In the first week of July 1996, Tracy Lawrence was at the top of the Hot Country Songs chart with “Time Marches On,” the second single and title track from his 1996 album. It spent three weeks at No. 1, the longest-running chart-topper of his career and remains one of his most popular songs.
“Time Marches On” captures decades of a family’s lives in its three verses. The opening verse introduces a married couple and their kids. The nods to Hank Williams’ “Dear John” and “Kaw-Liga” put the beginning of the story sometime between 1950 and 1953. The second verse jumps forward roughly 15 years, referencing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” from 1965. By the end of the song, the former hippie boy is watching his cholesterol and his sister calls herself a “sexy grandma.” Their cheating father is dead, and their mother suffers from dementia. The less-than-happy ending makes the song that much more relatable, and its cast of characters feel a little more real.
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Songwriter Bobby Braddock was inspired to write “Time Marches On” after visiting his hometown in Florida. “I noticed that the people who were middle-aged were gone. My younger teachers were then middle-aged or late middle-aged,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in time and physics and the what-ifs of life. And I just got the idea of writing a song about this family that just spends their whole lifetime in about two minutes and forty seconds,” Braddock added.
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He added that the song gave him the chance to “put some things in there that we’re not supposed to put in country songs, like dementia.”
It takes more than existential musings about the passage of time to make a great song, though. According to Songfacts, Braddock’s former mother-in-law had a bumper sticker that read “Sexy Grandma.” He thought it was funny, so he worked it into the song.
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