Garth Brooks
Photo credit: Photo: TwinsofSedona, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Garth Brooks made country music arena-sized. The wireless headset, the hit-after-hit albums, and "Friends in Low Places" became the sound of the '90s — country that didn't apologize for being enormous, and made it look like the point all along.
Garth Brooks was born February 7, 1962, and emerged from his 1989 debut album to redefine country music in real time. His second album, No Fences (1990), became his biggest, shipping 18 million copies in the US, and contained "Friends in Low Places," "The Thunder Rolls," and "Unanswered Prayers" — songs that played everywhere at once. The third album, Ropin' the Wind, arrived in September 1991 with advance orders of 4 million copies and became the first country album ever to debut at number one on the Billboard 200; its success pushed his earlier records back up the chart, making Brooks the first country artist with three albums in the Billboard 200's top 20 in the same week.
His live shows borrowed the vocabulary of arena rock in ways Nashville traditionally didn't allow. Brooks ran the stage with a wireless headset microphone and a rock star's command — a jolt to country's staid concert tradition. In August 1997 he played Central Park on HBO, drawing a crowd reported as high as 980,000 people, the largest concert in the park's history. By then his chart dominance felt inevitable.
The numbers were staggering. Brooks is the only artist in history with nine RIAA Diamond-certified albums, surpassing the Beatles' six. He has sold more than 170 million records and, per the RIAA, is the best-selling solo albums artist in US history with 162 million domestic units — ahead of Elvis Presley and second only to the Beatles overall. He won two Grammys and seventeen American Music Awards, including "Artist of the '90s." In 1999 he briefly adopted the fictional rock-star persona Chris Gaines for a planned film, a detour fans still puzzle over. He retired from recording and touring in 2001 to raise his family, returned in 2005, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012 — but it's the 1990s run, when country's biggest star was simply music's biggest star, that people miss.
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