My 100 Favorite Charted Pop Songs: The Valley Road

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Are you keeping track of where these songs have been on the musical landscape lately? Well, if so, here’s another one to throw you for a loop. I’ve actually liked the weird way these group together when placed in alphabetical order. So from 70s pop to 80s rock, here’s today’s song. The Valley Road - Bruce Hornsby and the Range You big city folks might not understand this song. This is how pregnancy was dealt with in a small town. The girl gets pregnant and runs off “to her sister’s,” even if she was an only child (or if her sister lived in the same town). A few months later, “she came back around like nothing’d really happened.” (It’s nothing new: there were lots of children born to slave women fathered by their white masters…and look at Thomas Jefferson!) Like I said, you big city folks might not understand that. There’s still, in 2024 with every Tom, Dick, and Harry fathering a child with a celebrity without marriage, a stigma associated with teenage pregnancy in the small towns. That’s one of the reasons a lot of people don’t like small towns: everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody’s business. (It brings to mind a funny-not-funny story my mom told about a Gladys Kravitz-type woman in the neighborhood when she got married: the woman was watching my mom like a hawk for signs of a pregnancy. ) All of that might make you hate this song, but it’s so beautifully melodic that it’s hard to do anything but love this. And I do. The Valley Road Written by Bruce Hornsby and Mike Hornsby Recorded by Bruce Hornsby and the Range From Scenes From the Southside, 1988 Peak chart position: #5 Today’s country song: “When I Stop Dreaming” Standing like a stone on the old plantation: