Neil Diamond's Hard Pivot To Country In The '90s Was A Bold Risk That Paid Off

By the mid-'90s, Neil Diamond was struggling to thrill audiences and record-buyers like he'd done in the 1960s and 1970s, so he engineered a musical experiment to get the world to pay attention again — and it worked. Diamond, once an icon of mature pop and thoughtful rock, had gone and recorded a country LP. While there was a chance that Diamond switching genres could betray his most loyal fans, the opposite transpired: Released in 1996, "Tennessee Moon" was a major hit.

The best year of Diamond's career was 1970, and things had fallen off considerably by the mid-1990s. Between 1972 and 1982, the sensitive but swaggering singer-songwriter who rocked out as much as he sweetly crooned released 13 albums, and they all sold at least a million copies. Throughout the rest of the '80s, sales of Diamond's LPs of middling and ultra-light rock dropped off significantly, until he sold 2 million copies of 1992's "The Christmas Album." Diamond took the hint: The world wanted him to drop the adult contemporary and try out new concepts. Diamond's next three LPs were a thematic covers collection, "Up on the Roof: Songs from the Brill Building," another Christmas record, and the country album, "Tennessee Moon." 

"Tennessee Moon" wasn't a cynical attempt by Neil Diamond to get in on the country music bandwagon, which in the mid-1990s was big business thanks to the likes of Garth Brooks. Diamond clearly approached the project with seriousness and affection: He co-wrote 17 of the 18 "Tennessee Moon" tracks with veteran country composers, including Tom Shapiro, the Mavericks' Raul Malo, Gary Burr, and Harlan Howard. (He also included a more country-forward remake of his own 1967 pop hit "Kentucky Woman.") Many of the songs were duets, with country notables giving their tacit approval with their participation, including Chet Atkins and Waylon Jennings.

Promoted with the 1996 TV musical special "Neil Diamond: Under a Tennessee Moon" to prepare the public for the major shift in the legendary musician's sound, the LP was a smash in both the country and pop realms. Shortly after its February 1996 street date, "Tennessee Moon" reached No. 3 on the country albums chart and No. 14 on the Billboard 200 general albums chart. Country fans didn't see the LP as a novelty either. It sold briskly throughout 1996, to the point where it was the 21st-best-selling country album of 1996, trailing genre superstars like Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, and George Strait. Diamond's first real stab at country ultimately sold half a million copies.