About 1/10th of the playlists I've done in this series over the years have been tribute posts directly following a musician's death. And really it's for me more than anything else, I enjoy having an excuse to savor someone's discography after their life has ended and do my little part to memorialize them, even if I didn't know their music well when they were alive. With COVID-19 tearing through the world and killing a horrifying number of people, including greats from the music world as well as every other profession, I particularly want to honor people who've fallen victim to it, to not let them get lost in the shuffle all the headline news that's constantly happening.

Some of those musicians who've already been killed by the coronavirus wouldn't really make sense to cover in the Deep Album Cuts format (Ellis Marsalis, Cristina, Hal Willner, among others). But I already made a Fountains Of Wayne playlist for Adam Schlesinger, and am working on a John Prine one, and sadly I'm sure there'll be others. But right now, let's talk about Joe Diffie, who had 17 top ten hits on the country charts, 8 of which charted on the Hot 100, with only 1999's "A Night To Remember" scraping the Top 40. I hadn't heard a lot of his music during his lifetime, back when he was making hits I didn't know any current country stars beyond Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson. But I found myself really enjoying Diffie's catalog recently.

Joe Diffie deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Just A Regular Joe
2. I Ain't Leavin' 'Til She's Gone
3. Show Me A Woman
4. My Heart's In Over My Head
5. Wild Blue Yonder
6. I Can Walk The Line (If It Ain't Too Straight)
7. There Goes The Neighborhood
8. My Give A Damn's Busted
9. Tears In The Rain
10. The Grandpa That I Know
11. I'd Like To Have A Problem Like That
12. Almost Home
13. Back To Back Heartaches
14. Life's So Funny
15. I Got A Feelin'
16. Are We Even Yet
17. Good Brown Gravy
18. What Would Waylon Do featuring George Jones
19. Better Off Gone
20. Cold Budweiser And A Sweet Tater
21. Wrap Me In Your Love
22. Hurt Me All The Time
23. Willin' (live)
24. Here Comes That Train

Tracks 2,7 and 12 from A Thousand Winding Roads (1990)
Tracks 1 and 13 from Regular Joe (1992)
Tracks 6, 20 and 24 from Honky Tonk Attitude (1993)
Tracks 5, 11 and 17 from Third Rock From The Sun (1994)
Track 21 from Mr. Christmas (1995)
Tracks 9 and 14 from Life's So Funny (1995)
Tracks 3 and 15 from Twice Upon A Time (1997)
Tracks 22 from Greatest Hits (1998)
Tracks 8 and 10 from A Night To Remember (1999)
Tracks 4, 16 and 19 from In Another World (2001)
Track 18 from Tougher Than Nails (2004)
Track 23 from Live At Billy Bob's Texas (2009)

Joe Diffie went to #1 on the country chart with his debut single "Home" and was off to the races, and it amused me that his first album also had a deep cut called "Almost Home." Diffie co-wrote some of the songs on each of his albums, including a few hits like "Honky Tonk Attitude" and "Is It Cold In Here" and about 1/3rd of this playlist, but he got a lot of his material from Nashville pros.

Diffie also wrote hits for Tim McGraw and Holly Dunn, and some of the songs on his albums were re-recorded by other artists. "Tears In The Rain" was on McGraw's debut album and "The Grandpa That I Know" was recorded by Patty Loveless, while "My Give A Damn's Busted" was turned into a #1 hit by Jo Dee Messina in 2005. And "There Goes The Neighborhood" previously appeared on my Shania Twain deep cuts playlist, but Diffie recorded it three years earlier.

George Jones is my favorite country singer, so I have a soft spot for anybody who's audibly influenced by The Possum, and Diffie had that in spades, most evidently on songs he had a hand in writing. Diffie was one of several younger singers who made a cameo on Jones's 1992 sngle "I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair," and Jones returned the favor with an appearance on Diffie's Waylon Jennings tribute track a decade later. The single that best reflect's Jones's influence on Diffie is "New Way (To Light Up An Old Flame)," but I also hear it on the deep cuts "I Ain't Leavin' 'Til She's Gone" and "I Got A Feelin'," which are also just from a songwriting standpoint two of my favorite tracks here.

In 2013, Jason Aldean's single "1994," co-written by Thomas Rhett, paid tribute to Diffie with references to several of his hits. In the last decade of his life, Joe Diffie recorded an album of bluegrass covers and a collaborative album with Sammy Kershaw and Aaron Tippin, but I focused on his solo albums of original material. But then, the cover of "Willin'" on his 2009 live album caught my eye, and Diffie rose in my esteem even more for tipping his hat to Little Feat.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10, 2020 at 1:36 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.