George Strait

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Essential Albums

  • Carrying Your Love With Me
    Carrying Your Love With Me

    While it doesn’t quite have the impact of the previous year’s Blue Clear Sky, Carrying Your Love With Me displays George Strait’s ability to deliver a diverse, quality collection of songs even as he approaches his 20th year of recording. “Carrying Your Love With Me,” “She’ll Leave Your With a Smile,” and “Today My World Slipped Away” combine emotional climaxes with catchy choruses, proving that Strait is a master of the modern country ballad. “Won’t You Come Home (And Talk to a Stranger)” and “That’s Me (Every Chance I Get)” are perfectly crafted and resolutely old-school slices of honky-tonk, while the splendid “I’ve Got A Funny Feeling” is the kind of song that makes you wish Strait would make an all-bluegrass album. As usual, the magic isn’t only in the material, but how it’s delivered. Every song rings with a maximum of conviction and sincerity, yet everything Strait does has a low-key, easygoing air about it. The secret to Carrying Your Love With Me, and Strait’s career in general, is his ability to remain humble and his refusal to sing any song he doesn’t believe with his whole being.

  • Blue Clear Sky
    Blue Clear Sky

    If you needed to explain to a creature from outer space why earthlings love George Strait, this album would make a pretty useful tool, displaying many of the Texas country giant’s most celebrated gifts. On "She Knows When You're On My Mind," Strait shows off his knack for delivering old-school lump-in-your-throat ballads with a power worthy of George Jones, while the perky "I Ain't Never Seen No One Like You" shows his knack for Western swing.

  • Pure Country (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)
    Pure Country (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)

    It wasn't much of a stretch role by any means, but the 1992 film Pure Country featured George Strait portraying a chart topping country star who turns his back on the glittery and theatrical trappings of Nashville to re-embrace his less commercialized, honky-tonk roots. Ironically, Pure Country proved to be the best selling commercial release of Strait's career at the time. And as the title suggests, these songs are very much steeped in the roadhouse twang and weepy beer joint ballads that helped define the new traditional sound of early '90s hat acts. But with the boot stomping drive of "Where The Sidewalk Ends" and the George Jones inspired "The King Of The Broken Hearts," Strait also found a secret weapon in the songwriting of hit maker Jim Lauderdale, who until then was scraping by as a back-up singer for Dwight Yoakam and Carlene Carter.

  • Ocean Front Property
    Ocean Front Property

    1987

  • Strait From the Heart
    Strait From the Heart

    You could be forgiven for not immediately thinking George Strait would become as big a star as he did. He was too well-mannered to be honky-tonk, and too understated to be pop. His rockers, such as they were, were tidy and restrained (“The Steal of the Night”), and he never milked a ballad for more feeling than it needed (“Marina del Rey”). In a gallery of cowboys, ramblers, and other personalities that pushed emotions to the extreme, Strait presented himself as nothing more than a nice guy in a crisp pair of jeans. He was a traditionalist from the drop. But instead of trying to revive the past, 1982’s Strait From the Heart evokes the core values of country music in ways that feel familiar and timeless. Musically, you can hear the Western swing of Bob Wills (“I Can’t See Texas From Here,” “Heartbroke”) and the gentle countrypolitan of Glen Campbell (“Amarillo by Morning”). But you also get the sheen of soft rock (“Marina del Rey”) and adult contemporary (“Lover in Disguise”) in ways that skirt convention without overtly trying to cross over. Strait From the Heart paved the way for Garth Brooks, Brad Paisley, and a host of other artists who managed to capture their moment without embracing trend. But most of all, Strait created a style that allowed country music to grow into the future without sacrificing its past. He later joked that fans would consider anything he did traditional—because traditional is just what a traditionalist does.

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About George Strait

"At some point during the early ’80s, country singer George Strait was given a nudge by his then-producer, Jimmy Bowen, to try and liven up his stage act. Strait reportedly obliged not with banter or acrobatics, but by taking off his hat and waving it a few times. Born in 1952 and raised outside San Antonio (he helped his father on the ranch during weekends and summers), Strait started his career in the early ’80s as a stiff-jeaned, cowboy-booted ambassador of “real” country, a singer whose songs—warm, direct, bittersweet, and funny—seemed to tap into the genre’s original mandate: Honest music for people getting by. He quickly became one of the steadiest and most enduring voices in country, building a body of work both astonishingly popular and consistent: In the first three decades of his career, for example, Strait placed more than 80 singles in the Top 10 of the Country charts, more than half of which went to No. 1. For as often as Strait has been defined as a traditionalist, his most definitive songs (“All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” “Ocean Front Property,” “Check Yes or No”) never seemed like they were trying to recapture a lost past so much as evoke the timeless feelings always running underneath the present—a testament, perhaps, to why Strait has managed to stay relevant despite ignoring trends almost completely. "

HOMETOWN
Poteet, TX, United States
BORN
May 18, 1952
GENRE
Country

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