The
Spiritual Successor to
American Country Countdown,
Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40 is a
Country Music countdown show begun in 2006.
After 27 years with ACC, Kingsley took the show's format over to Jones Radio (now Dial Global) to create
Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40. (
ACC, meanwhile, continues to this day, hosted by Kix Brooks of the now-former duo
Brooks & Dunn.)
Country Top 40, or CT40 as the show is sometimes referred to, presents the top 40 country hits for each week according to
Mediabase (as opposed to the
Billboard charts, which ACC would continue to use through 2009). Other features include listener requests (two per show), a handful of classics, and stories behind the songs. Another feature is "CT 40 Flashback", done once a month, which presents several facts on a given year, followed by snippets of the top 5 country hits on the current month in that year.
Tropes present:
- Bowdlerize: A strange zig-zagging. Bob seemed just fine playing Zac Brown Band's "Toes" uncensored – the lyric, "I've got my toes in the water/ass in the sand" – when it was scaling the charts, but every occurrence of the song after the fact has been censored ("I've got my toes in the water/toes in the sand").
- He also censored "marga-daiquiri-screw-olada on the beach" (from Jerrod Niemann's "One More Drinkin' Song") to "…chill-olada" depsite the "screw" referring to a screwdriver drink. Oddly, he's done nothing about "screw the ticket" in Casey James' "Crying on a Suitcase".
- Cheap Heat: A few songs, including "Tim McGraw" by Taylor Swift and "Little Bit of Life" by Craig Morgan, have gotten edits relating to Kingsley's show ("Someday you'll turn your radio on" in the former became "And turn the Bob Kingsley countdown on", while the latter changed "A little bit of radio going boom-boom-boom" to "A little bit of Kingsley").
- Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: On a December 2012 show, Kingsley made reference to Strait's 2002 single "She'll Leave You with a Smile"… but accidentally played an unrelated song of the same name that Strait recorded in 1997 (which, unlike the 2002 song, was not released as a single). After a fan sent him an e-mail correcting the error, Kingsley acknowledged the mistake and played the right song on the January 12, 2013 show.
- Cool Old Guy: Kingsley is in his 70s and still announcing the latest hits in country.
- Guest Host: Jeffrey Steele filled in for Bob in late 2008 and 2009. Steele is surprisingly comfortable in the role, often handling listener requests for songs that he co-wrote (even some that he sang as a member of Boy Howdy) and even hauling out the guitar to perform a cover in the middle of the top 10. Steele's first fill-in was followed by another fill-in by Jack Ingram.
- Lance Tidwell of 92.5 WWYZ in Hartford, Connecticut filled in for the September 1, 2012 show.
- Previously On: Each program begins with a montage of the previous week's Top 5 hits.
- Rearrange the Song: Like its predecessor, it almost always uses the radio edits of songs. Some songs are also cut down or faded out early if time is running short.
- In one bizarre zig-zagging, he once used an abridged version of the album version of Montgomery Gentry's "Gone". The radio edit has the backing vocals mixed louder in parts, plus a few more truncations here and there (most notably, the Hammond organ solo before the last chorus is truncated). The version he played on one show had the softer backing vocals and longer organ solo of the album version, but was hacked up in different spots than the radio edit.
- Spiritual Successor: To ACC's original format.
0 reviews