• “Tennessee Whiskey” plays well with songs in the country, Americana, singer-songwriters, rock, R&B, and soul genres.
• Stapleton’s music has a close relation to Etta James and other R&B/soul legends.
• “Tennessee Whiskey” has 146 million spins to date at Pandora.
• Stapleton has 4.4 million artist stations, 5x his Facebook likes and 19x his Twitter followers.
Chris Stapleton, whose third album,
From a Room; Volume 2, was released today, struck cross-genre Pandora gold with his cover of “Tennessee Whiskey,” a song that first hit the top ten in the ’80s. In baseball, “Tennessee Whiskey” would be called a five-tool player. In high school, it would traverse a diverse handful of cliques. In other words, “Tennessee Whiskey” is
so Pandora: a song that’s spun alongside the music of myriad genres because Pandora’s algorithms can predict which songs go together and be liked by a particular listener.
Turned into a soulful ballad by the Kentucky native, “Tennessee Whiskey” was written by Dean Dillon, a former recording artist who penned dozens of songs for George Strait, and Linda Hargrove, a ’70s recording artist. David Allan Coe was the first to record the song in 1981. Two years later, “Tennessee Whiskey” was a hit for the late, great George Jones. Over two decades later, Stapleton put his stamp on the classic by infusing elements of soul and R&B into his country roots. Rolling Stone critic Will Hermes called it correctly in the first sentence of his
review of
From a Room:Volume 1, “Chris Stapleton is a soul singer.”
On the surface, there appears to be no relation between “Tennessee Whiskey” and soul and R&B artists such as Etta James and Otis Redding. The songs tell a different story, however. Take James, for example, a singer whose own career spanned R&B, soul, blues, jazz and rock.
Listen to “Tennessee Whiskey” and then listen to James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind.” Both songs have the 12/8 rhythmic meter, are in the key of A, and have a chord progression often found in classic gospel and soul music. Stapleton and James have a similar singing style, too. The two are incredibly similar (as has been
noted previously). So, if you like “Tennessee Whiskey,” you’re probably going to like “I’d Rather Go Blind,” and vice versa. Pandora knows as much. Nearly as similar is James cover of “Misty Blue” — country singers Wilma Burgess and Eddy Arnold each recorded hit versions the ‘60s — that appeared on her final album, 2011’s
The Dreamer.
