AUGUST 13, 1988 – Willie Nelson became the first artist ever to have an album spend 10 years on the Billboard country chart, as “Stardust” logged its 520th week. Its ten songs consist entirely of pop standards that Nelson picked from among his favorites. Nelson asked Booker T. Jones, who was his neighbor in Malibu at the time, to arrange a version of “Moonlight in Vermont”. Impressed with Jones’s work, Nelson asked him to produce the entire album. Nelson’s decision to record such well-known tracks was controversial among Columbia executives because he had distinguished himself in the outlaw country genre. Recording of the album took only ten days.
Released in April, Stardust was met with high sales and near-universal positive reviews. It peaked at number one in Billboard’s Top Country Albums and #30 in the Billboard 200. Meanwhile, it charted at number one in Canadian RPM’s Country Albums and #28 in RPM’s Top Albums. The singles “Blue Skies” and “All of Me” peaked respectively at #1 and #3 in Billboard’s Hot Country Singles.
In 1979, Nelson won a Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for the song “Georgia on My Mind”. Stardust was on the Billboard’s Country Album charts for ten years—from its release until 1988. The album also reached #1 in New Zealand and #5 in Australia in 1980. In 2003, it ranked #257 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was originally certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in December 1978. In 1984, when it was certified triple platinum, Nelson was the highest-grossing concert act in the United States. In 2002, the album was certified quintuple platinum, and it was later inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame class of 2015.
TRACKLIST:
1) Stardust (Hoagy Carmichael, Mitchell Parish)
2) Georgia on My Mind (Hoagy Carmichael, Stuart Gorrell)
3) Blue Skies (Irving Berlin)
4) All of Me (Seymour Simons, Gerald Marks)
5) Unchained Melody (Alex North, Hy Zaret)
6) Song (Kurt Weill, Maxwell Anderson)
7) On the Sunny Side of the Street (Jimmy McHugh, Dorothy Fields)
8 Moonlight in Vermont (Karl Suessdorf, John Blackburn)
9) Don’t Get Around Much Anymore (Duke Ellington, Bob Russell)
10) Someone to Watch Over Me (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin)
