Songfacts®:

• Josh Turner sings here about a girl who will never forget her upbringing. "The first time I heard 'Hometown Girl,' I was kind of excited, because, first of all, it sounded like a hit to me," said Turner. "It just had that hit chorus and it just had that vibe that didn't really lose you. It held your attention. But honestly, it was different for me, and that's kind of what I was looking for. I was looking for those songs that I felt like that would be different for me that or things that I hadn't done really yet, but still had those Josh Turner ingredients, which is basically a lyric that tells a story that has a good message and just has a melody that caters to my voice. It had all that, and so it was just kind of a no-brainer."
• The song was written by:
  
  Veteran songwriter Marc Beeson who has had hits since the early 1990s. In 1992, he co-wrote Restless Heart's "When She Cries", which won him Country Song of the Year and Pop Song of the Year awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. More recently he helped pen Billy Currington's "We Are Tonight."
  
  Daniel Tashian, who is the son of country, folk and bluegrass duo Barry and Holly Tashian. He is the leader of the Nashville pop rock band, The Silver Seas.
• Josh Turner sings about a woman who doesn't want to forget how she was raised. "The song was basically talking about she's got a lot of potential and she's got a lot of talent and she's obviously beautiful, but she's kind of down-to-earth and she hasn't forgotten where she came from," he explained. "She's got a lot of roots there in that small town, and it's special to her and close to her heart."
  
  "There's a lot of people that I've met that live in the big city that couldn't wait to get out of their small town, and I don't think the girl in this song is that," Turner continued. "If she does leave, it's not because she's trying to escape [laughs] or trying to run away. So that's kind of the way I view it."
• The song was inspired by an old crush of Marc Beeson that popped into his mind shortly before his writing session with Daniel Tashian. Though he didn't talk about her, Tashian intuitively seemed to pick up what his songwriting partner was thinking. Beeson recalled to The Boot:
  
  "I walked in that day - it was just him and me - and he said, 'Hey man, what do you think of this?' And he started playing this music. I thought, 'That's so cool.' And I thought, 'I don't know if this fits,' and I threw something out at him, and he goes, 'That's great.'
  
  He kind of had a little phrasing thing, and the next thing you know, he had a hometown girl. Everyone's got to have a hometown girl. I had [a hometown girl], and I'm not even sure she knew I existed, but to me, I thought she was the greatest thing ever, and so that's what I was thinking about.
  
  I think we just got descriptive. We were messing around with the chorus, and it just kind of fell out. We just kind of sat there, and [he] had some music going, and we fell into that cadence. It was just a series of pictures for me. I grew up in a little rural town in Illinois, and it was like a sea of corn, and so we got the corn in there. I was just thinking about this girl, and Daniel was, like, rolling with it."