Stones in the Road by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Stones in the Road, Mary Chapin Carpenter's fifth studio album, came out on Columbia Records on October 4, 1994, with her longtime collaborator John Jennings producing. It was her first album to top the Billboard country chart and her first to crack the top 10 of the Billboard 200, and it gave her a first number-one country single in the rowdy, rollicking "Shut Up and Kiss Me".

But the record's heart lies elsewhere. The wistful title track had already been recorded by Joan Baez, who heard Carpenter pitch it at a shared concert and cut it for Play Me Backwards in 1992. "John Doe No. 24" tells the story of John Doe Boyd, a Black deaf man locked away in an Illinois institution for more than 40 years whose real identity has never been known. It won her Grammys for Best Country Album and Best Female Country Vocal Performance, and went double platinum.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.