Keep On Lovin' You

Album: Steel Magnolia (2009)
Charted: 68
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Songfacts®:

  • Steel Magnolia is an American Country music duo consisting of Meghan Linsey and Joshua Scott Jones who rose to fame when they won season two of CMT's Can You Duet. They then signed a recording contract with Big Machine Records, and released this song, which they'd performed on the season finale of the show, as their debut single.
  • This song about a couple devoted to each other was penned by singer-songwriter Trent Willmon and the lead singer of the bluegrass band the SteelDrivers, Chris Stapleton. Willmon told AOL's The Boot the story behind the song: "Chris is about my favorite person to write with. He's the best singer in Nashville by far. He just has a way with melodies. It seems like whenever he starts singing, whatever words come out of his mouth sound like a song. The title was something that just fell out of Chris' mouth. He picked up his old Gibson guitar that is maybe 60 years old, and he just started singing [the lyrics]. It really didn't take long. We wrote it in probably a couple of hours. It was just one of those days.
    Originally the song was kind of a slower groove, kind of a Josh Turner-type song. When Chris sang the song on the work-tape, it sounded great. A couple of months had gone by, and we never demoed the song. I started playing it for my band down in Texas because I was looking for new songs to do. We were in Corpus Christi at soundcheck, and we worked up the song. We had a couple of hours to kill. Just because of the nature of my band, it ended up sounding like Los Lonely Boys and Otis Redding. I played it out live for over a year. When we finally went in to demo the song, I talked to Chris about being there at the demo session, but he had to be out of town. I just cut it like my band. Chris came back later and sang it on the demo, and it just came to life. It was a totally different song than it was when we wrote it. It had a really uptempo thing instead of a slow, sweet groove. It was a fun, upbeat, R&B groove. In the long run, it was a perfect song for Steel Magnolia."
  • The song features on the soundtrack of the 2010 romantic comedy Valentine's Day.
  • When this song entered the Top 10 of the Country chart, it became the highest charting debut single for a male-female Country duet act in the 66-year history of the tally.
  • Hearing this being played on the radio for the first time was a moment both Meghan Linsey and Joshua Scott Jones will never forget: The duo first heard the song being played when they were on a radio tour. It came on the radio just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, when Linsey and Jones were about to pull into a hotel. Jones recalled to The Boot:

    "There was no one on the road, so we pulled over to the side of the road to listen to our song. We were on the road towards the parking lot. We got out of the car, and we ran around the car a few times... Meghan and I got out and just cranked it up and stood outside the car and listened.

    He added: "Not hearing the song on the radio was a great motivator. Once you hear it, that's a whole new burst of motivation in a different way. Then you have to say, 'Okay, I want to do that again!'"

Comments: 1

  • Peter from Not Brockton, MaMeghan Linsey was running karaoke at a bar called "Buckwild saloon" in Downtown Nashville prior to winning CMT's "Can you duet" with her boyfriend Joshua Jones. Josh used to park cars for a living and would come into Buckwild saloon to hang out with Meghan and have some fun singing karaoke.
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