Ne-Yo enlists three country singers for the Ms. Tundra remix videos

Ne-Yo has put out a run of remix videos for Ms. Tundra, the line dance single from his country album Highway 79. Mike Clark Jr., Tonio Armani and 803Fresh each take a turn on the song, and That Grape Juice posted the three clips on 27 August.

Highway 79 landed in July and is the first country record of a career built almost entirely in R&B. The album carries Dance Right Now, Thinking What I'm Thinking, Up Out & Gone and Simple Things, all of which were received warmly enough, but none of them travelled the way Ms. Tundra has.

Ms. Tundra is built on production from Chuck Harmony, a writer and producer whose credits run back through a long stretch of commercial R&B. The song is pitched squarely at line dancers, with a truck-shaped central metaphor and a chorus written to be shouted back in a room full of people who already know the steps.

Rather than let the single run on its own momentum, Ne-Yo brought in three of the Black male singers currently working in country. Tonio Armani, 803Fresh and Mike Clark Jr. each rework the track in their own register, and That Grape Juice framed the set of remixes as a spotlight on a group of vocalists the genre has been slow to make room for.

The move fits a wider pattern of R&B and pop artists testing country in the past two years, a route The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers also took with his own country album. For Ne-Yo, whose last few years of headlines have been dominated by a lawsuit over a dog attack, Highway 79 is the reset.

Chuck Harmony has been busy elsewhere too. The same week the Ms. Tundra videos landed, he and Claude Kelly wrote and produced Tamia's new single Forever And A Day. Ne-Yo's next moves, and everything else dated, sit on the release calendar.