Track Listing

1. Money in the Bank
2. Seminole Wind
3. Straight Tequila Night
4. I Wish I Could Have Been There
5. I Fell in the Water
6. I've Got It Made
7. Keep Your Hands to Yourself
8. Mississippi Moon
9. Swingin'
10. When It Comes to You
11. Long Hard Lesson Learned
12. Let Go of the Stone
13. Country 'Til I Die
14. Who Got Our Love
15. Bend It 'Til It Breaks

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5697 in Music
• Brand: RCA
• Released on: 1996-10-15
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Amazon.com
In the late 1980s, John Anderson found himself in the awkward position of seeing the country charts dominated by the new traditionalism, and yet he couldn't buy a hit. Anderson refused to give in, however, and he signed with the fifth company of his career, a brand new label called BNA, and threw the dice one more time. His gratifyingly successful years there have been summed up on Greatest Hits. As good as the songs are, what really makes these hits great is the combination of Anderson's rich, pure-country, baritone drawl, and the pumping swamp rhythms he adds to all his uptempo numbers. Only a handful of country stars could round 15 songs from 1992-96 as impressive as these. Unfortunately, BNA includes his remake of "Swingin'," which sounds busy and less focused than the Warner Bros. original. --Geoffrey Himes

Customer Reviews

Pure Country
John Anderson has a wonderfully distinct country voice. I owned this tape several years ago, and played it so much that it broke. I was glad to find it from amazon.com. I love every song on this cassette. There are classics like "Swingin'", "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal", "1959", and "Black Sheep of the Family", which I consider one of the 10 best country songs ever recorded. For fans of pure country, this tape is a must!

John's early classic hits
For reasons only Amazon knows, the pages for John's original greatest hits album on Warner (covering the early eighties) and his later greatest hits album for BNA (covering the nineties comeback) are linked, so reviews for either album are listed under both. This review refers to the earlier Warner collection though I plan to expand the review eventually to cover the comeback hits if I can't persuade Amazon to de-link the pages (I've tried before and failed) - in that unlikely event, I'll do a separate review and remove this paragraph from here.

With a voice and musical style that has echoes of, but which is distinct from, Merle Haggard, John Anderson burst on to the country music scene in 1980. He was a regular country hit-maker for much of the eighties but faded towards the end of that decade. He made a successful comeback on a different record label in the nineties.

I quickly became a huge fan of John's music. His debut album was a classic, featuring songs such as 1959, She just started liking cheating songs and (best of all) Your lying blue eyes. All of them became top twenty hits in the country charts. Bigger hits came later including some on this collection but those first three hits are (to my ears) as good as anything else that he ever recorded.

Among those bigger hits are Swinging (the biggest hit John ever had - it crossed over to the American pop charts), I'm just an old chunk of coal, Would you catch a falling star and Black sheep. Later eighties hits can be found on volume 2.

If you love the music of Merle Haggard and George Jones, you'll surely enjoy listening to John Anderson. And if you only buy one collection of John's music, the original Greatest Hits - the one on Warner - is the one to go for until and unless a more comprehensive collection appears. If you enjoy this collection and want to hear more, go for volume 2 or the BNA collection or both.

Instant classic.
A tape full of unbelievably cool songs (ok, so maybe the redone "Swingin'" should've been left off) by a guy whose voice is wonderfully unique. Why it took me so long to pick up on his music is beyond me, but now I have his whole discography (thanks in part to Ebay) and will NEVER LET IT GO! He puts heart & soul into music like no one else. He's the greatest, and this CD proves why.