Billy Ray Cyrus, ‘Achy Breaky Heart’: The government made me line dance

Billy Ray Cyrus
‘Achy Breaky Heart’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 3 on August 16, 1992

Teenagers in Ireland get to enjoy some of the longest school holidays in the world. Three glorious months of intermittent sunshine and no homework—it is bliss.

Of course, the longer you’re away, the harder it is to go back. Nothing is as soul-deadening as those final days of August, when the autumnal drizzle starts to settle in, when you’re trying on your scratchy school uniform (it’s too big, but you’ll grow into it), when your parents are covering your schoolbooks in leftover wallpaper, when it’s dark at dinnertime each evening, and it finally dawns on you that it is time to return to that awful place.

Going back after the summer of 1992 was especially hard for me because it meant Third Year, and Third Year in Ireland is a year of hellish exams. Nine months of pain, they told us at the end of Second Year. Worse than having a baby.

On the first day back at school, I discovered that everyone in my class had a growth spurt—except me. I was half a foot below everyone’s eyeline, feeling even more invisible than I had the previous year.

Can things possibly get any worse?

Of course they would, and of course it would somehow involve my PE teacher.

My PE teacher was a woman roughly my height (which, at that point, was quite small), with the coiled, compressed strength of a featherweight boxer. Usually, she spent these classes barking at us to run faster while barely managing to disguise the loathing she felt at our being such a disappointing bunch of physical mediocrities.

But this week was different. For starters, she was smiling.

This smile—a previously unobserved phenomenon—was so distracting that it took me a second to clock the fact that she wasn’t in a tracksuit. Instead, she was wearing jeans and a tucked-in plaid shirt.

I got that ice-cold creeping up my spine, like a character in a horror movie who realises that there’s somebody in the house.

She may have said “howdy y’all” One-by-one, everyone in my class started to realise what was about to happen.

We had heard about it in the news. We had seen it on TV. Perhaps some of our parents had tried it, and then enthusiastically encouraged us to try it, and we had all refused it because we were a hardcore grunge school (with a small subculture of ravers.)

And, of course, we knew that song. Everyone knew that song. You couldn’t leave your house without hearing that song. If it wasn’t on the radio (it was always on the radio) you would hear people whistling it.

We had tried to escape. We thought we were immune. But now we were trapped.

We had to do line dancing.

The 90s had plenty of novelty dance crazes: Voguing, the Macarena, the Saturday Night, the Running Man.

But ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was more than just a dance. It was a whole style of dancing, a style of music, and a cultural aesthetic that suddenly became part of the mainstream.

From Alberta to Auckland, from Carlow to Cape Town, wherever white people congregated in 1992, you would hear the sound of boots being scooted. People wore plaid shirts tucked into blue jeans. People wore stetsons.

In a previous newsletter, we talked about how ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ seemed to launch an overnight cultural transformation. ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ did something similar, especially in Ireland which already had quite a high tolerance for country music.

But there was one crucial difference. My PE teacher never put on Nevermind and taught us how to mosh. And yet somehow, in the Autumn of 1992, I found myself in PE class, being forced to learn how to grapevine.

Remember, this was a state-mandated PE class. My teacher was a civil servant. In effect, the government were forcing me to dance to Billy Ray Cyrus.

It was weird for me, and it was also a weird time for Billy Ray Cyrus. ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ made him an international superstar but it also left him strangely isolated.

Country music in general often struggles for any kind of mainstream acceptance (I’ve lost count of the people I’ve heard say, “I listen to a bit of everything…except country.”) Country artists are usually treated as outsiders until they pivot to pop and distance themselves from their CMT roots, like Shania Twain and Taylor Swift.

Billy Ray Cyrus has always stayed true to country, but country was a little embarrassed by him. Which was predictable in a way: this is a genre that fetishises rustic authenticity, so there was bound to be some pushback against an ex-stripper who’s big in the pop charts.

Country diehards hated ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ almost as much as I did in 1992, with Travis Tritt saying that Cyrus had reduced the genre to an “ass-wiggling contest”. When ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ won a fan-voted CMA in 1993, a visibly upset Cyrus slammed his hand on the podium and yelled, “here’s a quarter, call someone who cares!”

(That’s the name of a Travis Tritt song, btw.)

Looking back now, I can admit that ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ wasn’t terrible. I’ll go further and say… it’s actually a good song. It’s funny and catchy, and Cyrus is hella charm. The man can pull off a mullet, you have to respect him.

The problem was, I think, is that everyone was so overwhelmed by the song at the time. Existing country music fans had to deal with millions of casuals showing up at their clubs. Non-country fans had to deal with country music existing. Billy Ray Cyrus found his life reduced to a constant debate about this harmless, throwaway pop song (which he didn’t even write.)

In the years since, I’ve met plenty of people who genuinely love line dancing, and good luck to them. It’s not for me, but I’m sure that with a few beers and some good friends, it’s terrific fun.

It’s just not fun when it’s forced on you. It is now fun when you’re being urged to do it by a PE teacher who is growing increasingly manic as she realises that something she enjoyed on a Saturday night is much less fun on a Tuesday morning. I think she had a vision of us getting into the groove, having a good time, maybe even throwing out an enthusiastic “yee haw!”

Instead, we shambled this forced jollity, like a bunch of accountants at a corporate retreat. We were terrible when we started. After an hour of instruction, we were somehow worse.

The following week, our PE teacher was back in her tracksuit, blowing her whistle and yelling at us all for being slow and clumsy. It was nice to have everything back to normal. Although, for years after, I would shudder whenever I heard that song.

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