Historically, country music hasn’t made it to the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US as often as songs in the pop, rock, and hip-hop genres. That all changed on this day in 2023, when three separate country tunes claimed the very Top 3 spots on the chart.
As a result, 2023 was really the year of country music on a mainstream level. There were country music performances at the Grammy Awards, and musicians who typically produced music in other genres seemed to be releasing country music en masse following that year.
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Three Country Songs Absolutely Dominated the Hot 100 Chart in 2023
Three country and country-pop songs made it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2023, surprising anyone who was familiar with the chart.
At No. 1 was Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town”, a country tune released in May of that year. The song was a controversial hit, with some critics and even contemporaries of Aldean claiming that the song promoted violence. Aldean defended himself by saying that the song simply referred to “the feeling of community” that he grew up with.
The No. 2 spot on the Hot 100 track was occupied by Morgan Wallen’s tune “Last Night”. The country pop tune was released as a single from his 2023 album One Thing At A Time and also made it to No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart. It set more than a few records for Wallen. Most notably, “Last Night” was the first song to gain one billion streams in the United States within just a single year.
At No. 3, Tracy Chapman’s folk classic from the late 1980s got a modern-day country revival in 2023. The original version of “Fast Car” is a folk rock tune, but country star Luke Combs covered the song and gave it more of a country flair. The song is about ending the cycle of poverty and making it as a working-class person.
Both Chapman and Combs famously performed the song at the Grammy Awards that year, and the rendition is quite stunning. Combs’ version hit No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart, making Chapman the first black woman to score a No. 1 country hit with an original solo composition.
Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
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