Songfacts®:

• Chris Young's "Raised On Country" tips the hat to artists such as Joe Diffie, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, George Strait, and many others he listened to growing up.
  
  I was raised on Merle, raised on Willie
  Got my honky-tonk attitude from Joe Diffie
  Daddy did too, it's family tradition
  When someone cranks it up you can't help but listen
  My upbringing sounds like George Strait singing
  'Cause if you know me, I was raised on country
  
  Young credits the Nashville stars for forming the soundtrack to his life.
• Young also references in the lyrics some familiar country imagery such as the "southern drawl in my talk," a "little pickup truck" and Tennessee whiskey. In the bridge, he nods to a lyric from Alan Jackson's 1992 classic, "Chattahoochee," when he sings, "Learned a lot about livin' and a little 'bout love."
• Chris Young co-wrote the upbeat song while out on tour along with his I'm Comin Over and Losing Sleep co-producer Corey Crowder and Nashville songwriter Cary Barlowe (Lady Antebellum's "American Honey"). Young admitted that when they set out to pen the tune he had a pretty ambitious goal in mind.
  
  "This song is so crazy, because when I wrote 'Raised on Country,' we were actually out on the road," he explained to ABC Radio. "And we were like, 'You know, we really want just kind of a country anthem.'"
  
  "Those are so hard to write," he continued, "because it seems like they'd be super obvious, but you've just got to come at it in the perfect way. And from the minute we started writing this song, we knew we were onto something."
• The "Raised on Country" video was directed Peter Zavadil, who also shot Young's "Losing Sleep" clip. It co-stars the singer's touring bandmates Kevin Collier and Ryan Haas and was filmed at Rosie's Twin Kegs, an old Nashville dive bar. Additional footage was shot at the historic WSM radio tower, the station that's home to the Grand Ole Opry.
• When Chris Young sat on the tour bus with Corey Crowder and Cary Barlowe, they got into a conversation about the energy you get back from a crowd. He told the other two he was looking to write about something he'd never talked about before. It needed to be anthemic, but at the same time very true to him.
  
  Young recalled to The Boot the trio came up the idea of a song about who Young is. Talking about how he was "raised on country, how people grew up," and who the country star grew up listening to.
  
  Young added that it can be tough sometimes to come up with something fresh: "There's days when it's really, really easy to write a song, and 95 percent of those times, it's a love song or a thought that I've already expressed on a record," he said. "We were really trying to chase something that I had not said before."
• At first, Chris Young wanted "Raised On Country" to be the title track of his seventh studio album, but when the follow-up single "Drowning" stalled at #18 and the album released was delayed by the pandemic, it was ultimately re-titled Famous Friends.