Songfacts®:

• This touching tune is inspired by a lyric that Johnny Cash wrote about his wife, June Carter Cash. Paisley adds a simple guitar line, mandolin and backing harmonies to the Man in Black's words about giving it all for the one you love. Paisley also includes snippets of Cash's voice at both the beginning and the end of the track in which he talks about how his wife is responsible for keeping him alive.
• Cash's original lyric was written in March of 1967. He never got round to adding music to it, but it was published in 2016 in Cash's posthumous poetry collection Forever Words: The Unknown Poems , which collects 41 of Cash's poems into an anthology. "Gold All Over the Ground" is the first of Cash's poems to be set to music.
  
  "His son, John Carter Cash, is a good friend of mine and decided to dig up some old songs that were unfinished by his father," Paisley recalled to ET Online. "He brought one to me that was just a lyric and wasn't really in song form, and he said, 'If you want to finish this and turn it into a song, I think Dad would approve.'"
• This was included on Forever Words, a 2018 album by various artists recording poetry and lyrics by Johnny Cash set to music. John Carter Cash, who produced the record, told Mojo magazine: "I approached people with one to three pieces I'd picked out for them. Brad Paisley sat down and wrote the melody to 'Gold All Over The Ground' on the spot, and I just recorded it on my phone."
  
  Paisley's track, along with a contribution from the late Chris Cornell on "You Never Knew My Mind," are, according to Mojo, the album's centerpieces.