Hindsight is 20/20, and 30 years down the road, it’s easy to look back and see Wynonna Judd’s “To Be Loved by You,” which topped Billboard’sHot Country Songs chart dated April 6, 1996, as a hall-of-fame project.
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Wynonna, of course, earned a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022 as half of The Judds, while the single’s producer, Tony Brown (George Strait, Vince Gill), joined the Hall in 2025. Both of the “To Be Loved by You” songwriters — Gary Burr (Patty Loveless’ “I Try to Think About Elvis,” Conway Twitty’s “That’s My Job”) and Mike Reid (Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House,” Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”) — became Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame members in 2005.
Wynonna infused “To Be Loved by You” with dramatic, R&B-shaded dynamics, debuting the recording at No. 59 on Hot Country Songs on Jan. 6, 1996, ahead of the Feb. 13 release of her Curb/MCA album Revelations. She performed it in her first TV special as a solo act, also titled Revelations, that Feb. 23, and it climbed to the top of the list in the single’s 14th charted week. It marked the most recent of her four solo No. 1s, following 14 chart-toppers in 1984-89 with The Judds, featuring now-deceased mother/duet partner Naomi Judd, who announced her health-related retirement from touring in 1990.
Wynonna covered another Hall of Famer this March 30 when she sang Tammy Wynette’s “Woman to Woman” during taping for a PBS Great Performances episode, “Forever Yours: The First Lady of Country Music,” slated for later this year.
