First, a hint: He came out of East Nowhere with one of the fastest-selling debut albums in history and rocketed to No. 1 on Billboard's country and pop charts!
And the answer is: Not Garth Brooks! Today's mystery musician doesn't even wear a hat. However, like many another country star, he does have three names: Billy Ray Cyrus.
These days, Billy Ray Who? is the question on the lips of anyone who isn't busy humming Cyrus's rockabilly ditty "Achy Breaky Heart"—a tune as catchy as the boogie-woogie flu and infinitely more bankable. In three months the single sold 600,000 copies, and the album whence it comes, Some Gave All, 1.5 million. Not bad for a clean-living, God-fearing soul who, this time last year, was traveling with his band in a broken-down bread truck.
In part, Cyrus, 30, owes his success to a bold marketing campaign. After hiring a choreographer to invent an "Achy Breaky" dance step, Mercury Records sponsored dance contests in country discos, where Cyrus's video—taped near his home hamlet of Flatwoods, Ky.—became a hit before it was released to television. When the single and album came out weeks later, radio programmers were swamped with requests.
But Mercury can't take all the credit. With a hot hand and a pectacular bod, Cyrus induces pandemonium during concerts when he strips off his shirt to bump and grind. Hip action aside, he says, "I'm really pretty shy. It's only onstage that I carry on like that."
Billy Ray—one of two sons of Ron Cyrus, a state assemblyman, and Ruth Ann, a homemaker, who divorced when he was 6—first exercised his pipes at Flatwoods' Pentecostal church. At 20, driven by a desire he still can't explain, he dropped out of Kentucky's Georgetown College. "I started feeling compelled to buy a guitar," says Cyrus. "I thought I was going crazy—I had never even liked to fast dance, so for me to buy a guitar and try to make a living singing was unreal."
Or at least unrealistic. Cyrus worked his way up through bar bands and along the way married Cindy, a sales representative, in 1986. They divorced last October, and money was partly to blame. "She told me, 'Billy, you might never make it, and I can't keep going through this,' " he says wistfully. "If everything had come along sooner, I don't think we would have fallen apart."
Things are looking up now, and Cyrus is as well. "Every night," he says, "me and the band huddle up and thank the good Lord for our blessings. If God is pulling his hand on my shoulder and leading me, I hope he keeps it there."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
