Travis Tritt

Travis Tritt made waves in ’90s country by combining old-school honky-tonk and ’70s outlaw influences with a fresh feel. Born in Georgia in 1963, he’s one of the countless country singers whose first musical experience came in a church choir. He started writing songs in school and made his dreams come true in 1987 when he got a record deal with Warner Bros. His 1990 WB debut, Country Club, made him a major name, with four Top 10 country tunes, including the title track and “Help Me Hold On”. But the follow-up, 1991’s appropriately titled It’s All About to Change, turned out to be Tritt’s biggest album ever, going triple platinum and giving him four more huge country hits, among them the classic kiss-off song “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)” and a Grammy-winning duet with Marty Stuart, “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’”. Tritt’s winning streak continued into the early 2000s, but when trends began to move toward a poppier brand of country, he stood firm and stuck with his roots-conscious, rock-inflected sound. Even so, he was never far from the forefront of the country scene. His recordings became fewer and farther between by the 2010s, but in 2020 his single “Ghost Town Nation”, a comment on pandemic-era America, arrived as a striking first single from a forthcoming LP that would mark his first batch of brand-new tunes in years.