Songoftheday 07/30/24 -I take off time to time with those crazy friends of mine, head out on steel horses with wheels and we ride...

 

 

"Cowboys Like Us" - George Strait

from the album Honkytonkville (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #38 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 2

 

Today's song comes from country music icon George Strait, who had regained his momentum at the beginning of the 2000s with his twenty-first studio album The Road Less Travelled, which sent three singles to the top of the country radio charts and which also crossed over to the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 with "Run", "Living And Living Well", and "She'll Leave You With A Smile".  In the early summer of 2003, George returned with his next release on MCA Nashville, Honkytonkville. The lead single was uncharacteristically a cover song, albeit of a lesser known track recorded by Merle Haggard in 1986 as an album cut. Eleven years later, his son Noel released a version of "Tell Me Something Bad About Tulsa", and scraped the bottom rung of Billboard's Country Singles chart for a week at #75. Strait's take on "Tulsa" was also a relative disappointment, becoming his first lead single from a studio album to miss the top ten on the country radio chart at #11. (It deserved better.)

For the second try from the record, Strait put out "Cowboys Like Us", written by Bob DiPiero and Anthony Smith. The title is deceiving, with the lyrics trying to equate motorcycle riding to the grand agricultural tenet. He proclaims them "outlaws", which only apparently includes drinking (and probably driving afterwards) and making babies with their wives (or whomever). Unlike the pleasant ballads of his last album, this seems chock full of redneck sloganeering meant just to pump life into the promotion of the record after "Tulsa". And the production by Tony Brown, with the song being a waltz which totally clashes with the "outlaw biker theme", is pretty but incongruent. And the Spanish inserted in there smacks of the MAGA loonies clamoring about "the wall" while celebrating Cinco De Mayo. On the surface, it's inoffensive, but under the surface is a lot of what was going wrong in the genre, and beneath George for sure. They didn't even bother for a music video, but that didn't matter in the country world too much at the time, and the song did juice his fortunes...

"Cowboys Like Us" spent two weeks at #2 on Billboard's Country Songs airplay chart, while slipping into the top-40 on the Hot 100 for a couple of weeks at the end of December of 2003. The Honkytonkville album, released in June of that year, peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and topped the Country Albums list for two weeks, going on to sell over a million copies (his very successful tour concurrently with the album helped that greatly). 

A third single from the record, "Desperately", was a laid-back improvement, and while it also made the country top ten at #6, it stalled under the Hot 100's top-40 at #44. Meanwhile, another album cut, the comic party song "Honk If You Honkytonk", got enough unsolicited radio airplay to spend a couple months on the Country Songs chart with a high of #45

George will be back to the series.

(4/10)

 

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Here's Strait performing the song with Eric Church on his Cowboy Rides Away tour...

 

 Up tomorrow: Fast-lipped rapper takes the tempo down with the future fascist.