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Woman's World
Alabama’s Greatest Hits: 12 of the Country Band’s Top Tracks
By Ron Kelly,
22 hours ago
“I didn’t think there’d be anybody in the audience,” Alabama ’s Randy Owen coyly joked when he and cousin-bandmate Teddy Gentry took center stage at the CMT Giants: Alabama tribute show this August. “I have cried, I have laughed,” Owen added to the huge crowd — which included Blake Shelton, Little Big Town, Brad Paisley, Pam Tillis, Vince Gill, and other A-list artists — of the emotional roller-coaster evening that celebrated their success while also addressing the heartbreaking 2022 death of band co-founder Jeff Cook , Owen and Gentry’s cousin.
That trio, along with drummer Mark Herndon, “sold millions of albums, substantially broadening country music’s audience,” as the Country Music Hall of Fame notes , crediting the two-time Grammy winners with paving the way for such acts as Lonestar, the Mavericks, and Shenandoah. Last year, Alabama became just the fourth act — following Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney and Taylor Swift — to receive the CMA Pinnacle Award , the Country Music Association’s highest honor.
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12. 'Forty Hour Week (For a Livin')' (1985)
Let’s just say this song gets the job done. “[It] does an amazing job at recognizing workers from all walks of life, including coal miners and waitresses and mail carriers,” notes Whiskey Riff , adding that “Alabama just has a way of being able to perfectly appeal to the blue-collar worker and the heart of America.”
11 'Born Country' (1991)
“It was amazing to me to see…a totally different audience than we usually play for,” Owen told No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music about Alabama playing this song at a benefit for Paul Newman ’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Greenwich, Connecticut. “They sang [along to it] and I thought, ‘There’s nobody in Greenwich, Connecticut, who knows what country is, but I was wrong,” he shared with a laugh.
10. 'Feels So Right' (1981)
Owen, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013, turns up the heat in this No. 1 hit romantic ballad. With lines like “Your body feels so gentle, and my passion rises high,” his tune, as Songfacts notes , had “been described as ‘explicit’ and almost too intimate for radio” at the time of its release.
This No. 1 tune became Alabama’s biggest crossover success, reaching No. 15 on Billboard ’s Hot 100. “We’re country first and crossover second,” Gentry told Billboard . “If crossovers come, that’s great, but we would rather have a #1 country song than get lost in the middle of the country and pop charts.”
8. 'Dixieland Delight' (1983)
“It’s a good-time song. A fun song,” Owen told AL.com of his band’s tune, which has become a popular song played for the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide in Bryant-Denny Stadium. “I haven’t been to an Alabama game. I’m just proud they play it,” he added.
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7. 'If You're Gonna Play in Texas' (1984)
… you gotta have a fiddle in the band. Though originally a B-side, this gem gained so much popularity with radio DJs — and listeners — it became part of the band’s incredible string of 21 consecutive No. 1s on the country chart.
6. 'Take Me Down' (1982)
This peppy crossover hit No. 18 on Billboard ’s Hot 100 and went all the way to No. 1 on the country chart. “‘Take Me Down’ and ‘ The Closer You Get’ by Alabama were originally Exile songs. We…released those before Alabama but they didn’t really do much,” Exile’s Marlon Hargis told Eat Play Rock of the success Alabama had with this tune penned by his bandmates, Mark Gray and J.P. Pennington.
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5. 'My Home's in Alabama' (1980)
Though it only peaked at No. 17 on the charts, this “is what got us noticed in the music world and set us up for the next string of number-one singles,” Owen insisted to AL.com . “It was so different for its time,” added Gentry, who co-wrote it with Owen. “It was kind of in between Southern rock and country, you know? It was uniquely Alabama, I’ll put it that way.”
4. 'Song of the South' (1988)
“Sweet-potato pie and shut my mouth!” This Bobby Bare cover fared well when Alabama put their spin on it and took it to No. 1, with Wide Open Country noting that “ultimately, it’s a country music tune honoring the resilience of the American spirit without sugar-coating the difficult truth so many Americans faced while building the country we love today.”
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3. 'I'm in a Hurry (And Don't Know Why)' (1992)
Songwriter Roger Murrah ’s then-wife suggested he take this track to a pitch meeting with Alabama when he was about to leave without it. “They loved everything about it,” he told Backstory Song of the soon-to-be No. 1 tune, “[and] they had a monstrous hit on that song. And it was because my wife just accidentally mentioned it.… They ended up sending her a dozen yellow roses. So she loved that.”
2. 'Roll on (Eighteen Wheeler)' (1984)
Old Dominion ’s Matthew Ramsey, the son of a railroad worker, thanked Alabama for this song when his band performed it during the CMT Giants: Alabama special. “[It] taught me at an early age that even though you’re gone, you’re not absent [from] someone, especially your children,” an emotional Ramsey said of the tune, about a trucker toiling away on the road to support his family.
1. 'Mountain Music' (1982)
Owen proudly penned this iconic No. 1 hit for the band. “I prefer to have the time when you can just lay your heart out, when it just rips it apart, whether it’s a love song, or a sad song, or a happy song,” he told Alabama Living of his love of the songwriting process. “You just lay it out there, and nobody can say it exactly the way you feel it.”
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