The Tractors "Fallin' Apart" (1994)

Album: The Tractors
Label: Arista Records


Nobody remembers, but for a while there, in the almost-anything-goes mid '90s, it looked like the Tractors might take over the country music world. Their debut album was one of country's biggest sellers of 1994: Got to #2, sold two million copies.

And basically, that was it "they only ever charted again with a Christmas album, and by 1998 they were already calling themselves Farmers In A Changing World in the title of an album that barely anybody heard.

Admittedly, they would've made for unusual stars: Steve Ripley, their guitar-playing frontman, was already 44 when they hit; he and his fellows had spent previous years backing up mom-and-dad rockers of the Bob Seger/Eric Clapton/Bonnie Raitt/Linda Ronstadt school.

Raitt, J.J. Cale, Ry Cooder, and Leon Russell had cameos on the one big album, and the music was defiantly backdated: Hank Williams and Chuck Berry covers, songs about the sounds of Tulsa (where the Tractors were from) and New Orleans.

The hit, “Baby Likes To Rock It,” had as much choo choo ch'boogie as boot-scootin' boogie in it, and wasn't a whole lot less cornball-kitschy as jump-blues remembrances go than Jump 'N The Saddle's pop hit “Curly Shuffle” in 1984 or Cherry Poppin' Daddys' pop hit “Zoot Suit Riot” in 1998.

Basically, the Tractors come off like a good-timey '80s-style college-radio-type roots outfit (think a less eccentric Rockpile) who briefly managed to convince Nashville gatekeepers that was enough.

Nonetheless, they were in the right place and the right time: Just two years later, the band BR5-49, mining a related brand of retro, never got higher on the country album chart than #33.

And the Tractors were even ahead of their time in a way, putting jokey asides and snippets between their harmonized upbeat dance numbers in ways somewhat anticipating Big & Rich a decade later.

The similarity is most striking in their best song, “Fallin Apart,” a jovial take on romantic and economic collapse that opens up rebutting Bobby McFerrin's “Don't Worry Be Happy.”