Faith Hill
The voice that floated out of every car radio in 1998 riding a nectarine through a CGI garden. Faith Hill went from "Wild One" to "This Kiss" to "Breathe," the biggest single of 2000, and took country to the pop charts, the Super Bowl, and the CoverGirl counter, with Tim McGraw beside her from 1996 on.
Born in 1967, Hill arrived with Take Me as I Am in 1993. "Wild One" held number one on the country chart for four straight weeks in 1994, her cover of "Piece of My Heart" went to number one the same year, and the album sold three million. Surgery to repair a ruptured blood vessel on her vocal cords delayed the follow-up, but It Matters to Me arrived in 1995 with a third number one and more than three million sold. In spring 1996 she opened Tim McGraw's Spontaneous Combustion Tour while engaged to her producer; she and McGraw fell for each other on the road and married that October 6. Their duet "It's Your Love" spent six weeks at number one, and she took three years off to start a family.
She came back pop. "This Kiss," released in February 1998, was a country number one that climbed to number seven on the Hot 100 and became her first hit overseas, and its Steven Goldmann video, with Hill swinging on a nectarine, hopping from flower to flower, and riding bees and butterflies, won the CMA's Video of the Year. She was pregnant with her second daughter during the shoot; the costumes she had approved days earlier no longer fit. Breathe followed in November 1999 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 ahead of Mariah Carey and Savage Garden. Its title track, a power ballad written by Stephanie Bentley and Holly Lamar, spent six weeks on top of the country chart and seventeen at the top of adult contemporary, stalled at number two on the Hot 100 for five weeks, and still ended up Billboard's number-one single of 2000 without ever holding the weekly top spot. She won three Grammys off it, including Best Country Album.
The year 2000 was the crest: the national anthem at Super Bowl XXXIV, a CoverGirl contract, performances at the Oscars and the Grammys, the Soul2Soul tour with McGraw, and "Where Are You Christmas?" for the Grinch movie. Some in Nashville grumbled that she was leaving country behind; accepting the CMA's Female Vocalist award, she answered, "I love this business, and I love this industry... and my heart is here." "There You'll Be," from Pearl Harbor, became her best-selling single in Europe in 2001, and Cry, in 2002, completed what one critic called her transformation into a pop diva.
She later sang the NBC Sunday Night Football intro from 2007 to 2012, and Billboard named her the adult contemporary artist of the 2000s. She and McGraw have said they try never to be apart for more than three days in a row.
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The son of a World Series pitcher who made every girl at the county fair cry at "Don't Take the Girl." Tim McGraw went from a flop debut to the best-selling country album of 1994, married Faith Hill on the road, and closed his decade with "Live Like You Were Dying," the song he cut the year his father died.
Shania Twain
Canadian country-pop crossover sensation in leopard print and confidence. She sold albums by the tens of millions, and for a moment the whole world was her pickup-truck ballad audience.
Alan Jackson
The Newnan, Georgia, traditionalist who kept country sounding like country while the rest of Nashville went pop. Alan Jackson water-skied through the "Chattahoochee" video in red cowboy boots, racked up 35 number ones, and once walked off the CMA stage mid-song to stand up for George Jones.
LeAnn Rimes
Born in 1982, LeAnn Rimes released "Blue" at thirteen in 1996 and became an overnight country sensation with an impossibly mature voice. She won Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1997, becoming the youngest person ever to win those awards. Her 1997 ballad "How Do I Live" spent a record 69 weeks on the Hot 100—Billboard later ranked it the most successful song of the 1990s.