It’s the mullet-infused, funny-to-silly country music videos of the 1990s and early 2000s, when Joe Diffie was hot as a café griddle, that I remember most.

I was never a threat to buy a Joe Diffie CD. But gosh, it hurt me to hear he had passed away Sunday at 61 from coronavirus complications.

And as a DW co-founder with no working knowledge of Joe Diffie said, he had a great country music name.

For my tastes, if Willie Mays/Mickey Mantle = baseball and Dick Butkus/Ray Nitschke = linebacker, Joe Diffie = solid second teamer in a particular system. But that’s just my opinion, and what a career he had, one that, if you’d wanted to be a country music star, you’d have killed for (it’s a metaphor!) if, like Diffie, you were bankrupt, the father of two, and divorced in your late 20s, pre-Nashville.

He was a Grammy winner, charted 17 tunes (Top 10ers) on Billboard’s Hot Country songs chart, and had five Number 1s. You can’t have a No. 2 attitude about that. Numbers speak for themselves.

Plus he co-wrote a bunch of songs, and we at DW always give extra credit for the writing part.

Speaking of, DW just now read a headline that songwriter/performer John Prine, 73, has been hospitalized in critical condition with coronavirus symptoms. I hope I am not writing a Top 10 Prine Tunes anytime soon. (Somebody, make it stop…)

So, looking on the bright side, we remember the Top 10 Joe Diffie Songs (Sort of) According to Me, and we wish you the best. We’ve just got to stick together apart.

  1. Is It Cold In Here, (Or Is It Just You) Reminds me of the made-up, mythical country song I hope to write someday: “If you want to keep the beer cold, just put it next to my ex-girlfriend’s heart.”
  2. Home, his first single and first No. 1, in 1990
  3. Pickup Man, an ode to pickup trucks
  4. If The Devil Danced In Empty Pockets, (He’d Have A Ball In Mine), because this is my life in a nutshell.
  5. 3rd Rock From The Sun (Now, if any of these other songs listed below came on the radio I would change the channel, but for argument’s sake and for true Diffie fans, the rest of the Top 10.)
  6. John Deere Green
  7. New Way To Light Up An Old Flame
  8. Ships That Don’t Come In
  9. Honky Tonk Attitude
  10. Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox When I Die

(I hope they won’t actually do that. Again, I’m thinking metaphor…)

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