Songfacts®:

• This is the title track from the debut album by Black Country Communion, an Anglo/American rock supergroup featuring vocalist/bassist Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Trapeze), drummer Jason Bonham (Led Zeppelin), keyboardist Derek Sherinian (Dream Theater) and blues rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa.
• Glenn Hughes explained to Norway's Metal Express Radio how the quartet ended up playing together. Said the singer: "Joe Bonamassa and I became really good friends about four years ago. He was a fan of my music but I didn't know too much about Joe. I started to hang out with Joe and we started to write some songs and Joe started to become more and more popular. I think Joe was secretively plotting something and we ended up putting the band together towards the end of last year. It's now almost a year later and the album is almost out and a lot of hard work has gone into creating it. All that hard work is paying off and we're all so proud of this album."
• This track opens the album with a bang and is the heaviest thing Hughes had done in long time. He told Metal Express Radio it was a real statement of intent. Said Hughes: "It's a welcome back to the Rock format for me. If you drop the needle onto Track 1 it gives you a real sense of where you're going on the ride with Black Country… 'I am a messenger, this is my prophecy. I'm going back to the Black Country'. It's a statement, the planting of a flag saying 'We're here and this is who we are.'"
• Both this song and the band's name refer to "The Black Country," a nickname for the English West Midlands conurbation, covering the Birmingham/ Wolverhampton area, where both Hughes and Bonham were raised. Hughes told Nightwatcher's House of Rock why this contains some of his favorite lyrics from the album: "Because I'm throwing down that, 'I am the messenger, this is my prophecy...I'm going back to the Black Country.' When I sing this, it means I'm going back to the core of my being, where I was born, in the Black Country.
  
  The Black Country, for all intents and purposes, means the birthplace of hard rock. Purple, Zeppelin, Judas Priest, all these bands were born there. So I'm really.. "I speak to the millions, from city to shire...We come from the heartland...We walk through the fire...We rise to the measure...A line in the sand...It's cold on the mountain...And this is our land..." I'm getting chill bumps, because I'm really standing up and planting the flag of a rock n' roll band. I've never wrote a lyric so forged in granite before. That is rock."
• Black Country was cut in just four days, with very little overdubbing. Hughes told Spin Magazine: "I think the greatest records we've ever heard, from Zeppelin to Purple to Sabbath to The Who, were all recorded in the studio live."