Achy Breaky Heart – The Best of Billy Ray Cyrus

Achy Breaky Heart. Line dancing. Miley Cyrus. It’s hard to know which of the cowboy-booted, cosmos-transforming pop phenomena spawned from the creative and procreative loins of one man – Flatwoods, Kentucky’s favourite son Billy Ray Cyrus – has had the most culture-shifting impact on the world*. That’s more pop phenomena (three) than Achy Breaky Heart has chords (two).

“One-hit wonder” might be a tiny bit reductive for a bona fide country behemoth with sixteen albums, fifty-three singles and two Grammys to his name, so let’s call Achy Breaky Heart Billy’s signature song. That it was his debut single makes it all the more tantalising, because by rights Billy Ray Cyrus ought to have disappeared without trace. But his achy, breaky and curiously disembodied heart had other plans.

If the ‘achy breaky’ bit of the song title gives you the ick, you’re not alone. Duane Allen of the Oak Ridge Boys famously turned down ABH on grounds of lyrical cheesiness, and the song was first recorded by The Marcy Brothers under the more fromage-free Don’t Tell My Heart. Billy Ray had no such qualms however, blasting amateur songwriter Don Von Tress’s simple and sticky earworm into the stratosphere, inventing (okay, popularising) line dancing in the process with its do-si-do-bulous music video:

Despite its platinum status, the Nashville country establishment did not embrace ABH, and Cyrus found himself caught up in an ‘Is it country?’ row with among others Travis Tritt, who called the song ‘frivolous’ – a comparatively mild remark that blew up into a kind of antediluvian, pre-internet celebrity beef. When Lil Nas X found himself similarly embroiled with Music Row nearly thirty years later, who should step into the breach to give Old Town Road the country cred it needed? None other than Flatwoods’s own Billy Ray.

(*It’s Miley, isn't it.)