Wynonna – No One Else On Earth

The third consecutive number one off her debut solo album, the longest run at the top of the country chart by any woman in fifteen years, and one of the first country singles ever to get the dance-club remix treatment — Wynonna’s signature song was also her thesis statement.

Wynonna Judd was twenty-seven years old when The Judds played their farewell concert in December 1991, and almost everyone in country music assumed her career was going to be hard to restart. The mother-daughter duo she had spent eight years inside had been one of the most successful acts in the genre’s history — fourteen number ones, five Grammys, nine CMA awards, two million-selling tour runs — and Naomi Judd’s hepatitis C diagnosis had ended it abruptly. Wynonna had only ever sung in her mother’s company. Whether the voice would carry on its own, or whether the audience would follow it, was a real question.

The answer arrived in stages. Her self-titled solo debut, produced by MCA Nashville’s Tony Brown, was released on March 31, 1992. The first single, the Dave Loggins-penned She Is His Only Need, went to number one. The second, a revisionist take on Hank Williams’s gospel standard renamed I Saw the Light, went to number one too. By the time Brown sent No One Else on Earth out to country radio on August 25, 1992, even the people who had bet against her were paying attention.

The song had reached Tony Brown by accident. Jill Colucci, the Nashville songwriter who had co-written Travis Tritt’s I’m Gonna Be Somebody the year before, ran into him in the hallway at EMI Music’s offices and played him a demo she had cut with Stewart Harris and Sam Lorber. Brown listened once, asked for a cassette, and put it on hold for Wynonna. Colucci — who would later become better known to a generation of children as the voice singing the America’s Funniest Home Videos theme — had no idea the song would become anyone’s signature record. What she handed Brown that day was a tight three-and-a-half-minute country track with an unusually funky undertow.

The country single that pretended it was a soul record

Steuart Smith, the session guitarist Brown had brought in for the album — later poached by the Eagles in 2001 — gave the recording its edge. The guitar figure that runs through the chorus pulls more from Memphis and Muscle Shoals than from anywhere on Music Row, and Wynonna sang to it like she had been waiting for a country session to feel that loose. Her phrasing across the verses is conversational, almost spoken; the chorus arrives big and demanding. Country radio had been the home of nostalgic mid-tempo ballads in the early 90s — Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill — and No One Else on Earth sounded slightly impatient with that. It moved.

It hit number one on the Hot Country Songs chart the week of November 4, 1992 and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. That run was the longest by a female country artist since Dolly Parton had spent five weeks at the top with Here You Come Again in 1977. Of the more than two hundred singles to chart on Hot Country that year, only four spent four weeks or longer at number one: Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart, Garth Brooks’s What She’s Doing Now, Brooks & Dunn’s Boot Scootin’ Boogie, and this. The song also crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100 and the Adult Contemporary chart — a kind of crossover rare for a hard country single at the time. The parent album Wynonna went on to be certified five-times platinum in the United States and reached number four on the Billboard 200.

What made No One Else on Earth meaningful beyond the chart history is that it was one of the first country recordings ever subjected to the dance-club remix treatment, when a 1994 UK reissue retitled No One Else on Earth ’94 appeared with a club mix that pre-figured the pop-country crossover blueprint Shania Twain would build her own career on a few years later. The music video the official Wynonna channel still uses today is from that 1994 remix release. Watch the video and you can hear a country singer who already knew her catalogue would have to do more than sit pretty inside the genre. She turns 62 today. Thirty-three years on, this is still the song her audience reaches for first.