Joe Diffie - Musical Styles

Musical Styles

Steve Huey of Allmusic wrote that Diffie "lent his traditional sensibilities to humorous, rock-tinged novelties and plaintive ballads." His early albums for Epic mostly consisted of ballads, but starting with Honky Tonk Attitude, he began to include more up-tempo and novelty numbers. Starting with A Night to Remember, Diffie returned to a more ballad-oriented sound; Mike Kraski, then the senior vice president of sales for Sony Music Nashville, thought that the albums before it had over-emphasized his novelty releases.

Alanna Nash regularly compared Diffie's voice to that of George Jones. In her review of A Thousand Winding Roads, she contrasted the album with Mark Chesnutt's debut Too Cold at Home by saying, "While Chesnutt merely takes his inspiration from Jones, Diffie mimics Jones' delivery ... But now that he's making records himself, drops him to the rear of the pack, as a stylist with little style of his own." She thought that Diffie began to move away from his George Jones influences on A Night to Remember. William Ruhlmann wrote that Diffie "has put together a decade-plus career in country largely on his ability to succeed" in "scour Nashville publishers for ten good compositions in the established style", and that he was an "adequate but undistinguished singer." Similarly, Wilcox described Diffie as having "the vocal chops to sound like just about anyone" and thought that none of his Epic material showed any musical identity.