Achy Breaky Heart – Billy Ray Cyrus

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Achy Breaky Heart – Billy Ray Cyrus

This one's my brothers fault. He heard this first on Capital radio '92, we happened to be going on holiday to America and this song appeared on one of the in-flight radio stations on the plane. We saw the name of the song in the listings but had to wait for it to come round on the tape, no streaming in them days. I remember hearing it and thinking straight away what an earworm it was, it's like a total nursery rhythm of a lyric. It became the soundtrack to that holiday and I have had a love hate relationship with it ever since. My brother bought the album 'Some Gave All' this is from, all the other songs on there are 'real' country songs with very powerful messages. So it always annoyed me that Billy Ray Cyrus was only ever known by this one song, other albums of his have some amazing songs on there, I especially love 'Trail of Tears', 'Where My Gonna Live' and 'Busy Man'. Billy Ray has an amazing voice, he's better known as an actor and Miley's dad than for his music, that was until he featured on Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' a few years ago.

This song falls into the same thing as the amount of people who only know Dolly Parton from the song 9 to 5, her least sounding Country song. But I expect neither of them care to much, both songs being enormous hits and played all over different radio genres. Billy Ray was the villain of Country music for quite a while, he didn't fit into the '90s mold and Nashville tried to run him out of town. Then as always as tastes and sounds changed through the years and the music moved even further away from traditional country, songs like this become standards.

This song also helped launch the whole line dancing movement, a type of dancing with crowds set out in rows doing a set routine. Again I really got the fun in it all, but if you didn't know the routine you had to sit each out each dance, I prefer to do what I want when I dance. Ye Haa.

Weirdly all these years later my football team adopted this song, changing the words into a chant about one of our players, all very random. But if you like Country music you could do a lot worse than look at Billy Ray's back catalogue.

Favourite lyric : Or tell your brother Cliff who's fist can tell my lips / He never really liked me anyway

Location: Rayleigh, UK

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