Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music: The Inspirational Stories behind 101 of Your Favorite Country Songs

by Jack Canfield

I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below

  They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound

  But I am still around...I’ll always be around...and around and around and around and around

  I fly a starship across the universe divide

  And when I reach the other side

  I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can

  Perhaps I may become a highwayman again

  Or I may simply be a single drop of rain

  But I will remain

  And I’ll be back again, and again and again and again and again.

  The House That Built Me

  Story by Allen Shamblin

  Song written by Allen Shamblin and Tom Douglas

  Recorded by Miranda Lambert

  Since I graduated from high school in 1977, I have had a ritual where I go back every year to my hometown of Huffman, Texas. I’ll go through the Dairy Queen drive-through and then drive by the house my dad built on Sunny Glen Drive. It’s just a way I recalibrate myself, and it seems like over the past few years, since 9/11, with the world going the way it has, it’s more and more important for me to go back there. It’s a touchstone for me.

  “The House That Built Me” was actually written about seven or eight years ago. I brought in the title, but it was truly a co-written song. Tom Douglas and I both drew on our experiences from our childhood homes while we were in the writing process. The upstairs bedroom where I learned to play guitar, the dog buried in the backyard, the fingerprints — all of that is drawn straight from our lives. We actually buried a couple of dogs in my backyard. I was crazy about dogs growing up, and still am.

  In the song, the singer says he (or she) is broken, and that came from our lives, too. When you’ve lived as long as Tom and I have, there are certain things that just break your heart, and home seems to be the place to go to feel better. I have a home in Tennessee now and a family here, but when I go back to those earliest memories of my childhood home, it just seems very healing to me. It brings me great comfort the older I get.

  Maybe part of that brokenness or grieving is the breakdown of community. I miss the days when we could get on our bikes and stay gone all day and nobody thought a thing about it. Everybody knew everybody in our neighborhood. The world’s not like that anymore. We have to keep a much closer eye on our children than my parents had to keep on me.

  The song has an unusual format. That just came out in the writing. The lines that repeat, “I thought if I could touch this place” — work like a chorus, but it’s hard to define. That’s just the way it came out. We weren’t really analyzing it in the process. We were just following one line to the next, following the heart of the song wherever it led us. We went where the emotion took us lyrically and melodically. It’s usually better to do it that way. Most of the time, when you are writing a song, the head will steer you wrong, but the heart will always steer you right.

  So it was pitched for a while and it just wasn’t connecting with people the way we thought it would. Then two years ago, Tom called me up and said, “Let’s take another look at ‘The House That Built Me.’” We could see the holes and the weak spots so clearly after letting it sit for a few years. Within an hour and a half we had rewritten it.

  Tom went in and demoed it with just a piano and a light drum groove and sent it to Scott Hendricks, who is a great producer. Scott put it on hold for Blake Shelton. Blake was picking Miranda up at an airport one day and Miranda got in Blake’s truck and he started playing the compilation CD of the songs he had on hold. I think it was the third or fourth song on the CD. When Miranda heard it, she said, “Blake, I want this song,” so they called Scott Hendricks from the truck and Blake said, “Scott, I need to talk to you about something. Miranda just heard ‘House that Built Me.’ She was pretty moved by it and says she’d like to have it.” So Blake and Scott graciously released the song to Miranda.

  Miranda really made it hers. Frank Liddell and Mike Wrucke ended up producing it for her and they did a simple acoustic version of it and it worked great. The fact that it was a woman singing, I think, really helped the song connect with the public better anyway. It worked better for the video, too. It’s a pretty bold request for a man to come up to someone’s house and ask to walk through it, so that might not have worked as well with a male.

  The House That Built Me

  I know they say you can’t go home again

  But I just had to come back one last time

  Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam

  But these handprints on the front steps are mine

  Up those stairs in that little back bedroom

  Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar

  I bet you didn’t know, that under that live oak

  My favorite dog is buried in the yard

  I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

  This brokenness inside me might start healing

  Out here it’s like I’m someone else

  I thought that maybe I could find myself

  If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave

  Won’t take nothing but a memory

  From the house that built me

  Mama cut out pictures of houses for years

  From Better Homes and Gardens magazine

  Plans were drawn and concrete poured

  Nail by nail and board by board

  Daddy gave life to mama’s dream

  I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

  This brokenness inside me might start healing

  Out here it’s like I’m someone else

  I thought that maybe I could find myself

  If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave

  Won’t take nothing but a memory

  From the house that built me

  BRIDGE:

  You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can

  I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am

  I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

  This brokenness inside me might start healing

  Out here it’s like I’m someone else

  I thought that maybe I could find myself

  If I walk around I swear I’ll leave

  Won’t take nothing but a memory

  From the house that built me

  To purchase the original demo of this song,

  go to www.countrysongdemos.com

  The Most Beautiful Girl

  Story by Norro Wilson

  Written by Norro Wilson, Rory Bourke, and Billy Sherrill

  Recorded by Charlie Rich

  The world doesn’t know it now, but I was a recording artist for every label except CBS. What it taught me is that, although I thought I could sing, I wasn’t a stylist like a George Jones or a Willie Nelson. When you hear Willie Nelson, you never forget his voice. And you have to have a hit song, too.

  I had recorded this song that Rory Bourke had written called “Sunset and Vine.” I always was a pretty good mimic. When I did nightclubs, I would do impressions and things like that all the time, and this song was my impression of The Beach Boys. I went up to Chicago to meet Rory, who was the national sales and promotions director of Smash Records, a subsidiary of Mercury. I went there to do a promotional tour and see the DJs, and so on.

  After we did the radio tour, I was staying with Rory and his wife in their guest bedroom. In those years, I would take a drink now and then and, one morning, there was a knock at my door. I opened the door, and there was Rory and his wife. She was holding a cup of coffee and he was holding a little glass of orange juice. Rory had his guitar in his hand and he said, “Let’s write a song.” Now, I couldn’t think of anything else in the world that I wanted to do less than write a song at that moment. But I was on his turf, so I said, “Okay.”

  He told me had an idea and he strummed, “I woke up this morning, realized what I had done / I stood alone in the cold grey dawn and knew I’d lost my morning sun. / I lost my head and
I said some things, now comes the heartache that the morning brings.” That’s as far as he had gotten. And, I didn’t really even consider myself a writer at the time, but maybe I got lucky. I sat right up and said, “What if that guy wakes up in an apartment building and then walks outside and goes up to the first guy he sees and says, ‘Hey, Mister, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world? And if you did, was she crying?’” And we went on to finish it. It’s a very short song if you look at the lyrics. It’s not too wordy or involved, but it had magic to it.

  The song lay around for six or seven years. I tried to get Joe Stampley to cut it, but it was too pop for him. We had no problem with that. He wanted to be a country singer and it was a pop song, which has really been my background. I was always more pop than country.

  Then Billy Sherrill heard it. He heard the intro, “Hey Mister, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and he said, “What kind of crap is that — ‘Hey Mister’? Why don’t you just say, ‘Hey, did you happen to see....’ It don’t matter who he’s talking to. People will get it.” Well, that was the answer! That was just what the song needed. That really kicked it in the butt.

  Billy was producing Charlie Rich then, so he took it to him and they began working on it in the studio. They took a lot of the flavor of the piano work from Charlie’s first hit, “Behind Closed Doors” and they worked some of it into “Most Beautiful Girl,” which kind of became Charlie’s signature sound. When they went in to cut “Most Beautiful Girl,” they took several hours trying to get the piano intro just how Billy wanted it. But man, did it work.

  The Most Beautiful Girl

  Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?

  And if you did was she crying, cryin’?

  Hey, if you happen to see the most beautiful girl, that walked out on me

  Tell her I’m sorry, tell her I need my baby

  Oh, won’t you tell her, that I love her.

  I woke up this morning, and realized what I had done

  I stood alone in the cold gray dawn

  And I knew I’d lost my morning sun

  I lost my head and I said some things

  Now come the heartaches that the morning brings

  I know I’m wrong and I couldn’t see

  I let my world slip away from me.

  Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?

  And if you did was she crying, cryin’?

  Hey, if you happen to see the most beautiful girl, that walked out on me

  Tell her I’m sorry, tell her I need my baby

  Oh, won’t you tell her, that I love her.

  Did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?

  And if you did was she crying, cryin’?

  Hey, if you happen to see the most beautiful girl, that walked out on me

  Tell her I’m sorry, tell her I need my baby

  Oh, won’t you tell her, that I love her

  Did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?

  And if you did was she crying, cryin’?

  The River

  Story by Victoria Shaw

  Song written by Victoria Shaw and Garth Brooks

  Recorded by Garth Brooks

  I wrote “The River” with Garth Brooks at my little house in East Nashville. We were sitting around trying to come up with any kind of song idea but we were blank. After about an hour he said, “Put some music on,” so I put on this new James Taylor album I had just gotten. If you listen, you can hear we had James as our muse.

  As soon as we locked in, the song wrote itself. We were done in two hours. Garth’s first record hadn’t even come out yet. He told me he would put it on his second album, but it never made it, so I was thrilled when it showed up on Ropin’ the Wind. This song was, and is, one of Garth’s signature songs.

  I still get people telling me all the time how “The River” was used at their graduation or at a funeral or it inspired them to leave a job or a town they were unhappy in and start a new life.

  Garth and I were two wide-eyed dreamers when we wrote this. The song was, and still is, our philosophy of life.

  The River

  You know a dream is like a river

  Ever changin’ as it flows

  And a dreamer’s just a vessel

  That must follow where it goes

  Trying to learn from what’s behind you

  And never knowing what’s in store

  Makes each day a constant battle

  Just to stay between the shores

  CHORUS:

  I will sail my vessel

  ’Til the river runs dry

  Like a bird upon the wind

  These waters are my sky

  I’ll never reach my destination

  If I never try

  So I will sail my vessel

  ’Til the river runs dry

  Too many times we stand aside

  And let the waters slip away

  ’Til what we put off ’til tomorrow

  Has now become today

  So don’t you sit upon the shoreline

  And say you’re satisfied

  Choose to chance the rapids

  And dare to dance the tide

  CHORUS

  There’s bound to be rough waters

  And I know I’ll take some falls

  But with the good Lord as my captain

  I can make it through them all

  CHORUS

  The Song Remembers When

  Story by Hugh Prestwood

  Song written by Hugh Prestwood

  Recorded by Trisha Yearwood

  I was an English major in college and a lot of poets influenced my lyric writing. I’ve loved poets like Frost, and Edwin A. Robinson, and Emily Dickinson. I got the idea for “The Song Remembers When” from a poem by Anne Sexton called “Music Swims Back to Me.” There’s a line in the poem where the narrator says, “The song remembers more than I.”

  I had a couple of major heartbreaks in my life. I think everyone has had those relationships where you hear a song that triggers emotions and memories. The lines that read, “we were rolling through the Rockies, we were up above the clouds” — that came from a real moment in time. My wife and I were driving through Rocky Mountain National Park. We drove from Estes Park, Colorado, and as we got higher, we were literally driving through the clouds and eventually we were above the clouds.

  We were listening to the radio and I actually heard one of my songs, “Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart,” performed by Randy Travis. So this was just an incredible moment, looking out over the mountains and then hearing one of my songs on the radio. The station was actually out of Denver, and I started to use Denver in the song, but we had also been to Jackson Hole, Wyoming on that trip and I decided Jackson sounded better.

  The first verse, “I was standing at the counter, I was waiting for the change,” was also based on an experience I had when I heard one of my songs for the first time. I was at a Shoney’s restaurant and something that I had written came over the speakers. So I remembered that scene and thought, “I’ll use that as the first verse.” All of those scenes got jumbled around and ended up in this song, which was about a painful break-up.

  We had a lot of trouble getting that song recorded. I was writing for BMG then and I went through a little bit of a depression because I thought that was as good a song as I would ever write and we could not get it cut. I actually had a couple of big producers who called me and asked me if I would consider re-writing it to make it more radio-friendly and more chorus-y. It doesn’t really even have a chorus. But I just loved it the way it was and I didn’t want to change it.

  Then Kathy Mattea recorded it and I really very happy about it, until I found out it didn’t make it on her record. That really sent me into a nosedive, with a lot of self-doubt. She told me later the label actually liked the song, but it didn’t really match the flavor of the album.

  W
e had pitched it to Trisha Yearwood for a previous album and that didn’t happen either, but the second time around, she cut it. It later won the Nashville Songwriters Association Song of the Year, and even won an Emmy because Trisha did it in a TV special. Since then, it’s almost become her signature song. When an artist gets identified with a song that closely, a lot of other artists don’t want to touch it. If I were an artist and I heard Trisha sing it, I wouldn’t want to try to cover it either. She really nailed it.

  The Song Remembers When

  I was standing at the counter

  I was waiting for the change

  When I heard that old familiar music start

  It was like a lighted match

  Had been tossed into my soul

  It was like a dam had broken in my heart

  After taking every detour

  Getting lost and losing track

  So that even if I wanted

  I could not find my way back

  After driving out the memory

  Of the way things might have been

  After I’d forgotten all about us

  The song remembers when

  We were rolling through the Rockies

  We were up above the clouds

  When a station out of Jackson played that song

  And it seemed to fit the moment

  And the moment seemed to freeze

  When we turned the music up and sang along

  And there was a God in Heaven

  And the world made perfect sense

  We were young and were in love

  And we were easy to convince

  We were headed straight for Eden

  It was just around the bend

  And though I have forgotten all about it

  The song remembers when

  I guess something must have happened

  And we must have said goodbye

  And my heart must have been broken

  Though I can’t recall just why

  The song remembers when

  Well, for all the miles between us

  And for all the time that’s passed