Ten Albums "Everybody" Owned -- Except Me: No Fences

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Humpy hapday! It is a positively GORGEOUS morning here in the land of the horse race and baseball bats, and here I am sitting inside talking about music. That's okay, the weekly tournament comes later in the afternoon. Right now, it's time for another one of those monster-selling albums that I did not contribute to the success of. This one may surprise you...or not. No Fences - Garth Brooks Blech. See you tomorrow. Garth doesn't care. Seventeen million people bought this. He's not losing sleep over me. With his debut album Garth Brooks came along with a fine neo-traditional sound, following in the footsteps of people like Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, and Keith Whitley. Then Whitley died and rock started creeping back into country. Guess who was at the forefront of that? If you need to know, listen to "The Thunder Rolls." To quote Bob in The Blues Brothers, "That ain't no Hank Williams song!" From there, Garth was unstoppable. And commercial country music, as it had been defined since 1922, was fatally injured. To be fair, Garth the person is terrific. I have friends who've met him, and say he is as shy and humble as a gazillionaire as he was when he was struggling along trying to get people to listen to "The Dance." He even offered to buy the Grand Ole Opry from Gaylord to keep it from becoming a thing of the past. But his music? Blech. No Fences Recorded by Garth Brooks Produced by Allen Reynolds Released in 1990 I really did like this song the first 80,000 times I heard it: