Country
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Maren Morris returned to social media with an encouraging message following news that she filed for divorce from her husband Ryan Hurd. On Friday (Oct. 20), the singer-songwriter, 33, shared a positive quote through her Instagram account weeks after officially ending her marriage. The quote begins with partially scribbled-out text “It will be fine,” above […]
Morgan Wallen banks his 10th leader on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart as “Thinkin’ Bout Me” ascends from No. 2 to No. 1 on the ranking dated Oct. 28. The single increased by 5% to 32.5 million audience impressions Oct. 13-19, according to Luminate. The song was written by John Byron, Ashley Gorley, Taylor Phillips and Charlie Handsome, […]
It’s only October, but Jelly Roll is already doing his best to make the holidays a little happier for kids in Nashville. The country star, a native of nearby Antioch, Tenn., announced a toy drive in Nashville to help kids, in partnership with Coca-Cola, toy company Hasbro, iHeart and metro Nashville. In a video on […]
Lainey Wilson, who currently has a three-week No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hit with “Watermelon Moonshine,” has revealed her headlining trek for 2024. Wilson’s Country’s Cool Again Tour will launch in Nashville on May 31 at Ascend Amphitheater. Joining her for the 35-plus shows are openers Zach Top, “Don’t Come Lookin’” singer-songwriter Jackson Dean and […]
“The enthusiastic acceptance of the new Hot 100 pop singles chart as the standard of the industry since its inception three months ago has made it possible for The Billboard to complete its plans to streamline its record research operation,” a story announced in the Oct. 20, 1958, issue of Billboard (to be formal, then The Billboard).
“Record dealers, disk jockeys and music machine operators have made it abundantly clear that their prime need in the pop singles area is the freshest possible data about breakout singles as well as established best-sellers,” the story continued. “This singles information is completely provided by The Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.”
After the Billboard Hot 100 began with the Aug. 4, 1958, listing, two new genre charts arrived: Hot C&W Sides and Hot R&B Sides, ranking 30 titles apiece. Today, they thrive as Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, each 50 positions deep and incorporating the same streaming-, airplay- and sales-based methodology as the Hot 100.
Billboard had presented various rankings for the two genres previously, with R&B first measured by the Harlem Hit Parade, starting in the Oct. 24, 1942, issue. Country popularity was first reflected by the Most Played Juke Box Folk Records listing, beginning on Jan. 8, 1944.
The makeover in 1958, as noted that issue, marked “a new and expanded form of service,” with Hot C&W Sides and Hot R&B Sides the first all-encompassing song rankings for each genre. “Hot C&W Sides provides the fastest and most accurate coverage available on country music records, with the emphasis on ‘traditional’ rather than pop-style disks,” Billboard noted that issue. “The other new chart, Hot R&B Sides, performs the same service for the rhythm and blues field.”
The first track atop Hot C&W Sides? Ray Price’s “City Lights,” which reigned for 13 weeks. Multiple covers have been recorded, with Mickey Gilley’s likewise a No. 1 in 1975. Price amassed over 100 entries on Billboard’s country singles charts in 1952-89, including six Hot Country Songs leaders among 33 top 10s.
Bobby Day’s “Rock-in’ Robin” flew in atop the inaugural Hot R&B Sides chart, leading for three weeks. It, too, became a hit in a new form, as Michael Jackson’s version reached No. 2 in 1972. Like Price, Day was born in Texas; “Rock-in’ Robin,” however, stands as Day’s only charted R&B single.
Sixty-five years on, Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” leads the latest Hot Country Songs chart (dated Oct. 21, 2023). “Flashing signs invite a broken heart to lose itself in the glow of city lights,” a lonesome Price sang in his hit; sings Combs, “Won’t have to drive too far, just across the border and into the city …”
Meanwhile, Drake’s “First Person Shooter,” featuring J. Cole, launches as Drake’s record-extending 30th No. 1 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. On the Hot 100, it’s Drake’s 13th leader, tying him with Jackson for the most among solo males.
Dolly Parton is just a month away from releasing her highly anticipated first rock album, fittingly titled Rockstar, on Nov. 17, and fans are particularly excited to hear her collaboration with goddaughter and fellow superstar Miley Cyrus.
The duo are teaming up for a fresh rendition of Cyrus’ 2013 Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Wrecking Ball,” and in a clip shared exclusively with Billboard on Friday (Oct. 20), the country icon revealed why she wanted to include the track on her album.
“To involve Miley in my rock ‘n’ roll album, I thought, well, I have to do ‘Wrecking Ball,’ because I love Miley and I love the song,” Parton shares in the video. “So I said, ‘Will you come and do this for me?’ And she said, ‘Of course,’ but it actually came from the fact that we had done the song on NBC for her New Year’s show that she does every year from Miami.”
Parton continued: “We got such a response from how we did ‘Wrecking Ball,’ and combined my song ‘I Will Always Love You’ with that one. Since everybody loved it, and we loved it, I thought, why don’t I just do that combination and have her sing on my rock album? So I love my Miley and I love that song and I’m very proud of it. My version, and hers, and ours.”
Following its release on Aug. 25, 2013, “Wrecking Ball” became Cyrus’ first No. 1 single on the Hot 100 and spent three weeks atop the chart.
Beyond “Wrecking Ball,” Parton’s Rockstar album will feature a number of superstar collaborations with the likes of Sting, Stevie Nicks, Peter Frampton, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Chris Stapleton, Lizzo, Elton John, P!nk, Brandi Carlile, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and more. Check out the full track list here.
Watch Parton talk the inspiration behind putting “Wrecking Ball” on Rockstar below.
Former Billboard cover star Jelly Roll has become one of country music’s biggest breakthrough success stories over the past year, notching hits on Billboard charts in multiple genres. His 2021 song “Dead Man Walking” topped the Mainstream Rock chart. He followed with “Son of a Sinner,” which topped the Country Airplay chart and “Need a […]
Luke Grimes may be known for his role as the confident Kayce Dutton on the popular television series Yellowstone, but the actor was equally enamored with music while growing up in Ohio, as he listened to the Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings records his Pentecostal preacher father played at home.
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Still, Grimes says the prospect of releasing his own proper album was “terrifying” at first.
“There’s some imposter syndrome there. Sometimes it feels like I stepped into somebody else’s job for a minute,” he told Billboard backstage at Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Festival, where he performed alongside Ashley McBryde, The War and Treaty and Zach Bryan. Grimes took courage to step into the music world from singer-songwriter, and fellow Yellowstone actor, Lainey Wilson.
“It was inspiring to watch Lainey step into those [acting] shoes,” he said. “As much as I was afraid that people would naturally be like, ‘What is this guy doing here?’ I realized that no one on our set was like, ‘What is she doing here?’ Everyone was like, ‘She’s awesome and we’re glad she wants to do this.’ That took some of the fear away for me.”
Grimes’ foray into country music begins with his eight-song EP Pain Pills or Pews, out Friday (Oct. 20) on Mercury Nashville/Range Music. His deal with Mercury Nashville came by way of his manager, Range Media’s Matt Graham.
“Matt was a fan of what I do on the show [Yellowstone] and he heard that I play music and asked me to send him some stuff,” Grimes recalled. “I started sending him a few work tapes of things I had worked on, but we talked about music for two years before I did anything.”
Earlier this year, Grimes’ debut single, “No Horse to Ride” (which he wrote with Tony Lane and Jonathan Singleton) was featured in the mid-season finale of Yellowstone. The song peaked at No. 7 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart in January and has earned 22.3 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate data.
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His grainy vocal and the stripped-down production proved an early signal that Grimes’ brand of country music has more in common with the gruff, singer-songwriter fare of his influences than with the highly-polished, pop-infused country that has proliferated playlists and airwaves over the past decade. Grimes’ playlists are filled with music from Americana stalwarts Bryan, Steven Wilson, Jr. and Colter Wall.
“When I heard The Highwaymen on records my dad would play, they seemed like tough guys, but when you heard their music, it could be really vulnerable and I liked that,” Grimes said. “I love all kinds of music, but when I tried to write my own songs, it always came out folky and Americana. I love the whole process of songwriting, just a bunch of people in a room bouncing ideas off one another.”
Grimes is a co-writer on six of the project’s compositions, working with a slate of top-shelf Nashville writers and artist-writers including Lane, Singleton, Jessi Alexander, Randy Montana and Josh Thompson.
Grimes worked with producer Dave Cobb (known for his work with Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit) to craft the rugged-yet-revealing sounds that permeate Pain Pills or Pews. To gauge Cobb’s interest in the project, Grimes sent Cobb a work tape with “No Horse to Ride,” “Oh Ohio,” and “Playing on the Tracks.”
“For him, it was like, ‘I just need to hear the songs.’ He wasn’t going to do it unless there were [good] songs. Most of the demos were just me and the other writers and acoustic guitars, recorded in the writing room on an iPhone,” Grimes said. “That’s how Dave likes to work — It’s a thing in Nashville to make the work tape sound like a huge production. For Dave, it’s like, ‘Well that painting’s already painted.’ He wants a sparse canvas so he can add colors and do his own thing. It’s like taking a masterclass, just watching how he works. He always wants what is best for the message of the song and for the singer.”
“Oh Ohio,” written with Alexander and Jon Randall, pays homage to Grimes’s home state, while grieving the deterioration that has come with time, as the lyrics recall “before they parked the trains on the tracks and the parking lots grew weeds.”
“One of my favorite Ryan Adams songs was [2000’s] ‘[Oh My] Sweet Carolina,’ where he’s singing about his lifestyle, traveling all over the place and just dreaming of being home,” Grimes said. “I wanted to take a swing at a song like that, but with a twist, where it’s not all completely positive messages, but you still love the place. For a long time, I would go home to Ohio and it would feel like home still — but about 10 years after leaving, I went back and realized, ‘Oh, this is not home anymore.’ It was a really crazy feeling.”
Foy Vance, who is signed to Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man label, joins Grimes for “Hold On,” which Vance wrote with fellow singer-songwriter IIsey Juber.
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“Foy and Ilsey wrote that for a female [to sing], and Ilsey sang the demo, but I thought it would also be cool if a man sang it. It’s a very vulnerable message. I think those feelings of being afraid to fall head over heels for somebody are universal, but you don’t often hear men opening up that way. I played it for Dave and he loved it. And then we got Foy to sing on it with me.”
Grimes wrote the defiantly free-wheeling “Ain’t Dead Yet” with Aaron Raitiere. After sifting through notebook pages of ideas, they began discussing their shared musical inspirations, including Nirvana’s classic MTV Unplugged in New York album.
“We thought, ‘What if we wrote a Nirvana-sounding song? What if Kurt Cobain was a redneck from Kentucky, and had lived to be 70 years old and wrote a song for his wife? What would that sound like?’” Grimes noted.
Grimes’ love of music stems from years of playing drums, and later picking up guitar. When Grimes was 12, his parents’ church needed a drummer, so Grimes learned the instrument out of necessity. He played drums in various high school bands but was simultaneously drawn to acting.
“I would walk out of the theatre after seeing a movie and think, ‘I could do that,’” Grimes recalled. “I wasn’t able to do anything about it in Ohio — I could have done school plays, but that’s very different from films. Music came as another creative outlet at a time when I couldn’t do acting, but I fell in love with that, too.”
Grimes made his way to New York and then Los Angeles to pursue acting, which has included his role on Yellowstone, and roles in 2012’s Taken 2 and 2014’s American Sniper, as well as 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey and its two successors. But along the way, Grimes continued dabbling in music. Grimes was previously part of alt-country band Mitchell’s Folly, which released an album in 2008.
“I honestly don’t see them that differently,” Grimes says of making music and acting in films. “It’s a similar process, whether you are coming up with a song idea or bringing a character to life. The really good artists do kind of create a persona that’s bigger than life, like Hank Williams Jr. People want to see that when they come to a show, and there’s different levels of that, clearly. I’m still trying to figure out what that is for me and where that lies.”
Coming up, Grimes will follow the EP with a full album, and will make his second performance at California country music festival Stagecoach in 2024.
“Right now, I just want to get more comfortable performing,” he said. “There’s definitely some nervous feelings before getting onstage, and then halfway through, it gets really fun. I’m waiting for that halfway through feeling to start in the beginning.”
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“God Bless the U.S.A.” singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood has chimed in on Maren Morris’ recent revelation to The Los Angeles Times that she is leaving the country music industry behind, and is responding to Morris’ recent comments regarding patriotism in country music.
During a recent New York Times Popcast interview, Morris discussed songs that have recently topped the Billboard Hot 100, including Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” noting that the country music genre is “so steeped in, weirdly, like patriotism or quasi-patriotism, lots of like, overt hypermasculinity, Whiteness — that’s just like how it’s been from the jump.” Morris added, “After the [Donald] Trump years, people’s biases were on full display. It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music.”
She also told the Los Angeles Times that she feels “very, very distanced” from the genre.
In an opinion piece for Fox News, Greenwood took issue with Morris’ comments, writing, “To suggest that country music is ‘too patriotic’ is to not understand country music at all. It’s in our very name: country music. Our music is written for love of our country, our heart for America.”
He continued, “Because country music is so closely tied to the heartbeat of America, it also happens to reflect what’s happening across the country at the very moment. As a result, it’s not that politics has infiltrated country music, it’s quite the opposite — music ends up reflecting the very conversations happening across the country today … Political trends will change with the winds, but the core of country music remains: love of country, love of freedom, love of America. There’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s not going to change any time soon.”
Greenwood stated that he felt it would be “wiser” for Morris to stay in country music, “where she could continue the conversation and present her interpretation of what it means to be American today.” He also wrote that that stating that country music artists — or the country music genre as a whole — should be canceled because of disagreements with a song’s lyrics “is a slippery slope to censorship, free expression, and is out of line with the values of hard work, freedom, and grit that have made country music so great to this day.”
Billboard has reached out to Morris’ rep for comment on Greenwood’s opinion piece.
Morris has been a strong and outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ+ community. Earlier this year, she performed as part of the Love Rising benefit concert in Nashville, which was held to protest Tennessee legislation that would negatively impact trans youths. Morris also appeared on a cover of Billboard‘s 2023 Pride Issue alongside drag luminaries Eureka O’Hara, Landon Cider, Sasha Colby and Symone.
Jonas Group Entertainment (JGE) and the company’s founder Kevin Jonas Sr. have launched the Nashville-based Red Van Records, under the leadership of CEO Phil Guerini.
The label’s first signing is Nashville singer-songwriter Levi Hummon, who’ll release his first song under the label on Oct. 27, with a new version of his Walker Hayes collaboration “Paying For It.” Dan Pearson‘s Lakeside Entertainment Group will provide label services for Red Van Records.
JGE was founded in 2005 while Jonas was managing his sons, the sibling music group Jonas Brothers. The namesake for Red Van Records is the red van that the Jonas family originally toured the country in. “I can’t begin to guess how many hours and miles we logged driving the guys around the country in that van, but it represents the commitment you make to be in the music industry,” said Jonas Sr. in a statement. “We were always building and in motion and that’s the philosophy of Red Van Records.”
“With the values and ideals that are the foundation of Red Van Records, Levi is the perfect artist to launch our label,” Guerini said in a statement. “He is so well respected in the music community as a complete artist, and he has been tireless in his pursuit of music and taking it to the fans on the road. It’s the unrelenting pace and ‘firsts’ of the early days that may seem small at the time, but like the red van, they are the start of something truly special.”
“So excited to be working with Kevin, Phil, and honored to be Red Van Records first signing,” Hummon added. “I’m so grateful to them for dreaming big with me and I couldn’t imagine my music in better hands. Family is everything to me and they have made feel like part of their family since day one. This next chapter is going to be a wild ride.”
Jonas Group Entertainment’s artist roster includes Bailee Madison, Darby, Franklin Jonas, Harper Grace, Levi Hummon, LIVVIA, Mallary Hope, Mandy Harvey, Tayler Buono and The Band Light. Meanwhile, Jonas Group Publishing’s roster includes Franklin Jones and Terri Jo Box.
Hummon, the son of songwriter Marcus Hummon, previously issued his debut self-titled EP in 2016 through Big Machine Label Group, followed by 2018’s Patient via Iconic Records.