20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of George Strait is a collection of some of George Strait's greatest hits. It was released in 2002 by MCA Nashville. 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of George Strait peaked at number 8 on the U.S. Billboard Top Country Albums chart. It also reached number 76 on the all-genre Billboard 200. The album was certified Gold by the RIAA on September 30, 2003, and Platinum on July 29, 2005.[3] It has sold 1,836,000 copies as October 2019.
George Harvey Strait is an American singer, songwriter, actor, and music producer known as the "King of Country" and one of the most influential and popular recording artists of all time. He is known for his neotraditionalist country style, cowboy look, and being one of the first and main country artists to bring country music back to its roots and away from the pop country era in the 1980s. Strait's success began when his first single "Unwound" was a hit in 1981. During the 1980s, seven of his albums reached number one on the country charts. In the 2000s, Strait was named Artist of the Decade by the Academy of Country Music, was elected into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and won his first Grammy award for the album Troubadour.
George Strait may have landed his first number one in 1982, making him an "overnight sensation," but he'd been working for it since 1976. Strait From the Heart boasts "Fool-Hearted Memory," a perfect slow two-step that raged in all the dancehalls in America for half a year and sent folks to the bins in droves seeking out Strait's records. What they found was a singer of uncommon vitality who could sing honky tonk, countrypolitan, and the new traditional sounds that were just beginning to assert themselves after the first wave of "new country." The new Strait fans were interested in the ballads such as "Marina del Rey" and "A Fire I Can't Put Out," but they are hardly the best cuts on the set. In fact, when Strait lets it get on the raw side is when he is at his best. Tracks such as "Honky Tonk Crazy," his cover of Guy Clark's "Heartbroke," the Western swing of his original "I Can't See Texas From Here," and the strutting barroom anthem "The Steal of the Night" offer a portrait of Strait as a man who can do it all.
It could easily be argued that George Strait never made a bad album and they were all hits, but even among that remarkably consistent catalog, 1989's Beyond the Blue Neon stands apart from the pack, with half of its ten tracks reaching the country charts. Three of these topped the charts – "Baby's Gotten Good at Goodbye," "What's Going on in Your World," and "Ace in the Hole" – with "Overnight Success" peaking at eight and "Hollywood Squares," a novelty so sly and understated that it never cracks a smile, scraping the bottom reaches of the charts. An easy nature is one of Strait's signatures – he never makes anything look difficult – and he's never made music that seems as easy as this. That casual virtuosity can disguise just how virtuosic this album is. Strait hits the same touchstones as always – Western swing, barroom ballads, honky tonk shuffles, laments, and two-steps – but what's missing is that slight coat of gloss that always distinguished his singles on the albums after he turned into a superstar.
One Step at a Time continues the hot streak George Strait began with Blue Clear Sky. It's not on par with that latter-day masterpiece, yet equals its follow-up, Carrying Your Love with Me, by offering a uniformly excellent set of songs that are all delivered with conviction from Strait. If anything, Strait is getting better with age, as he's able to give even mediocre material nuanced, impassioned performances, which is a trick younger country artists need to learn if they're ever going to have a catalog as rich and consistently rewarding as his.
The electric pianos that kick off "You Look So Good in Love," the opening song on George Strait's third album Right or Wrong, may suggest that Strait is softening a bit, but that first impression is a bit misleading. As soon as that ballad is over, he launches into the Bob Wills standard that gives this album its title and he's as dexterous and as pure country as ever, and the rest of the album follows the lead of its title song, not the opening cut. To be sure, there are other ballads and slightly slicker material here, but the heart of this record is in the pure country of the Bakersfield love tune "A Little Heaven's Rubbing Off on Me," the light, funny "80 Proof Bottle of Tear Stopper," the Merle Haggard cover "Our Paths May Never Cross" and the barroom weeper "Let's Fall to Pieces Together." The overall tone of Right or Wrong is a little bit lighter than his first two albums – the Western swing skips, it doesn't ride the beat hard, the honky tonk numbers don't hit at the gut, they hit at the heart – but that only emphasizes how natural Strait's delivery is, and how he makes it all sound easy, and all sound good. It's another fine album from a singer who was already notching up a lot of them.