Early in 1991, I was a few months shy of becoming a Program Director for the country station where I worked. By then, I’d been in radio for about five years and had witnessed the “New Traditionalist” movement of the mid-to-late 1980s. Yet the excitement of artists such as The Judds, Foster and Lloyd, Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, kd lang, and Lyle Lovett had given way to the reliable blandness of Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, and, yes, Garth Brooks.

Then a single on Curb—a label I usual...