I Believe in You

Album: I Believe in You (1980)
Charted: 24
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Songfacts®:

  • This simple song about the power of love comes from the pen of the first British songwriter to enter the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Roger Cook, who wrote it with Sam Hogin, whose other credits include Lonestar's "No News" and Joe Diffie's "The Quittin' Kind."
  • Roger Cook penned the first draft. He recalled to The Tennessean how he one day realized "a lot of the lyrical images were dumb." He was especially unhappy with a line that said, "the rising costs of getting high."

    So Cook got together with Sam Hogin and the pair sat around until 2 o'clock one night, fine-tuning the lyric - they changed "the rising costs of getting high" to "the rising cost of gettin' by." Once he was happy with the lyric, Cook recorded a demo.

    Two or three days after Cook did the demo, Don Williams' producer Garth Fundis asked Cook if had anything suitable for the singer's next album, and Cook suggested this song.
  • When Williams recorded "I Believe in You," he didn't change anything from Cook's demo. They even brought in the songwriter's demo guitarist, an Irishman named Phil Donnelly, to play on the session, as they didn't want to change the guitar lick.
  • Released as the first single and title track from Don Williams' I Believe in You album, this became the singer's 11th #1 on the Country chart. "I Believe in You" was also Don Williams' only Top 40 entry on the Hot 100, where it peaked at #24. It was also a hit in several other territories, particularly in New Zealand, where it reached #4 on the pop singles chart.
  • Artists who have covered the song include Bette Midler in 1995, Patti Page in 2001 and Joey + Rory in 2014.

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