Music

By 1991, Ricky Van Shelton had already amassed a fine collection of Billboard Hot Country Songs No. 1s, including “From a Jack to a King” and his duet with Dolly Parton, “Rockin’ Years.”

In August 1991, he released “Keep It Between the Lines,” written by Kathy Louvin (daughter of The Louvin Brothers’ member Ira Louvin) and Russell Smith (the voice behind the Amazing Rhythm Aces classic “Third Rate Romance,” which Sammy Kershaw would later release his own version of in 1994). The plaintive song depicts a father teaching his son to drive, and how the father’s wise instruction to “keep it between the lines,” applies to many different facets of his son’s life — including the next generation of fatherhood.

Co-written with Tom Douglas, Tim McGraw recorded this tender tribute to fatherhood, filled with vignettes about the ways his daughter has impacted his life. The song, released in 2006, details the “crooked little smile” that stole his heart, a sleepy voice at bedtime saying, “Daddy, love you more.”

Most of all, the song is a beautiful reminder that he’s always there to champion his daughter, evidenced by the key lyric, “Chase your dreams but always know the road that’ll lead you home again.”

The song is sentimental one for McGraw, who shares three daughters with wife Faith Hill.

This 1994 hit from Confederate Railroad nodded to a working-class father who shies away from fancy, expensive cars. When his son later buys a Cadillac on credit, his father declines to take the car for a spin, saying that “some things just glitter and shine.” Years later, when the father passes away, his son can’t help but notice the irony — with a tear in his eye and a laugh — that this “simple man simply laid to rest” was driven away in a big Cadillac.

Dave Gibson, who also co-wrote the group’s hit “Queen of Memphis,” co-wrote the tune with Bernie Nelson.

This 2011 Trace Adkins song excellently depicts how making lasting memories with your children is a key part of parenting. Casey Beathard, Ed Hill and Monty Criswell wrote this song about a father-daughter fishing trip. As his daughter chatters about ballet shoes, training wheels and kittens, her father is soaking in the moment, and the memory of spending time with his daughter.

The sweet video is more personal — given that one of Adkins’s daughters, Trinity, is featured in the clip.

Riley Green wrote this tender tribute, released in 2019. This song, which reached No. 12 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart, is a personal one for Green, who penned it about his grandfathers, and even listed them as co-writers on the song, because the composition meant so much to him.

Green told The Ty Bentli show that writing the song was a way to cope with the deaths of his grandfathers: “It was really just a song I wrote for myself as a way of dealing with it, and I just thought it would kind of be a cool way to pay tribute to them.”

This Shel Silverstein-penned classic was recorded by Johnny Cash in 1969 at California’s San Quentin State Prison, for his appropriately titled At San Quentin album.

In this vengeful tale, a son seeks justice against his father for leaving him at the age of three, and for giving him the traditionally feminine name, “Sue,” which resulted in the son being bullied as a child. The son sets out to find his old man, determining to kill him for giving his son “that awful name.” When he finds his father in a bar, a fight ensues, and eventually results in a resolution between the two men — as the father tells his son that he purposefully gave him that name, knowing the bullying would force him to “get tough or die.”

The two men reconcile, and even though the son grows appreciative of the name that brought him so much ridicule, he says if he ever has a son, he’ll name him…”Frank or George or Bill or Tom, anything but Sue!”

One of Jackson’s many solo writes, “Drive (For Daddy Gene)” was penned as a tribute to Jackson’s father Eugene, and became a four-week Country Airplay No. 1 for Jackson in 2002. The song vividly recalls memories of Alan’s childhood, as he and his father (who died in 2000) would take drives in an old truck they had worked on together, or times they would take a boat out on the lake. Later in the song, Jackson notes he’s sharing those same experiences with his own daughters, by letting them drive his Jeep around on their property — and he hopes that they too will someday look back on those memories with joy.

Masterful storyteller Guy Clark depicts the emotionally complex journey of grief following the death of a parent in this song, which he originally released on his 1983 album Better Days. The early lyrics unfurl the story of his father — a “good man” and a “lawyer by his trade” — who kept a Randall knife that had been given to him by his wife. Eventually, the knife gets put away in a drawer and stored there for years. After his father’s passing, the son struggles to express his sadness (“Well, I’d cried for every lesser thing/ Whiskey, pain and beauty, but he deserved a better tear”), until the moment he finds the long-stored away Randall knife.

Reba McEntire took this heart-wrenching song to the top 5 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in 1992. The song was written by Richard Leigh and Layng Martine, Jr., and McEntire pours every ounce of hurt, grief and love into one of her finest vocal performances. The song depicts a daughter grieving over the death of a father who worked hard and sacrificed for his family, but never told expressed his love for his family — specifically his daughter — through words.

The song earned McEntire a Grammy nomination for best female country vocal performance.

Paisley’s 1999 Country Airplay chart-topper, his first No. 1 hit, is a heartfelt tribute to stepfathers and father figures who step up to the plate to help parent a child with love. Paisley wrote “He Didn’t Have to Be” with Kelley Lovelace; the song was written about Lovelace’s then-nine-year-old stepson.

In accepting the song of the year honor for “He Didn’t Have to Be” at the TNN Music Awards in 2000, Paisley told the audience, “The greatest thing about country music is that you can write a song that you think is so personal that there is no way it could be anybody else’s story — and you find out we’re all the same.”

Texas native Dunn’s father was a preacher and painter, and Dunn initially set out to write the song as a Father’s Day gift for her dad — but she ended up with a song that would become her first top 10 hit on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart.

“Daddy’s Hands” details both the toughness and tenderness of her father: hands that were “folded in prayer,” hands that “patted my back for something done right,” but that were also “hard as steel when I’d done wrong.”

After signing with MTM Records in 1984, Dunn released the song two years later, and it became her signature hit. She moved to Warner Brothers in 1989. That same year, she earned the No. 1 country hit “Are You Ever Gonna Love Me.”

This ode to the enduring love of a father sent “Love Without End, Amen” to a five-week run atop Hot Country Songs in 1990. Songwriter Aaron Barker crafted the song when his son was going through a phase of teenage rebellion, including getting into a car accident.

“That was the night it really came to the reality that I had to be the dad — I couldn’t just be his friend, and I got on him pretty hard,” Barker previously told Bart Herbison of the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

The situation also inspired Barker to write about the duality of loving his son while still disciplining him. He landed on the key line, “Daddies don’t just love their children every now and then/ It’s a love without end, amen,” and applied that sentiment to the storyline of a father, a son who later becomes a father, and ultimately to the love of a higher power.

“The great thing about that is that it’s a real story. It’s not a made up, fabricated thing,” Barker added. “To have a story that I wrote about my son and have a messenger like George Strait pick it up and sing it, how great is that? … It reached millions of people, more than I ever would have reached with a pulpit, with a little bit of good news for everybody.”

The Judds paid tribute to a seemingly quaint, antiquated way of life in this 1986 release, written by Jamie O’Hara, and included on The Judds’ album Rockin’ with the Rhythm.

The song centers around the rapidly changing pace of modern life (“It feels like this world’s gone crazy”), as Wynonna and Naomi Judd sing of being drawn to an older, slower way of life — one where lovers stayed together, where families remained intact and where relationships were of paramount importance.

The song won The Judds a Grammy for best country vocal by a duo or group with vocal, and earned writer O’Hara a win for best country song.

The late Country Music Hall of Fame member Lynn crafted her most well-known, autobiographical hit with this tender ode, which crested on Billboard‘s country charts in 1970. The song’s title became not only Lynn’s sobriquet, but provided the title of both a book and movie based on Lynn’s life.

The song is a look into Lynn’s life growing up in Kentucky, with a father who “loved and raised eight kids on a miner’s pay.” Earlier in the song, Lynn sang that though they were impoverished, “We had love/ That’s the one thing that daddy made sure of.” Lynn wrote the song by herself, with production from Owen Bradley.

According to The Billboard Book of Number One Country Hits, written by Billboard contributor Tom Roland, Lynn wrote “Coal Miner’s Daughter” while waiting to do some work on a television show at Nashville’s WSIX studios. With a few hours to herself, Lynn went to her dressing room and began crafting the verses to “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” ultimately writing nine verses (six made it onto the vinyl).

Bradley said in the book of Lynn’s phrasing on the key line, “I was borned a coal miner’s daughter,” “That sounds like Loretta to me…I think that’s her charm. I may be wrong, but if she did ’em all perfect, she’d sound like a whole lot of other people.”

Conway Twitty earned a top 10 Country Airplay hit with this Gary Burr-written track in 1987. The song depicts a son who seeks reassurance of his father’s love and support throughout his life — first, as a child awoken after dreaming that his father had died, and later as a young man seeking to find his own way in the world. No matter the circumstance, his father offers a steady hand and a safe place to land.

“Ev’rything I do is because of you, to keep you safe with me … that’s my job, you see,” relays the song’s key line.

“That’s My Job” was the third single from Twitty’s album Borderline, and followed a string of country chart-toppers Twitty earned earlier in the the decade with “Tight Fittin’ Jeans,” “Slow Hand,” “Desperado Love” and “Don’t Call Him a Cowboy.”