In his 1990s heyday, Garth Brooks refused to release even his biggest songs, from “Friends in Low Places” to “Shameless,” as singles. Sure, it pumped up his album sales. And mostly, he was following the Nashville convention at the time, wherein country hits were generally released only as noncommercial 45’s for jukeboxes.

But Brooks was no ordinary country act; he was the bestselling ’90s act of any genre, period. If anyone could have sold truckloads of singles like a pop act, it would have been him. No, Brooks eschewed them, in part, to prove a point: in interviews, he acknowledged that singles would have made him eligible for Billboard’s Hot 100, and Brooks was proud that the bulk of his blockbuster sales came from the country radio audience alone.

Brooks’s chip-on-shoulder attitude was emblematic of most ’90s Nashville stars, who nursed still-fresh memories of the Urban Cowboy fad of the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s when Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt and Juice Newton scored huge crossover Top 40 hits — before the pop audience abruptly fled in droves (blame MTV and Michael Jackson). For the rest of the ’80s, country stars like Alabama and the Judds sold albums on the strength of county radio alone.

A proud country star, Brooks danced with the audience that brung him. (Well, except for that Chris Gaines thing, but that’s a topic for another day.) But as the ’90s veered toward the ’00s, bit by bit, country acts were seduced to the pop side of the dial again.

So think of this week’s charts as the culmination of a two-decade pendulum swing. For the first time since probably “Islands in the Stream,” the most-played song on American radio is a country tune — sung by America’s new sweetheart, who, usurping rappers aside, just put her first MTV Video Music Award on the mantle. MORE »