20 Country Slow Dance Songs
That Won't Rush You

You want a song to dance to with your wife in the kitchen, and country is what plays in your house anyway. The trouble with most lists is that they're built for listening, not for holding somebody. Half the songs on them are too quick to sway to, and a few will turn the mood of the room in a direction you didn't intend.

Below are twenty that work: ten older, ten newer. First, the test that tells you inside fifteen seconds whether a song is going to let you take your time.

Pick The Song By Its Beat, Not By The Words

Put the song on and stop listening to the singer. Find the beat underneath, the thing your head nods to, and walk in place to it. Fifteen seconds is enough to know. If you can walk to it without hurrying, the two of you can sway to it. If walking to it feels like a jog, save it for the car.

Two things to notice while you're standing there:

• The count. Most slow country songs fall into fours. If it feels like the song is counting in threes instead, you've got a waltz, and a waltz moves differently than what you're about to do. Nothing wrong with it. It's just a different night.
• The singer's phrasing. In a lot of country ballads the lines run long and the singer sits back behind the beat. That's what gives you room. When the words start stacking up on top of each other, the song has stopped being a slow dance.

A familiar song beats an impressive one here. A song the two of you have both heard four hundred times means neither of you is hunting for the beat while you're also trying to figure out where your hands go.

Kitchen dancing is the reason Date Nights Dancing exists: easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No dance experience required. For tonight, though, a song off this list and the basic hold in how to slow dance with your wife will get you through three minutes.

Ten Older Country Songs That Hold A Steady Beat

• 1. "I Cross My Heart," George Strait. Steady the whole way through, and slow enough that you can give each foot two beats instead of one.
• 2. "Amazed," Lonestar. The chorus gets big. The beat underneath it doesn't change, so you don't have to do anything different when it does.
• 3. "When You Say Nothing at All," Keith Whitley. Easy beat to find. A good first one if either of you is counting in your head.
• 4. "I Swear," John Michael Montgomery. The lines run long and there's no scramble anywhere in it.
• 5. "It's Your Love," Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Two voices trading off. Good if you'd rather be facing each other than both looking at the floor.
• 6. "My Best Friend," Tim McGraw. Gentle from the opening bar and it stays there.
• 7. "Neon Moon," Brooks & Dunn. More shuffle in this one than the rest of the list. You can sway through it, but you'll feel it pulling at you.
• 8. "Remember When," Alan Jackson. Slow and plain, start to finish.
• 9. "The Dance," Garth Brooks. Piano-led and slow. Worth knowing it's a sad song before you press play, if the night was supposed to be light.
• 10. "Cowboy Take Me Away," the Chicks. It builds, and it never gets fast.

Ten Newer Country Songs That Work The Same Way

• 11. "Tennessee Whiskey," Chris Stapleton. Slow and heavy, and about as forgiving as a song gets.
• 12. "Die a Happy Man," Thomas Rhett. Simple all the way down, with nothing in it that speeds up.
• 13. "Speechless," Dan + Shay. Big in the middle, and none of that reaches your feet.
• 14. "Yours," Russell Dickerson. Nothing in it changes, so you can hold a frame and leave it there.
• 15. "Forever After All," Luke Combs. Unhurried, and the beat sits right where you'd want it.
• 16. "Lost in This Moment," Big & Rich. Slow and wide open.
• 17. "Making Memories of Us," Keith Urban. A little quicker than most of these. One beat per foot works fine.
• 18. "Blue Ain't Your Color," Keith Urban. There's a drag on this one that does half the work for you.
• 19. "H.O.L.Y.," Florida Georgia Line. The slowest thing here. If this is your first song ever, start with it.
• 20. "Bless the Broken Road," Rascal Flatts. It grows toward the end and stays walkable the entire time.

That's the shortlist. If you want a wider net than country, there's a broader set of slow dance songs, slow songs for the living room, and, if the radio you both grew up on was the 80s and 90s, plenty of those still work on a kitchen floor.

A Few Country Songs Want A Two-Step, Not A Sway

Plenty of the country songs you love are the wrong shape for holding your wife and rocking side to side. They're quicker, they travel, and at a dancehall you'd see the whole floor moving around the room instead of turning in one spot.

"Forever and Ever, Amen" by Randy Travis is one. So are "Check Yes or No" and "Carrying Your Love with Me" by George Strait, and "Fishin' in the Dark" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Put any of them on and your feet will want to go somewhere. What's under those songs is a two-step, a real dance with lessons of its own, and you can't fake it by swaying faster.

I'll be straight about what my own program covers. Date Nights Dancing teaches social swing at home, not the two-step. Swing is what fits most of the twenty songs above and most of what gets played at a wedding, which is why I built it around that. If the two-step is what you're after for a night at a dancehall, go find a teacher who does it. That's a different night out and a good one.

Put A Song On Before The Kitchen Gets Cleaned Up

The window is smaller than you think. Once the dishwasher is loaded and everybody's on the couch, you aren't getting anyone back up. The best time is while there's still a dish towel over somebody's shoulder.

Keep it simple:

• Your song is picked before you walk in, so you're not scrolling with one hand while she waits.
• Push a chair back and get the rug out from under your feet.
• Volume up far enough that you feel the beat in the floor. This is not background music.
• Hold out your hand, palm up, and say her name. Asking her to dance is most of the skill; the dance is what happens after she takes it.

One song. Not a playlist, not a project, not an announcement about how the two of you are going to start doing this now.

If what's coming is a wedding, that's a different job with more preparation behind it, and I'd send you to the wedding slow dance songs list and to online wedding dance lessons instead. And if the two of you get comfortable enough in the kitchen that you start wanting a floor with other people on it, summer is when those floors show up.

Three Minutes In The Kitchen Outlast The Rest Of The Night

One customer wrote this under an ad a few days after buying the program:

My husband made dinner, we lit candles, had our wine glasses, dressed to the nines, and played country music. It was so magical to then dance together by candlelight, all dressed up and then cuddle up and watch the Princess Bride. Best date ever.

Nothing in that is expensive or hard. Dinner, candles, country music, and the two of them dancing to it in their own house.

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain that the moments people carry out of an experience are the ones that break the script of how that kind of day normally goes. A weeknight at your house has a script. Three minutes of the two of you holding onto each other in the middle of the kitchen is not in it, which is why she may still be describing it a month later, when the rest of that week is gone.

One gift message sent along with the program said, in part:

For the moments when the only dancehall we can go to is in our living room.

That's the right way to think about the room you already have. The floor between the counter and the table is a small dancehall with better lighting and nobody watching.

If the two of you get through a song and she wants more of that, Date Nights Dancing is where it goes next, both of you on the same video, working on the same moves. There are more at-home evenings like this one in the date night ideas library.

You already know which of these songs is hers. Put it on tonight and hold out your hand.