Quite a few country tunes in the 20th century ruffled some feathers here and there, and some even got banned from country music radio for a while. And many of those songs really didn’t deserve to be banned; they deserved to be praised. Let’s look at just a few songs that got the boot from country radio stations that really deserved better.
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“The Pill” by Loretta Lynn (1975)
There was no way we’d leave this track off our list of country songs that did not deserve to be banned. Loretta Lynn was ahead of her time. And her 1975 classic “The Pill” made a lot of conservative listeners at the time pretty angry. Lynn wrote this song as an ode to the freedom that birth control could offer women who did not want to be continuously pregnant in their marriages. This legendary song made it to No. 5 on the Hot Country Singles chart in the US. It likely would have charted higher if a number of radio stations hadn’t banned it.
“We Shall Be Free” by Garth Brooks (1992)
Garth Brooks dropped this country song back in 1992 on his album The Chase. There is a lot of social commentary to be found on this song. And it was a No. 12 hit on the country charts in both the US and Canada. That’s surprising, because the song was banned by some country radio stations due to what many interpreted as a lyric in support of LGBTQ+ causes. The line that caused issue was “we’re free to love anyone we choose.” Brooks clarified that the lyrics were part of the broader message of the song, which called for a world without racism, injustice, pain, etc.
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” by Kitty Wells (1952)
This song was a response to Hank Williams’ hit song, “The Wild Side Of Life”. That tune painted a not-so-pretty picture of what he considered to be “wild” women. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” by Kitty Wells clapped back, and some stations weren’t happy, namely because Wells called out the double standard between men and women on a cultural level. NBC and the Grand Ole Opry banned the song for some time. Though, that didn’t have much of an effect on the song’s charting success. It topped the Hot Country Singles chart in a short amount of time.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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