Nashville sound

The Nashville sound originated during the mid 1950s as a subgenre of American country music, replacing the chart dominance of the rough honky tonk music which was most popular in the 1940s and 1950s with "smooth strings and choruses", "sophisticated background vocals" and "smooth tempos". It was an attempt "to revive country sales, which had been devastated by the rise of rock 'n' roll."

Origins

The Nashville sound was pioneered by staff at Decca Records, RCA Records and Columbia Records in Nashville, Tennessee, including manager Steve Sholes, record producers Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley, and Bob Ferguson, and recording engineer Bill Porter. They invented the form by replacing elements of the popular honky tonk style (fiddles, steel guitar, nasal lead vocals) with "smooth" elements from 1950s pop music (string sections, background vocals, crooning lead vocals), and using "slick" production, and pop music structures. The producers relied on a small group of studio musicians known as the Nashville A-Team, whose quick adaptability and creative input made them vital to the hit-making process. The Anita Kerr Quartet was the main vocal backing group in the early 1960s. In 1960, Time magazine reported that Nashville had "nosed out Hollywood as the nation's second biggest (after New York) record-producing center."

Keith Urban (1999 album)

Keith Urban (also known as Keith Urban II) is the second studio album by Australian country music artist Keith Urban, released on 19 October 1999 through Capitol Nashville.

Prior to this album, Urban recorded a self-titled album in Australia in 1991 and another in the US as a member of the short-lived band The Ranch. The US album is Urban's breakthrough album, as it produced four singles on the Billboard country charts. In order of release, the singles were "It's a Love Thing" (number 18), "Your Everything" (number 4), "But for the Grace of God" (number 1), and "Where the Blacktop Ends" (number 3). It has sold 980,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. The album track "A Little Luck of Our Own" was originally titled "Luck of Our Own" as first recorded by singer-songwriter Dale Daniel on her 1993 album of the same name.

Track listing

Personnel