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Tennesseein' is Tennebelievin'.
Whenever we go on a road trip further south, the stage is set for this lost hit. This song is like the theme music for the Volunteer State. We inevitably start singing the intro: "Tennessee...Tennessee...Tennessee...Tennessee..."
This stratagem was most famously employed on our 2005 trip to see relatives in Orlando. As we were also on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike in Florida, an extended impression of Ronald Reagan was heard. This was also the trip where - returning home through Tennessee - we stopped at Lost Sea Cave and someone ripped a silent-but-deadly inside the cave.
The song "Tennessee" also prompted one of the strangest incidents in the history of Cincinnati music radio. As bad as the MOR doldrums of the early 1980s was, the adult contemporary invasion of a decade later was even more frustrating. Q-102 was our only remaining top 40 station, and it became the equivalent of stations in the 1950s that banned rock 'n' roll. In the 1950s, a station in St. Louis ran a TV commercial in which one of its DJ's smashed rock records. He later said he hated being forced to make this ad, and that he was embarrassed for life by it. Similarly, in Cincinnati in the 1990s, Q-102 targeted rap to cull from its playlist. Arrested Development is described by Wikipedia as part of the progressive rap genre, which was considered too edgy for the party poopers at increasingly stodgy stations like Q-102. For years, the station played little if any rap.
Even though it peaked way up at #6, I hardly ever heard "Tennessee" on the radio - except in one context. At the time, Q-102 kept airing a commercial that was made up entirely of much of the song. In other words, the only way for the song to get airplay on stations like that was to buy commercial time. As Billboard had recently changed its Hot 100 formula so stations would be electronically monitored, these ad buys must have counted toward the Hot 100. Wikipedia actually says paid plays do not count on the Hot 100, but the chart might not have been equipped to exclude them yet in 1992.
Outside of these ad breaks, local radio sure wasn't playing our song!
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