Songfacts®:

• This instrumental features some whistling by movie legend Clint Eastwood. "We wrote [it] as a Western. It's an epic movie soundtrack-sounding Western," Paisley told The Boot. "I've become friends with Clint and his wife, Dina. So I emailed Dina and said, 'Does he whistle?' And she said, 'Yeah, you want him to whistle on something?' I said, 'I have a thing that sounds like an Ennio Morricone, the guy that did all the spaghetti western music like 'The Good, Bad and the Ugly,' and of course it has to have [he whistles] all that kind of stuff. I asked, 'Can he do that?' She wrote back and said, 'He'd love to.'"
• The short intro features Paisley's sons, Huck, and Jasper, who were four and two-years-old respectively when the song was recorded.
• Another song titled after the iconic actor is Gorillaz's 2001 single "Clint Eastwood." It was so named as the theme from Eastwood's movie The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly can be heard periodically throughout the song.
• Though better known for his movie career, Clint Eastwood has also featured on various music charts. His version of "I Talk To the Trees" from the movie soundtrack for Paint Your Wagon was a #18 hit in the UK in 1970 and he also made a visit to the country chart summit with "Bar Room Buddies," a collaboration with Merle Haggard from the film for Bronco Billy, which reigned the week of July 26, 1980.
  
  Another music link to Eastwood is his interest in jazz, which led him to direct Bird, a biopic starring Forest Whitaker as jazz musician Charlie "Bird" Parker. Also Clint's son, Kyle Eastwood, is a successful jazz bassist and composer.
• This Is Country Music is a musically diverse love letter to country and Paisley felt it was important to include a song on the collection that was reminiscent of old westerns. "I wanted to write a western song because it was one of the things I felt belonged on here," he explained to CMT. "I love spaghetti western music. Crazy, cool music. I don't know where [Italian composer] Ennio Morricone got the idea that a Fender guitar through an amp with reverb and a guy whistling was the sound of the Old West, but he did. It's amazing to me how much that is the sound of the Old West. So I covered the guitar with the reverb part, and I figured if you want street cred -- if there is such a thing as street cred in the western movie word -- it's to have Clint do the whistling."