Country Album Chart News: The Week of April 2, 2014: Johnny Cash Is Out Among The Stars While It's High Noon time for Jerrod Niemann

This week we debut our new Top 10 Country Album Chart format, where we showcase the Top 200 Chart Placement for the Top 10 (and beyond) but also show the Top Country Album Chart position for our Notables section. Johnny Cash’s Out Among The Stars and Jerrod Niemann’s High Noon make their debuts.

While Luke Bryan still holds down two slots in the Top 10, he’s no longer holding down two of the Top 5 slots with his Spring Break EP or Crash My Party album. This leaves room for Johnny Cash’s lost album Out Among The Stars to debut at #1 with 54k sold in its first week. The album is his third post-humous release. The Gold-certified The Outsiders from Eric Church is next. At #3 is Jerrod Niemann’s High Noon, an album which gained 6,000 copies in its first week over Jerrod’s sophomore album Free The Music but still doesn’t pace as well as his Judge Jerrod And The Hung Jury did when it debuted in 2010 at #1. Still, it’s not a horrific start for the “Drink To That All Night” singer. At #4 is Crash My Party and at #5 is Florida Georgia Line’s Here’s To The Good Times. Both these albums have sold well over 1.7 million copies.

Cole Swindell, Dierks Bentley, Luke Bryan, ZinePak and Sara Evans lead the rest of the Top 10 Country Albums this week.

Luke’s second album in the top 10, his Spring Break 6: Like We Ain’t Ever sits at #6 while The 2 disc Walmart-exclusive Zinepak has sold nearly another 10k to give 22k copies sold in two weeks. At #8 is Cole Swindell’s self-titled album, an album which has sold 126k in just six weeks on the charts. At #9 is Dierks Bentley with his 100k selling Riser while Sara Evans’ Slow Me Down takes home the #10 slot this week, its third week on the charts. This means that 10 out of the Top 56 albums in the USA are Country music releases. Still one of the top ratios for any genre.

Notable albums include Eli Young Band, David Nail, Scotty McCreery, Sarah Davidson, Cassadee Pope, Taylor Swift, and Danielle Bradbery.

David Nail leads our rundown this week with I’m A Fire. In one month on the charts the album has sold nearly 40k while Eli Young Band’s 10,000 Towns (also a month old) has sold 54k to date. Taylor Swift’s RED continues to sell bringing scanned sales well over 4,000,000 copies in the usa alone. Jake Owen’s Days of Gold continues to have slight sales increases and in 17 weeks he’s moved 121k copies of the album featuring the hit single “Beachin’.” Scotty McCreery’s album slipped off the Top 200 Albums chart this week but we’ve still got him covered as See You TOnight has now moved 219k in 24 weeks on the chart. Meanwhile, Sarah Davidson -- the singer appearing on TBS series “Private Lives of Nashville Wives” debuts at #30 on the Country chart with her Self-titled EP. Finally, we have the latest news on Danielle Bradbery and Cassadee Pope’s debut albums for the Big Machine Label Group and Republic Nashville.

Next week we’ll see the debuts of many albums, including Dan+Shay’s debut, Josh Thompson’s sophomore album, the Infamous Stringdusters, Charlie Daniels and the Merle Haggard “Working Man’s Poet” tribute. As always check with Roughstock for all of the details!

Top 10 Country Albums for The Week of April 2, 2014 with 6 Notable Albums (SoundScan Top 200 Current Albums Chart Placement in First colum, Country Rank in Second)*

*Top 10 Country Album Numbers rounded to nearest thousand, Outside Top 10 rounded to nearest Hundred.