Robbed hit of the week 6/4/24 - Clay Walker's "A Few Questions"...

 

 

"A Few Questions" - Clay Walker

from the album A Few Questions (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #55 (two weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from country music artist Clay Walker, who was winning his struggle with multiple sclerosis since his diagnosis in 1996 and returned to the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in the summer of 2000 with his crossover hit "Chain Of Love".  The following year, Walker returned with his sixth effort, Say No More. Unfortunately, Giant was in the midst of closing shop, and the lack of promotion aided in the two singles stalling in the lower part of the country radio top-40, with "If You Ever Feel Like Loving Me Again" stopping at #27, under the parent company Warner Brothers imprint. After a contract-settling Christmas album the next year, Walker moved over to the RCA Nashville label.

Clay returned in 2003 with A Few Questions. The title track "A Few Questions" was another try at the moral story-song that made "Chain Of Love" a hit, but this time actually invoking God into the mix.Written by Phillip Moore, Ray Scott, and Adam Wheeler, the song poses the tough queries to the man upstairs like "How in this world can we put a man on the moon and still have a need for a place like St. Jude's", among other injustices. It's not a bitter song though, as in the chorus Clay's resigned to the unknowingness of religion with a Brad Paisley-like earnestness, which forms the basis of so many in that faith. The production from Clay with Jimmy Ritchey is reverent and brings in orchestral force to the ballad....

While "A Few Questions" climbed to #9 on Billboard's Country Songs airplay chart, the single stopped under the halfway mark on the all-genre Hot 100 in October of 2003. His album came in at #23 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #3 on the Country Albums list. 

The second single from the record, "I Can't Sleep", was a gentle ballad that spelled out a breakup. It also peaked at #9 on the Country Songs chart, and got as high as #61 on the Hot 100. A third release, the hokey "Jesus Was A Country Boy", made it to #31 on the Country Songs list. 

(6/10)

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Here's Clay doing a bare-bones rendition of "A Few Questions" from his house at the beginning of the pandemic...