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You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.
I love country music. Growing up in the ’90s, I had to ride a bus to school for an hour both ways, with twang on the speakers the whole time.
One of the biggest songs from that era is “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson.
Alan is one of the best selling music artists of all time, with over 75 million records sold worldwide. Thirty-five of his songs have hit #1. He’s a big deal. And something that makes him different from a lot of country artists is that he writes or co-writes most of his own songs.
When Alan wrote Chattahoochee (with songwriter Jim McBride), he thought he was mostly writing about himself and his own experiences growing up in a small town in Georgia.
Alan didn’t think this little song about his experiences growing up would matter to anyone else. In fact, in the liner notes for his Greatest Hits album, Alan wrote: “We never thought it would be as big as it’s become.”
But he was wrong. Very wrong.
The song was named Single of the Year by the Country Music Association (the CMA) and was #1 for several weeks on the country charts. “Chattahoochee” was everywhere for years. It was the “Smooth” for country music. You couldn’t get away from it, that’s how popular it was.
