Jake Owen – Down To The Honkytonk

It spent thirty-three weeks on the chart and went down before it went up.

Thirty-three weeks. That is how long Down to the Honkytonk spent on Country Airplay before it stopped climbing, and the shape of that run is unusual. It entered in the mid-thirties in August 2018, slipped backward to 39, hung around the twenties through the autumn, and only reached its peak of No.7 the following April — nearly a year after release. Radio did not decide about this record. It came around to it slowly, and then would not let it go.

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The sequence around it was equally odd. Big Loud released the single on August 20, 2018. The album it belonged to, Greetings from… Jake, did not arrive until March 29, 2019 — more than seven months later, by which point the song had been on the chart for over thirty weeks and was still going. Owen had left RCA Nashville in 2017 after a decade there, and this was the second single of a new arrangement with a label that was willing to wait.

Rodney Clawson, Luke Laird and Shane McAnally wrote it, which is a considerable amount of Nashville songwriting firepower for three minutes and three seconds of music, and Joey Moi produced. The joke in the chorus is a small one and it carries the whole record: a shrug at the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a preference for the bar instead. That the song then earned an Academy of Country Music nomination for Single of the Year is a piece of irony nobody had to reach for.

The accident that made him a musician

Owen was born Joshua Ryan Owen in Winter Haven, Florida in 1981 and grew up in Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast. He went to Florida State on a golf scholarship and expected that to be his life. Then a waterskiing accident wrecked his shoulder and ended it, and in the flat stretch that followed he picked up an acoustic guitar and taught himself Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings songs because he needed something to do that was not thinking. He started playing campus bars, decided he preferred it to the degree, and left. His debut album came out in 2006.

That history sits underneath a song about choosing an ordinary Friday night over a place in history, and it is probably why the record does not sound like a pose. Owen has ten top-ten Country Airplay singles, and the ACM nomination for this one was his first nod of any kind since he won Top New Male Vocalist in 2009 — a decade of steady work between the two, which is its own argument for the song’s subject matter.

Four blocks of Broadway

The video was shot on Broadway in Nashville, in and around the honky-tonks the song is named for, starting in an alley behind Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It is a straightforward document of a specific place on a specific kind of night — pedal taverns, bachelorette parties, people dancing on the bar — and it became the most-watched video of Owen’s career, passing forty-five million views.

Nothing about the record is complicated. The steel guitar is doing what steel guitars did on country radio in the early nineties, the drum pattern is built for stamping along to, and the sentiment fits on a postcard. What took thirty-three weeks was radio working out that a song this plain was going to outlast most of what was released alongside it.