Songoftheday 6/6/24 - Well I never once backed down from a punch, well I'd take it square on the chin...

 

 

"Tough Little Boys" - Gary Allan

from the album See If I Care (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #32 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 5

 

Today's song comes from country music artist Gary Allan, whose fourth studio album Alright Guy had landed the singer his first two top-40 crossover hits on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "The One" and "Man To Man".  In the autumn of 2003, Allan returned with his fifth release, See If I Care. The lead single from the record was the morality ballad "Tough Little Boys". Written by Harley Allen and Don Sampson, the lyrics spell out how when battle-toughened men become fathers, all that vulnerability comes to the surface. The writer's seems to veer towards the more traditional "protector" role, as the general stories of first steps and getting bussed to school make way for the final verse which has Gary singing about walking their child down the aisle. The production is a little "Nashville sterile", a detour from his normal troubadour facade. But music is a business, and radio and the public bit, and Allan found himself with another #1 country hit. The music video brings the patriotic fervor in play with shots of military personnel, but he doesn't go heavy-handed, and Gary's gentle delivery is far from the fist pumping infecting the genre...

"Tough Little Boys" became Allan's third top-40 hit on the Hot 100 in October of 2003, while spending two weeks at #1 on Billboard's Country Songs airplay chart. The See If I Care album, which came out in September of that year, came in at #17 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #2 on the Country Albums list, spending almost two years on the latter and going on to sell over a million copies.

Both Gary and the album will be back to the series.

(6/10)

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Here's one of the writers, Don Sampson, performing the song live...

Up tomorrow: The first of one of the biggest one-two punches in hip-hop history, which hit the top-40 first but the #1 spot second.