Artist · chart history · #707 in indie & aaa artist polls
Chris Whitley
Solo artist Houston United States
Chris Whitley is an artist from Houston. Chris Whitley has 23 chart appearances on 22 radio countdowns from 5 stations on RockLists, spanning 1999–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Big Sky Country”, which appears on 20 lists with a best position of #141. The station that charted Chris Whitley most often is CD101 (Columbus, OH), with 14 appearances.
Chris Whitley, born in Houston in 1960, was a guitarist and singer who never fit neatly anywhere, and that was the point. His music drew on blues, jazz and rock at once, and he was just as likely to take on somebody else's song from a completely different corner of the record store as to play his own.
Columbia put out his debut, Living With the Law, in 1991, and it's a haunting, dust-blown record, blues rewired for a lonely modern landscape, with "Big Sky Country" as its wide-open centerpiece. Two of his songs made the top 50 of Billboard's mainstream rock chart, and he won 2 Independent Music Awards, yet neither the blues crowd nor the alternative rock scene ever fully claimed him.
He kept working for 25 years and put out 17 albums before he died of lung cancer in 2005, at 45.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Chris Whitley on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Big Sky Country | 20 | #141 | – | – | |
| 2 | Made From Dirt | 1 | #286 | – | – | |
| 3 | Living With The Law | 1 | #429 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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