“Walk Tall” by John Mellencamp

"Walk Tall" comes from John Mellencamp's 2004 hits collection, Words & Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits, and it's an odd, appealing hybrid. He wrote it as an uplifting folk-rock number, then brought in Babyface to give it R&B-style production, so the pep talk at its heart rides on a glossier bed than its folk bones would suggest.

Critics took to it, and it went top 40 on three separate US adult-radio charts, climbing as high as number three on Adult Alternative Airplay. The video had a sharp hook of its own: Peter Dinklage plays a milkman in a retro, 1950s-flavored town that sorts its citizens by height. MTV, VH1 and CMT all put it in rotation, and it earned a nomination at the 2005 CMT Music Awards.

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