Songfacts®:

• This song, written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove, dates back to 1981, when David Allan Coe first recorded it and took it to #77 on the Country chart. George Jones covered it two years later; his version reached #2 on the Country chart in November 1983 and became a mainstay in his live set. It's a love song to a lady whose love is better than even the smoothest Tennessee whiskey.
• Chris Stapleton recorded a bluesy cover for his debut solo album, Traveller, in 2015 at the suggestion of his producer, Dave Robb. He recalled to Billboard magazine: "The guys in the band and I were in Charlottesville, Virginia, waiting to set up microphones and started playing in that groove. I just was really enjoying it and started singing 'Tennessee Whiskey' on top of it, trying to make it something new.
  
  We liked it so much, we played it that night - and every night since. When we started to record, we used it as a warm-up song. Dave said, 'We need to do that right now.' That's what you hear."
• Chris Stapleton and Justin Timberlake sang a medley of this track and Timberlake's "Drink You Away" at the 2015 CMAs. It proved to be a breakthrough night for Stapleton as he won the CMA trophies for Male Vocalist of the Year, New Artist of the Year and Album of the Year (for Traveller). The interest generated from his performance resulted in "Tennessee Whiskey" ranking as the second-largest selling digital song the following week, with 131,000 downloads sold.
  
  The Stapleton-Timberlake double act wasn't something the CMA producers just threw together. Stapleton told Billboard magazine: "We've known each other for a couple of years. His wife had called me to fly out for his birthday party and wanted me to play. That was our first meeting, and we kept up with each other after that."
• Dean Dillon, who was just about to begin his longtime collaboration with George Strait with the hit "Unwound," met Linda Hargrove when she was performing at a dive in Nashville. The pair hit it off (only professionally, Dillon assured us) and stayed up until 4 o'clock in the morning writing what became "Tennessee Whiskey."
• Dean Dillon came to George Strait with "Tennessee Whiskey" soon after he'd written it, but Strait wasn't feeling the song and passed up the opportunity to record it.
• The song appears prominently during George Clooney's 2020 American science fiction film, The Midnight Sky.