Baby Got Back

Album: Never Gets Old (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Yes, "Baby Got Back," Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 ode to big, beautiful backsides, was reworked into a country song.

    Joe Nichols started playing the song during his live shows as a joke in 2012, but it caught on, and in 2017 he released a studio version on his album Never Gets Old.

    "At one point in the show a couple of years ago, I would start playing a song with just me and a guitar," Nichols told Billboard magazine. "Sometimes, the band would come in, and finish it out with the last verse and chorus, and sometimes they wouldn't. I just figured I would do something a little bit off the wall. I just hit a D chord, and went into it. It was a country version, more like a shuffle. My band wasn't shocked at all, they just joined right in and picked it up, so the joke was very much on me.

    But, each time we played it, the crowd would go crazy. I think the country demographic now is very familiar with early '90s pop and rap. So the song was familiar to everybody, and the shock of it sounding so country put it over the top. Having a few years of playing it live, and it going over so well made us think 'What the heck?'

    We cut it, and the musicians were laughing and having a good time with it. It's just a fun track, a little off the wall, and definitely a little goofball-ish, but it's definitely a light moment for the album."
  • Nichols sings only the first verse from the Sir Mix-A-Lot original, starting with the iconic line, "I like big butts and I cannot lie." His delivery is very slow, so it would be a very long song if he sang the whole thing.
  • That's the comedian Darren Knight in the guise of his character "Southern Momma" doing the spoken interludes. The original version of "Baby Got Back" has a similar spoken part at the beginning, but Southern Momma gets a lot more airtime on this one.
  • In the music video, Sir Mix-A-Lot appears as a judge who's unimpressed by several failed versions of the song until Nichols takes the stage and wins over the rapper with his rendition. The video version cuts out the Southern Momma spoken sections.
  • Nichols is one of the few country singers who can pull off "Baby Got Back" without mocking it (the song actually has a serious message about how women with bigger body types are portrayed in the media). He's known for fun songs with a hearty sense of humor, his most famous being "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off."

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