1991
September 28 · Billboard 200
The week a computer proved country music had been underestimated for decades
The real story here isn't Garth Brooks. It's a piece of software.
For most of Billboard's history, the album chart ran on store owners phoning in what they thought they'd sold. That method had a bias built into it, and the bias ran against records bought by adults in places that weren't New York or Los Angeles. In its issue dated May 25, 1991, Billboard switched over entirely to SoundScan — actual point-of-sale data, scanned at the register.
The chart rearranged itself immediately. Adult contemporary rose. R&B rose. And country, which the industry had been treating as a regional niche, turned out to be enormous. Garth's thirteen-month-old No Fences, which had been drifting in the lower reaches of the chart, jumped.
So when Ropin' the Wind arrived on September 2, 1991, the measuring instrument was finally honest. On the chart dated September 28, it became the first country album ever to debut at number one on the all-genre Billboard 200 — knocking off Metallica's self-titled record, which had held the spot for five weeks. It moved 300,000 copies in week one and topped both the pop and country album charts simultaneously, a first.
Brooks was 29. He'd had no pop radio airplay at all. Capitol Nashville president Jimmy Bowen, who'd been in the record business since 1953, told the Los Angeles Times he hadn't seen a reaction like it since Elvis.
Ropin' the Wind spent 18 weeks at number one across four separate runs and was certified 14× platinum. Nothing about country music's popularity had actually changed that September. The chart just started telling the truth about it.
On-air break · ~30 seconds
"Here's a piece of history most people don't know. Back in 1991 Billboard changed how they counted album sales — they stopped calling store owners and asking, and started using actual scanner data from the register. And the whole chart flipped. Turns out country music had been way bigger than anybody in the industry believed, they'd just been counting it wrong. That September, Garth Brooks' 'Ropin' the Wind' became the first country album ever to debut at number one on the all-genre chart. It knocked Metallica out of the top spot."
Garth Brooks — Ropin' the Wind, produced by Allen Reynolds · First country album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, September 28, 1991
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1998
September 23 · CMA Awards, Grand Ole Opry House
A session guitarist who'd been written off wins the whole night
Steve Wariner was discovered at seventeen, playing a club in Indiana, by Dottie West — who talked him into joining her band. Later he met his idol Chet Atkins, who hired him as a bass player and eventually got him signed to RCA. That's not a career origin story so much as a country music apprenticeship.
He spent the eighties and early nineties as one of those artists other musicians rated far higher than radio did. By the mid-nineties he'd left Arista and put out an instrumental guitar record, which is generally not the move of a man chasing hits.
Then he and Billy Kirsch sat down to write. The two of them were headed somewhere else entirely until they shifted toward a story song, and Kirsch mentioned a title his wife Julie had come up with: holes in the floor of heaven.
The song walks through two deaths — a grandmother who dies when the narrator is one day shy of eight years old, then a wife, years later — and turns rain into the tears of people watching from above. Wariner produced it himself. It was his first solo single in three years.
It reached number 2. Letters poured in. It got played at funerals, and, as Garth Brooks later pointed out to him, at weddings too.
On September 23, 1998, at the Grand Ole Opry House, it won CMA Single of the Year and Song of the Year. Wariner walked away with three CMAs — more than anyone else that night, in a field that included Garth Brooks, George Strait, Tim McGraw, and Shania Twain. He swept the ACMs the same year with the same song.
On-air break · ~25 seconds
"Steve Wariner got his start at seventeen when Dottie West heard him in a club and put him in her band. Then Chet Atkins hired him to play bass. By the mid-nineties, radio had pretty much moved on — he'd just put out an instrumental guitar record. Then he wrote this one with Billy Kirsch, off a title Kirsch's wife came up with. September of '98, he walks into the CMAs and wins more awards than Garth Brooks, George Strait, and Shania Twain. Three of them, in one night."
Steve Wariner — "Holes in the Floor of Heaven," written with Billy Kirsch · CMA Single and Song of the Year, September 23, 1998
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1998
September 23 · Song of the Year nominee
The song two women released on the same day, by accident
Sitting in the Song of the Year field that same September night was a Diane Warren song with the strangest history of any record in the nineties.
Warren wrote "How Do I Live" for Con Air, and she wrote it with LeAnn Rimes in mind. Rimes — fourteen, coming off "Blue" — cut it, and Warren got it to the film's producers. They passed. Accounts differ on why: her age, or a reading they found too pop. Either way they went looking for a more seasoned voice and landed on Trisha Yearwood, then 32.
Yearwood has always said she had no idea Rimes had already recorded it. She pointed out the industry convention she'd have followed if she'd known:
"The Nashville rule is, if somebody has a song on hold, you don't record it."Trisha Yearwood, to the Chicago Tribune
Rimes's label hesitated to put out a rejected recording. Warren pushed them to release it anyway. So on the same day in May 1997, two versions of the same song went out from two different labels — Curb and MCA Nashville — and radio stations started running call-in polls asking listeners to pick a side.
Both won something. Yearwood's version was in the movie, won the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, and got the Academy Awards performance slot. Rimes's version crossed over and became a phenomenon — it spent 69 weeks on the Hot 100, a record at the time, peaking at number 2 and never quite getting past Usher.
Yearwood, for her part, was blunt about the matchup she never asked for: she said she wouldn't have chosen to go up against LeAnn Rimes.
At the CMAs on September 23, 1998, the song lost Song of the Year to Steve Wariner.
On-air break · ~30 seconds
"Here's a wild one. In 1997, two of the biggest women in country music released the exact same song on the exact same day — and neither one of them planned it. Diane Warren wrote 'How Do I Live' for the movie Con Air, with LeAnn Rimes in mind. Rimes cut it. The movie people said no, too young, and hired Trisha Yearwood instead. Nobody told Trisha there was already a version. So both came out, same day, different labels, and radio stations had listeners vote. Trisha won the Grammy. LeAnn's version sat on the pop chart for 69 weeks."
Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes — "How Do I Live," written by Diane Warren · Both released May 1997 · CMA Song of the Year nominee, 1998
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Tim McGraw — "Indian Outlaw"
1994 · Curb Records
0
Times you've
heard it lately
This one isn't forgotten because it flopped. It's forgotten because it worked, and then everyone quietly agreed to stop playing it.
Tim McGraw had spent roughly four years in Nashville getting nowhere. He wanted to cut "Indian Outlaw" for his first album and couldn't get anyone to agree — not the label, not his own producer James Stroud. He's said Byron Gallimore liked it, but he couldn't talk the other two into it.
When it finally came out in January 1994, it did exactly what he'd hoped. It hit number 8 country and crossed to number 15 on the pop chart — real crossover, rare for a country act at the time. It sold over 600,000 copies and opened the door to Not a Moment Too Soon, his first number one album.
It also drew immediate, serious criticism. The lyric is a pile of Hollywood-Western clichés — wigwams, tom-toms, peace pipes — and Native American groups said so plainly. The chief of the Cherokee Nation at the time called it offensive. Billboard's Larry Flick, reviewing it, worried it would set relations back two centuries. Stations in major markets pulled it.
McGraw, 26, didn't back down. He told the Los Angeles Times that you're never going to please everybody, and that a song is often a means to an end for protesters rather than the real issue. Asked whether he'd object to a song painting Louisiana as full of ignorant rednecks, he said that happens in country music every day.
Thirty-two years later he's more reflective about it. On a 2026 podcast he said he understood the controversy and wasn't upset by it, and described telling Native American leaders that if going after his song raised awareness, they were welcome to use it that way. He still plays it — including, he says, at tribal casinos where the people booking him specifically want to hear it.
Either way, it's gone from the playlists. A song that was on every radio in America in 1994 and is on almost none of them now.
On-air break · ~25 seconds
"Remember this one? 1994, Tim McGraw's first real hit — number 8 country, number 15 pop, which for a country act back then was almost unheard of. Nobody wanted him to record it. Not the label, not his producer. He fought for it. And then it came out and Native American groups came down hard on it, and stations in the big markets pulled it off the air. He's talked about it recently — says he understood why people were upset, and he still plays it live. But you don't hear it on the radio anymore."
Tim McGraw — "Indian Outlaw," written by Tommy Barnes, Gene Simmons, and John D. Loudermilk · Released January 22, 1994
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