Songfacts®:

• This is the first single from American singer-songwriter Josh Kelley's debut Country album. He wrote the song with his brother Charles, who is a member of Lady Antebellum, plus Clint Lagerberg.
• Kelley was drinking some whiskey with his brother when they got the idea for this song, which brings up some great memories growing up in Augusta, Georgia (same as James Brown). Said Josh: "The whole idea behind 'Georgia Clay' came during a series of conversations with my brother Charles. High school was fun because we didn't overdo it, we didn't over-think it; we just had fun. We are so close in age that we have always been each other's best friend. I always joke with him that he was born to be my best buddy. My friends meshed with his friends and we'd all go down to the lake. We'd pull these two jet-skis behind my Dad's white '77 Silverado. 'Georgia Clay' is basically the thought that we could go back to the garage and look at a car like that old hooptie we had, and all those memories are layers of mud on the car, from rope swings to jet skis to getting stung, basically every first time in our youth happened on that lake."
• As he states in this song, Kelley was the first of his friends to get a fake I.D. - he had a full beard when he was just 15. He says all the little incidents mentioned in the song are true.
• Kelley recorded Pop songs throughout the '00s, but he thinks Country is really his calling. We spoke with him the day before Georgia Clay was released, and he was very excited. Said Kelley: "It looks really good, too. Finally. On an album cover, I finally look like me, it even sounds like me. Man, it took 10 years to do that."
• Where did all that Georgia Clay come from, exactly? Kelley told us: "I think it was Lake Chatuge, up in the North Georgia Mountains. It's in Young Harris, Hiawassee area. I know it's crazy, it's way up in the mountains. But yeah, that truck was up there a lot, because that's where my dad's farm was. He raised Black Angus cattle up there and stuff. Half of our life we grew up raising them, helping him with the cattle and bush-hogging the land. We were his slave labor. So we would go out to Lake Chatuge and take out the pontoon boat." (Check out the full Josh Kelley interview.)