Boys 'Round Here

Album: Based on a True Story... (2013)
Charted: 12
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Songfacts®:

  • The first time Shelton was played this Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson and Craig Wiseman penned song, he thought about all the guys he knows in his hometown of Tishomingo, Oklahoma. "None of them listened to The Beatles," he told Roughstock. "They listened to Hank, or these days you'll hear Jason Aldean blaring out of somebody's car coming from a mile away. It's just how they are, and that song is just written exactly how I live."
  • Shelton got help on this song from his wife Miranda Lambert's group, Pistol Annies, as well as RaeLynn, who finished third on Blake's team on the second season of The Voice. Meanwhile that's Rhett Akins and Dallas Davidson doing the "red red red redneck" thing.
  • Blake raps on this song, "Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit." The singer told CMT News that though in real life he has never chewed tobacco, there is another product he used to chomp. "Back in the day, remember when they used to make - and they probably still do - beef jerky that's shredded and they put it in the cans for kids to act like they're dipping?" he said. "I wore some of that out back in the day, especially in elementary school... Then I did a little Big League Chew. Still do some of that every now and then."
  • Regarding the album title, Blake told reporters at a media event: "There's songs like 'Doing What She Likes' and 'Ten Times Crazier'; and those are kind of where I'm at right now There's a song on there called 'Granddaddy's Gun.' I actually have my granddad's gun and it's so cool to me. So, when the marketing department started calling and were like, 'We actually have to print these albums, what do you want to call it?' I didn't want to call it [after the titles of the first two singles from the album].'Boys Round Here' or 'Sure Be Cool If You Did.'
    Noting that naming an album for a song on it "always feels like a cop-out," Blake added, "I always end up looking back, going, 'You wimped out there.' So I listened to it and I finally just thought this kind of is my life from start to finish. I just thought that's what we'll call it, it's Based on a True Story.... Normally, my ideas like that don't stick but somehow that one got through."
  • The Trey Fanjoy directed music video was shot at The Walt Disney Golden Oak Ranch in Santa Clarita just after the ACM Awards. The clip is one big party featuring Blake, the Pistol Annies, RaeLynn, a giant red pickup truck, and the original Chik-Fil-A cow.
  • The song came from a Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson and Craig Wiseman writing session. "We went to Craig's office, and Craig had this little beat machine. He turned the beat machine on, and we just started jamming on the guitar for a minute," recalled Akins to Roughstock. "Dallas goes, 'I've got a title called 'Boys 'Round Here.'' He looked up at the wall, and Craig's got a picture of The Beatles on his wall. We wanted to write a real redneck song about country boys all over the place. I guess The Beatles were in Dallas' head from looking at that poster, and he says, 'Boys 'round here don't listen to The Beatles.' We just went from there.

    "Craig calls it 'The Hobo Soup Song,'" laughed Akins. "Hobo Soup is just whatever you've got, throw it in the pot and hopefully it will taste good [laughs]. We just threw every crazy thing we could think of into this song, from 'chew tobacco, spit' to 'teach me how to dougie' [laughs]. Dallas and I were obsessed with this 'Dougie' song at the time, and I don't know how that made it into the song. I guess just from us being goofy.

    "Then we thought we needed something real different," Akins continued. "We didn't want the song to stay the same all the way through, so we were trying to think of something new to write for the back half of it. I was kind of leaning back in my chair, and I was yawning. My yawn was sort of in tune with what was playing in the background. Dallas thought I was going 'oooooooo,' but I was really yawning. Dallas was like, 'What was that!?' I was like, 'That was a yawn.' He said, 'Well it sounded good; do it again!' [laughs] So the yawn turned into 'Ooooooo, let's ride,' that Miranda [Lambert] and The Pistol Annies part. That just made the back half of the song totally different. It was a complete 180 to how the song was going. We were laughing and cutting up. A lot of the stuff like 'What? (That's right!)' and 'Country boy can survive' - just all the crazy stuff in there - was just Craig and me and Dallas just cutting up."
  • The trio's demo included all the crazy stuff the trio had been singing and doing. "Craig sent it out that night to (Shelton's producer) Scott Hendricks as it was," recalled Akins to Roughstock, "raw, bad singing, cutting up, Dallas didn't sing half of the lyrics right ... I was like, 'Why did you do that!?' Craig goes, 'Because it's awesome!' I was like, 'Nobody's going to cut that. It's too crazy.' And of course, Blake of all people heard it and fell in love with it. Actually, everything that you hear Blake singing on the record - all the crazy little adlibs and things - are exactly what we did on the little worktape demo that I thought would never even make the demo, and if it did, nobody would ever put that on their record. Blake did, and he used every bit of it. I guess that's why it works because we just didn't care. We were like, 'Let's just do it. If we're having fun with it, maybe somebody else will, too.' That's how that came about."
  • This song came top of a list of the most-requested Country dance club songs of 2013 released by dance venue marketing company Marco Club Connection. It was the tenth annual ranking of club hits. Here are the nine previous dance club faves:

    2004 - "Save a Horse, (Ride a Cowboy)" by Big & Rich.
    2005 - "Honkytonk Badonkadonk" by Trace Adkins.
    2006 - "Brand New Girlfriend" by Steve Holy.
    2007 - "Firecracker" by Josh Turner.
    2008 - "Good Time" by Alan Jackson.
    2009 - "Toes" by Zac Brown Band.
    2010 - "Stuck Like Glue" by Sugarland.
    2011 - "Country Girl (Shake It For Me)" by Luke Bryan.
    2012 - "Pontoon" by Little Big Town.
  • One unusual detail about the making of the song was the way Scott Hendricks used elements of the demo. There was an acoustic guitar in the reference version that "even the best musicians in this town could not duplicate," the producer told Radio.com. "It's a $200 guitar that sounds like no other guitar on the planet. The guy who plays on our sessions has $80,000 guitars that sound incredible, but they don't sound like this $200 guitar. So we built this track … around this acoustic guitar."

Comments: 2

  • Edward from Foster City, MiThis "country rap" is more like country crap. One of the worst songs ever! This has no business being played on country music radio.
  • Camille from Toronto, OhW.O.W. This song is instantly, certifiably 2013's summer country anthem: the tune, delivery of the lyrics and the beautiful southern drawl of those Pistol Annies confirming it all: "Ooo...that's right!"
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