Flashback: Mark Collie, Hardin County Line

Musician, record producer, and 2025 Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Tony Brown says that his reason for getting into the music business was wanting to make an impact.

He first began working towards that goal as a piano player in the 1970’s, working with artists ranging from The Oak Ridge Boys band to Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band to Rodney Crowell’s backing band The Cherry Bombs.

His era defining work as a record producer, beginning in the late eighties, would ultimately cement his legacy as a country music legend.

No doubt, his production work with future industry icons such as George Strait, Reba McEntire, Brooks & Dunn, and Vince Gill is the reason the Hall of Fame came calling, but Brown was also behind the recording studio glass for a number of lesser known artists and excellent albums as country music took the throne again in the nineties.

Right out of the gates in the new decade, Mark Collie’s 1990 MCA album Hardin County Line emerged as one of Brown’s most noteworthy projects that never found the traction it deserved. This despite Collie cruising Nashville’s fast lane with a pack of future country stars. Former Maverick magazine editor Alan Crackett quoted Collie as saying, “All us guys were singing demos…me and Billy Dean, Garth, Alan Jackson and Aaron Tippin would pass each other in the hallway, doing demos and writing together. Who knew we’d be making records in a matter of months?”

Brown signed Collie after watching him perform at a weekly gig at Douglas Corner, a celebrated and storied Nashville listening room that closed in 2020.

With his debut recording, Brown provided Collie access to Nashville’s top musicians. Marty Stuart, Vince Gill, Paul Franklin, Berry Beckett, Eddie Bayers, James Burton, Michael Rhodes, Curtis Young, Harry Stinson, and Steve Nathan offered their significant talents in studio.

Memphis clearly influenced Collie’s sound as much as Nashville, which makes sense given his hometown of Waynesboro is basically smack dab between the two music cities in Tennessee. There is something of the outsider to Collie’s persona and presence, but something more genuine than just an assumed outlaw shtick. Collie’s admittedly thin vocals are elevated throughout by his rockabilly swagger and a sense of feral urgency to his delivery.

Co-Produced with Doug Johnson, Collie’s debut, despite being a fully confidant calling card for a formidable new talent it, failed to take off. The album would peak only at 57 on the Billboard charts. Four singles would be released (“Something With a Ring to It,” “Looks Aren’t Everything”, “Hardin County Line,” and “Let Her Go.”) with only “Let Her Go” cracking the top twenty.

Nonetheless, the album was critically well received. John Floyd of All Music rated the album 4.5 out of 5 stars and wrote that it “evokes the heart of ’50s country, with detailed and compassionate songwriting, wildcat vocals, and guitar by James Burton.” John Morthland reviewed the album in the 1990 July/August edition of Country Music magazine. Morthland said, “…[Collie] shows he can toss the word play around as cleverly as the next Nashville Writer.”

That wordplay was at the heart of the album’s appeal. Collie wrote deceptively simple songs that alternated between lighthearted romps or profoundly compassionate and empathetic character studies.

Examples of the former include “The Good News and the Bad News, “Something with a Ring to It,” “What I Wouldn’t Give”, “Where There’s Smoke,” and “Looks Aren’t Everything.” Aaron Tippin was a co-writer on “Something with a Ring to It,” a song Garth Brooks would later record.

Collie imbues “Bound to Ramble” and the title track with a classic restless and twitchy sense of motion.

The more pensive songs, however, are where Collie hits the hardest. “Another Old Soldier” is song so carefully and smartly written it is difficult to determine if it is an antiwar song or a patriotic chest thumper. “Let Her Go” anticipates Keith Whitley’s “Lady’s Choice” by several years. It is a love song that fully leans into the agency and autonomy of a partner as the narrator advises, “you can’t hold her, if you can’t let her go.”

The highlight of the album is “Deliver Me.” A desperately vulnerable song of weakness about a man on the cusp of either taking his own life, his lover’s, or perhaps her lover’s with a  gun on the table by his bed.  Such is Collie’s craft, that the stories don’t easily give up their truths.

Collie’s entire debut album is really a killer collection of ten songs well worth either revisiting or discovering for the first time, and all the songs are written, or co-written, by Collie.

In the subsequent five years, other producers from Don Cook to James Stroud would experiment with Collie’s image and sound over the course of five albums on MCA Nashville and Giant Nashville, but none was successful in breaking Collie as the huge star Tony Brown must have originally envisioned or imagined.

In the early nineties, Collie achieved his greatest chart successes by consecutively running “Even the Man in the Moon is Crying” and “Born to Love You” into the top ten.

Collie would go on to pursue independent projects with 2006’s Rose Covered Garden, 2012’s Alive at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and 2021’s Book of the Blues.

Brown would also co-produce Collie’s sophomore effort Born and Raised in Black and White, a very worthy album in its own right, but Hardin County Line remains the best place to connect with Collie’s ragged charisma and wickedly sharp songwriting.