftheday 1/12/23 - Well, I was rollin' wheels and shiftin' gears 'round that Jersey Turnpike, Barney stopped me with his gun ten minutes after midnight...
"Where I Come From" - Alan Jackson
from the album When Somebody Loves You (2000)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #34 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 5
Today's song comes from neo-traditional country music artist Alan Jackson, who had started the 2000s with a album of covers, Under The Influence, which landed a top-40 hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the autumn of 2000 with "It Must Be Love". By the end of that year, Jackson had released another studio album, When Somebody Loves You. The lead single from that record was an attempt to update the genre to the "new age" with "www.memory", which hit #6 on Billboard's Country Songs chart and just missed the top-40 on the Hot 100 by a handful of notches. That was followed by the title track ballad "When Somebody Loves You", which went to #5 on the Country Songs chart, and stalled under the halfway point on the Hot 100 at #52 in July of 2001. (It's my favorite single from the set.)
The third single went for comedy, with the skit song "Where I Come From". Written by Jackson and produced by Keith Stegall, the lyrics tell four episodes of a story that casts Alan as a truck driver going through three decidedly non-"Southern" places - New Jersey, Detroit, and California. In each, he's stopped by a "local" who noticed his accent, I guess, and that's where the title comes in. In Jersey, it's a cop, and in Detroit its a waitress at a diner, but it's the third one. Yeah, the third one.
I was chasin' sun on 101 Somewhere around Ventura And I lost a universal joint and I had to use my finger This tall lady stopped and asked If I had plans for dinner Said, "No thanks, ma'am, back home We like the girls that sing soprano"
Nothing like some "aw shucks down home transphobia" delivered in a sweet baritone to make the cringe go down. And the "tall lady" and "sing soprano"? I guess to be even the most accommodating he was trying to "act polite", but hell, he wrote these words. Shit like that (by the way that scenario never happens except in bigots' minds) gets people killed. I honestly can't forgive it. Even if the music and his voice are in passable form this song simply doesn't need to exist. I love me some Alan Jackson. I think he had a great influence in keeping traditional country alive through the pristine 1990s. But this is just pandering to something in insecure males that is just pathetic. Luckily, someone realized they shouldn't play this out on a music video, so none were shot...
Nevertheless, "Where I Come From" played on those base humors and became the biggest hit from the album, reaching the top-40 on the Hot 100 in October of 2001. The song spent three weeks at #1 on the Country Songs chart. The When Somebody Loves You album, released in November of 2000, peaked at #15 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, while topping the Country Albums list for two weeks, going on to sell over a million copies.
A fourth single from the album, "It's Alright To Be A Redneck", that stiffed on the Country Songs chart at #53, as another song of his which I'll be covering put it to radio bed. Another track from the album, "Three Minute Positive Not Too Country Up-Tempo Love Song", which is actually a better attempt at comedy from Jackson, got enough radio airplay to pop on the Country Songs chart for a week at #72. As I said, Alan will be back to the series really soon.
(2/10)
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Up tomorrow: Latin-pop nepo-baby wants to be your Idol.
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