Tritt’s ‘Greatest Hits’ Album Bursting With Hot Singles

When Warner Bros. Records decided to issue a Travis Tritt greatest hits collection, it was faced with more hits than would fit in the usual 10-song album.

Tritt’s new “Greatest Hits - From the Beginning” contains 15 cuts - 10 No. 1 singles, three others and two new ones: the Steve Earle song “Sometimes She Forgets” and a remake of the 1955 Platters classic “Only You.” “Only You” is to be heard in the forthcoming Steve Martin-Dan Aykroyd movie “Sgt. Bilko.”

Tritt says his “Sgt. Bilko” shot resulted from his soundtrack contribution (“Bible Belt”) to the earlier “My Cousin Vinny.”

“Jonathan Lynn, who directed ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ asked me to write some songs for ‘Sgt. Bilko,”’ Tritt recalls. “He also had the idea for me to record a couple of pieces of music for the movie that were already written, one of them being ‘Only You.’

“Then he came back to me and said, ‘You know, wouldn’t it be cool if maybe you played yourself in this movie and performed on screen? We have a scene or two we could use you in.’ So I got to play myself and bring the band in. We spent a couple of days out in Hollywood having a good time.”

Tritt’s hits album contains the giants “Country Club,” “Put Some Drive in Your Country,” “Help Me Hold On,” “I’m Gonna Be Somebody,” “Anymore,” “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin”’ (with Marty Stuart), “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares),” “Drift Off to Dream,” “Can I Trust You With My Heart,” “T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” “Tell Me I Was Dreaming,” “Foolish Pride” and “Ten Feet Tall and Bullet Proof.”

“A lot of greatest hits albums I see these days have four or five hits, and the rest is pretty much filler material,” Tritt comments. “So we wanted to have an album that had a good 12 or 13 hits.

“Also, this is my sixth year of making records for Warner Bros. I felt like this album was a good way to close the chapter on the first part of my career and open up a new one. We’re going to use a lot of the time this album is giving us to write songs for the next album, which is scheduled to be out in the fall of next year.”

All B&D albums still charting

Brooks & Dunn, who now have sold more than 11 million records, have done so partly because of a pretty remarkable fact.

All three of the hard-kicking duo’s albums - “Brand New Man,” “Hard Workin’ Man” and the current “Waitin’ on Sundown”- are not only all still on the hit charts; none of the three has ever been OFF the hit charts.

If you’re counting, “Brand New Man” has been on them 214 weeks, “Hard Workin’ Man” 133 weeks and “Waitin’ on Sundown” 50 weeks.

Fruit of Loom tour back

Fruit of the Loom Inc. is obviously satisfied with the crowds its Alan Jackson-headlined 1995 Fruit of the Loom Country Comfort Tour has drawn so far.

The casual-apparel firm has just announced that in 1996 it will double its country tour sponsorships, with Jackson to do another 75 shows under the Fruit of the Loom banner next year and Alabama to headline 65 additional ones.

Nothing like a double-wide

Sammy Kershaw is an ultra-emotional balladeer, but his biggest-selling hit so far has been one of those Dennis Linde novelty songs in which you’re never quite sure whether Linde was laughing with or at his subject when he wrote it.

“Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” we’re talking about.

“I used to live in a trailer,” says Kershaw. “My wife left me one night. I went and got her and brought her back. I had some people try to tell me that people up North couldn’t identify with this song. Somebody must have identified with it. This song single-handedly sold hundreds of thousands of albums and pushed (the) ‘Haunted Heart’ (album) to platinum.”

“Queen,” whose deft humor probably attracted both trailer-denigraters and trailer inhabitants alike, is one of 12 cuts on Kershaw’s “The Hits, Chapter 1.”

“I’ve lived the stories,” the Louisiana native says of the package’s songs.

“I know what these songs are about, because I’ve been there before. If you’ve lived the song, you can keep the feeling in it. You’ve got to make that song come across for people to understand the story. Most of them have lived some of these stories, too, at one time or another.”

Kershaw’s personal favorite of these dozen songs is the one that gave its title to his second album, “Haunted Heart.”

“It has that eerie lonesome feeling to it,” he explains.