Songfacts®:

• "6th Of October" is a tale of self-discovery and resilience about learning the difficult art of self-love. In the chorus, Ashley McBryde concludes that there's strength in embracing our scars and owning who we are.
• McBryde wrote "6th Of October" with her songwriting friends Blue Foley and CJ Field on the porch of her house. The trio had a mutual friend, Randall Clay, who'd passed away six or eight months previously. Clay had helped McBryde write "American Scandal," "Tired of Being Happy" and "El Dorado" for her 2018 Girl Going Nowhere album. "The finest songwriter I've ever written with," she told Taste of Country Nights. They penned this song in part as a remembrance of their friend.
• I threw up this morning in Christiansburg, Virginia
  I drove down from Pennsylvania, slept in my van
  I can still taste the whiskey from the last fool that kissed me
  And the people who miss me, I can count on one hand
  
  Field pulled out a song he'd started months ago with Clay and suggested they keep working on it. He told McBryde and Foley how the first lines had effortlessly tumbled from Clay's lips before they even buckled down to business.
  
  "CJ Field had driven down from Massachusetts. He pulls into Randall's driveway, and says the first line: 'Hey, I threw up this morning in Christiansburg, Virginia. I drove down from Pennsylvania. I slept in my van,'" McBryde recounted.
  
  "Randall stands up in boxers and a white cotton T-shirt on his porch, smoking a cigarette, with his socks on. He takes a drag of his cigarette, and before he even blows the smoke all the way out of his mouth, he says, 'I can still taste the whiskey from the last fool that kissed me, and the people who miss me I can count on one hand.'"
  
  "Good morning, C.J.," he added seamlessly.
• As the three continued working on the song, they uncovered a spine-chilling coincidence in the second verse.
  
  "When I sing, 'I've been saying I was sober since the 6th of October' - that [date] was when we found out that it wasn't looking good for our friend to still be living," said McBryde. "That was just sort of by coincidence. We wrote the line, we wrote the verse, and then we went back and we said, 'Oh my God.'"
• The date of October 6 also holds a special significance for McBryde, as it commemorates the day she was invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
  
  "I was on TV doing a thing with CBS, and that was the morning that Garth [Brooks] invited me to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry," she remembered. "I called my brother afterward, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I just got invited to be in the Grand Ole Opry.' He said, 'Ash, it's the 6th of October.'"
• "6th Of October" is the closing track of Ashley McBryde's fourth studio album, The Devil I Know. The tour to promote her new album started in October – on, yep, the 6th. "And I'll be in Florida [on that tour], which is where Randall was from and where he went to be with our Lord," McBryde summed up. "So, the 6th of October just keeps swirling around."