Tim McGraw got a song for all the women of Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and beyond – “Southern Girl.” It was released in 2013 as the fourth single off McGraw’s album Two Lanes of Freedom.
It went on to top Canada’s charts, and it almost did the same in the United States, reaching No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
The Song With A Really Cool Groove For A Perfect Summer Night
Written by Jaren Johnston, Rodney Clawson, and Lee Thomas Miller, “Southern Girl” is a too-easy-to-fall-song that pays tribute to American women born where the weather’s hot nine months a year.
“Now I ain’t sayin’ them LA ladies don’t know what they’re doin’. And I been in love with New York City a time or two. I had some Seattle coffee, some Chicago wind. Some Kansas wheat fields I’d love to see again. But the fireflies play where the cattails grow. And them southern girls, they talk nice and slow with,” the song begins.
Johnston said they wrote the song at Big Loud Shirt. “We were there an hour and a half, maybe two hours. It was the first time I’d ever met Lee, but me and Rodney have written quite a few together. It came out real easy,” he said.
“We didn’t even have that little Auto-Tune thing on the end of the chorus that day,” he added. “When I got home, I was listening to the demo, and it just wasn’t hitting me. I felt like it was missing something. So, I went back in and put that ‘southern girl, rock my world…’ that kind of thing on it.”
For You
When McGraw heard the song, he immediately fell in love with the song, except for the lyric that is “originally something like daisy dukes or something like that. So, I looked at what color eyes Faith Hill has, and she has hazel eyes, so I said hazel eyes and golden curls [laughs]. So, it worked out!” And the rest is history!
Of course, McGraw – who has married a true Southern girl – is the perfect person to make this song a hit. “It didn’t take a whole weekend out there before the girls were shouting at us to play ‘Southern Girl.’ The song has a really cool groove to it that just gets everyone moving and sets the right tone for a perfect summer night,” McGraw said.
The accompanying music video for “Southern Girl” is as incredible as the song too. It offers a taste of McGraw in concert, sewn together with clips from the country crooner’s tour and his fans. “When we started talking about a video concept for ‘Southern Girl,’ I knew that this song belonged to the fans who have been out at our live shows all summer,” McGraw said. “We brought cameras out on the road and turned them around on the crowd, and they really helped us capture the fun summer groove of this song.”
Tune in and watch Tim McGraw’s breathtaking performance of “Southern Girl” in the video below.
