Travis Tritt

Essential Albums

  • Down the Road I Go
    Down the Road I Go
    Down the Road I Go

    One standout song on Travis Tritt’s 2000 effort Down the Road I Go is “Never Get Away from Me,” a tale of lifelong romance based on Waylon Jennings and his real-life wife, Jessi Colter. Tritt does a convincing job of conjuring Waylon’s inimitable style without aping the master. Clearly, the student has earned the right to pay tribute to his mentor. Waylon’s influence recurs on the gently swaggering rhythms of “Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde,” "Down the Road I Go,” and “If the Fall Don’t Kill You,” the latter of which was cowritten with Charlie Daniels. Like Jennings, Tritt has a way of making danceable songs without making dance songs. Likewise, he can make hummable songs that aren’t pop (“It’s a Great Day to Be Alive”) and gospel songs that aren’t religious (“Love of a Woman”). As far as modern country singers go, Tritt’s taste is fairly progressive. But his best songs are often his resolutely down-home country tunes. A unsentimental ode to being broke in the rural South, “Livin’ on Borrowed Time,” shows Tritt’s ability to reanimate timeless themes without resorting to cliché or imitation.

  • Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof
    Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof
    Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof

    The title song of Travis Tritt’s Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof contains one of the great lines of any bar song ever written: “I'm a full grown man, that's plain to see/But nowhere near as full grown as I'd like to be/But I'll find a bar and I'll have a few/Until I'm 10 feet tall and bulletproof.” A country star’s ability to poke fun at himself or herself is always a winning trait. It's never more so than with Tritt, who appears here as someone fully engaged and having fun with his own music. With Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, Tritt just kept getting better at the things he did best: barroom blues (“No Vacation from the Blues”), Southern rock (“Outlaws Like Us”), and boot-scooting boogie (“Wishful Thinking”). Yet his finest contributions to '90s country were his ballads, which were rich and soaked in R&B feeling. Gilded with Sunday organ, “Walkin’ All Over My Heart” and “Between an Old Memory and Me” achieve a merger of soul music and country music that other country performers could only dream of.

  • It's All About to Change
    It's All About to Change
    It's All About to Change

    If Travis Tritt’s 1990 debut, Country Club, positioned the Georgia-born singer as something of a musical rule-breaker, then the opening song on his sophomore effort aimed to re-establish his down-home credentials: “A woman warm and willin', that's what I'm lookin' for/'Cause the whiskey ain't workin' anymore.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a more classic country song than “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” which also features Marty Stuart (another Nashville rule-breaker who quickly became one of Tritt’s closest collaborators). The material here showed that Tritt was one of country's most adaptable voices, able to bring authenticity to vintage Bakersfield swing (“It’s All About to Change”), line-dancing anthems (“Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler”), and straight rock (“Homesick”). The venerable Southern rock band Little Feat backed Tritt on the uproarious “Bible Belt,” which was used to great effect in the film My Cousin Vinny. But Tritt's even more effective when he’s playing it subtle. After listening to “Nothing Short of Dying,” “If Hell Had a Jukebox,” and “Someone for Me,” you can almost begin to picture the R&B shouter as a sensitive folk singer.

  • Country Club
    Country Club
    Country Club

    Travis Tritt grew up singing gospel, bluegrass, and traditional country, and his naturally diverse talents made his debut album a smash in 1990. Hailing from Marietta, Ga., Tritt could easily play the lovable good old boy (“Country Club”) and then turn around and slay an audience with a genuine R&B tearjerker (“If I Were a Drinker”). Tritt’s crossover success was due to his ability to build bridges between opposing traits. He could be rural and cosmopolitan at the same time; he could be traditional and contemporary. He could even be black and white. Certainly Nashville wasn't accustomed to the funk-rock-country hybrid of “Put Some Drive in Your Country,” but Tritt made it seem as natural as the swift, banjo-inflected “Dixie Flyer.” He saw himself as a son of both Otis Redding and Waylon Jennings and never acted like there was anything contradictory about it. A line from “Son of the New South” epitomized his philosophy: “I hold on to some old ways, I ain't scared to try the new/But when it comes to what I change, I'll be the one to choose.”

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About 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 Marietta, GA, in 1963, he’s one of the countless country singers whose first musical experience came in a church choir. He started writing songs in high 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.

FROM
Marietta, GA, United States
BORN
February 9, 1963
GENRE
Country

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