Music

Country Music Memories: Clay Walker Drops a Future No. 1 Single

Twenty-seven years ago today, on Sept. 13, 1994, Clay Walker released the song that would become his fourth No. 1 single. He’d cast a future star in its music video, too.

If you blink, you’ll miss her, but actor Angela Kinsey — best known as Angela Martin on the U.S. version of The Office — appears in Walker’s “If I Could Make a Living” music video, directed by Michael Merriman and released in late 1994. The song is the title track of and first single from Walker’s album of the same name, released on Sept. 27, 1994.

The role came more than a decade before she took her fictional accounting job at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pa. Kinsey was in her early 20s at the time and hadn’t landed any major acting roles yet; in fact, her IMDB page doesn’t begin until 1998, when she played a character named Simone on an episode of Step By Step.

Watch closely around the 1:50 mark. That woman holding a beer and flipping her hair around to Walker’s upbeat, twangy single? That‘s Kinsey. (Angela Martin would have never!)

Kinsey and best friend Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesley-Halpert on The Office) now co-host the weekly Office Ladies podcast, for which they re-watch the popular NBC series episode by episode and share secrets from the set. It was during a September 2020 episode of the show that Kinsey shared a bit about her role in Walker’s music video.

“I wore — remember the construction boots? But, like, girls wore them with like jean shorts and a top?” Kinsey tells Fischer. “And [Walker] was singing on the stage, but, like, on a ranch. And then there was a bunch of people around … I was sitting, kind of slapping my leg to the music.

“I’m a blur. I’m a blip,” she adds. “It’s like you barely can see me.”

By November of 1994 — only about two months after its release — “If I Could Make a Living” was at the top of the country radio charts. Alan Jackson, Keith Stegall and Roger Murrah co-wrote the song.

Wanna Know More ’90s Country Facts? Read On:

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