This episode of Cocaine and Rhyne Stones is the second episode in a three-part series on Harper Valley PTA.

If this is the first episode of the podcast you are listening to, I would recommend going back

and at least listening to last week's episode before this one,

even if you're just a huge Genesee Riley fan and you don't even know who Shelby Singleton is.

If you haven't heard last week's episode, you'll be missing out on a lot of context,

and I'm not going to be doing very much recapping.

At last week we spent some time looking at how far outside of the box Shelby Singleton

was willing to go for a hit song.

Now, are we sure we know what a hit song is?

How to define it?

It's safe to say any song that hits the top 10 could be called a hit, right?

Okay, this past May, when I began working on this podcast,

I spent about a week listening to every song to ever go number one on the Billboard Country Chart.

In chronological order from the first year the chart existed in 1944,

until this show's cutoff point in the year 2000.

I needed to make sure I'd heard them all to build a timeline of what happened

in the mainstream of country music in the 1900s.

There were quite a few songs I'd never heard before,

unless you've purposefully sat down to give yourself the same experience

or spent the past 70-something years of your life glued to country radio.

The same thing is true for you.

Number one songs, hit songs, completely absent from our personal experience of country music.

...