On June 13, 1989, country music's mainstream audience met Mary Chapin Carpenter. The future hitmaker and multi-Grammy Awards winner wasn't new to the studio -- her folk-leaning debut album,
Hometown Girl, arrived in 1987 and featured bluegrass mainstays Mark O'Connor and Tony Rice -- yet it's Carpenter's sophomore effort,
State of the Heart, that helped Class of '89 peers Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Lorrie Morgan raise the genre's creative bar.
Carpenter established herself as her country music's poet laureate beginning with her consecutive Top 20 singles "How Do," "Never Had It So Good," "Quittin' Time" and "Something of a Dreamer." Those songs and seven other cuts on