Bucky Covington – A Different World

The singer who finished eighth on American Idol had the best debut by a new male country act since Billy Ray Cyrus, on a song one critic graded F.

In the week of April 17, 2007, Bucky Covington’s debut album sold 61,000 copies. It entered the Top Country Albums chart at No.1 and the Billboard 200 at No.4, the best first week and the highest debut for a new male country act since Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992. Covington had finished eighth on American Idol a year earlier. What carried the album was A Different World, a song about growing up in a looser, rougher America, which country radio took up while at least one critic told it not to.

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Covington came from Rockingham, North Carolina, a guitar player with long hair and a twin brother, Rocky, who played music too. He took his nickname from his grandfather, Buck, and before television found him he was working at Covington’s Body Shop in nearby Hamlet. On the fifth season of Idol he sang country when the show mostly rewarded pop, and viewers voted him off on April 11, 2006. Eighth place turned out to be enough. Lyric Street, Disney’s Nashville country label, signed him that December.

The song came from Nashville professionals. Jennifer Hanson, a former Miss California who had had her own country hit with Beautiful Goodbye, wrote it with Tony Martin and Mark Nesler. Martin and Nesler had written Just to See You Smile, which Billboard named the No.1 country single of 1998 for Tim McGraw. Their new song is a list of things that wouldn’t happen now: no seat belts, no helmets, discipline at the end of a belt, too few kids for every one of them to make a team, and a mother who smoked and drank while she was pregnant, with a child who turned out fine anyway. The chorus insists this wasn’t just another time but a different world, and it says that with pride rather than regret.

Graded F, then a hit

Not everyone heard pride. When Lyric Street sent the single out in January 2007, Country Universe gave it an F in a review dated January 12. The critic argued that a singer born in 1977 was too young to be nostalgic for life before video games, and objected to the line about pregnancy. Country radio ignored the advice. The Billboard Hot Country Songs chart took A Different World to No.6, and it also reached No.58 on the Hot 100 and No.68 on the Pop 100. Billboard’s 2007 year-end country chart ranked it No.34. Mark Miller, the lead singer of Sawyer Brown, produced it, which gave an Idol contestant the credibility of a working country band’s sound.

The video plays on the song’s then-and-now idea. A boy playing the young Covington watches an adult Covington walk through a small town on an old television set, while the town’s children play the way the lyric describes. It ends with the grown man walking into the house and switching off a modern TV. Lyric Street released two more singles from the album. It’s Good to Be Us reached No.11 and I’ll Walk reached No.10, making three Top 15 country hits from one debut.

The label didn’t last as long as the songs. Lyric Street closed in 2010 with Covington’s second album recorded but never released, and he spent a year unsigned before Entertainment One Nashville picked him up in 2011. By then A Different World had already found its audience. The song’s argument held up better than its review. Listeners didn’t need the singer to have lived every line. They needed someone who sounded like their own town, and an eighth-place Idol finisher who had worked in a body shop sounded exactly like that. The critic was right that Covington was young, and the radio audience didn’t care.