Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40
The Spiritual Successor to American Country Countdown, Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40 is a Country Music countdown show begun in 2006.
After 27 years with ACC, Kingsley took the show's format over to Jones Radio (now Dial Global) to create Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40. (ACC, meanwhile, continues to this day, hosted by Kix Brooks of the now-former duo Brooks and Dunn.) Country Top 40, or CT40 as the show is sometimes referred to, presents the top 40 country hits for each week according to Mediabase (as opposed to the Billboard charts, which ACC would continue to use through 2009). Other features include listener requests (two per show), a handful of classics, and stories behind the songs. Another feature is "CT 40 Flashback", done once a month, which presents several facts on a given year, followed by snippets of the top 5 country hits on the current month in that year.
- Bowdlerize: A strange zig-zagging. Bob seemed just fine playing Zac Brown Band's "Toes" uncensored – the lyric, "I've got my toes in the water/ass in the sand" – when it was scaling the charts, but every occurrence of the song after the fact has been censored ("I've got my toes in the water/toes in the sand").
- He also censored "marga-daiquiri-screw-olada on the beach" (from Jerrod Niemann's "One More Drinkin' Song") to "…chill-olada" despite the "screw" referring to a screwdriver drink.
- Cheap Heat: A few songs, including "Tim McGraw" by Taylor Swift, have gotten edits relating to Kingsley's show ("Someday you'll turn your radio on" became "And turn the Bob Kingsley countdown on").
- Guest Host: Kingsley often takes a week off around August and lets singer-songwriter Jeffrey Steele fill in for him. Steele is surprisingly comfortable in the role, often handling requests for songs that he co-wrote (even some that he sang as a member of Boy Howdy) and even hauling out the guitar to perform a cover in the middle of the top 10.
- Rearrange the Song: Like its predecessor, it almost always uses the radio edits of songs. Some songs are also cut down or faded out early if time is running short.
- In one bizarre zig-zagging, they used an abridged version of the album version of Montgomery Gentry's "Gone" (the radio edit has the backing vocals mixed louder in parts, plus a shorter instrumental bridge and a few other minor truncations — he kept the longer bridge and softer backing vocals, but hacked up the song in different spots than the radio edit).
- Spiritual Successor: To ACC's original format.
- Suspiciously Similar Song: As with the last few years of ACC, many of the commercial bumpers are not-quite-soundalikes of popular (or not-so-popular) country songs.