“All My Ex’s Live in Texas” is perhaps George Strait‘s most famous tune, next to “Amarillo By Morning”. The 1987 hit details the story of a man who desperately tries to outrun his past lovers by fleeing to Tennessee, even though “Texas is a place [he’d] dearly love to be.”
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Strait, who was born in Texas himself, can certainly sing the song with a flair of authenticity, but what some fans don’t know is that Strait actually changed one of the lyrics in the song to make it more personal to him.
In the original version of the song, the second verse says “I remember that old Brazos River”. However, Strait changed this line to be “I remember that old Frio River” instead. He wanted the river’s location to reflect where he was from.
George Strait grew up in Pearsall, Texas, which the Frio River passes west of.
The Story Behind “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”
It’s not uncommon for artists to change lyrics in songs, even if those songs are their own. Let’s not forget the time Taylor Swift changed the “mattress” rhyme in her re-recording of “Better Than Revenge”. “But she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress” was changed to “He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches.”
However, in this case, George Strait wasn’t the one who wrote “All My Ex’s Live In Texas”. The song was written by Sanger D. Shafer and his fourth wife, Lyndia D. Schafer, which is hilarious considering the song is about trying to escape a bunch of exes.
According to SongFacts, Schafer, inspired by a travel guide, wrote a song in which “Texas” and “Exes” rhymed. He had already written one using that rhyme before, but it was never cut. Schafer, who was from Whitney, Texas, admitted that he did have a few exes from the state, but that the names used in the song were not the names of anybody he dated. He claimed he wanted to “protect the guilty.”
“I think if [George] hadn’t cut that, it would never have been recorded,” Shafer would later tell The Roanoke Times. “People are funny about cutting cute songs, but that one just had something about it. It was too cute to pass up.”
Photo by: Kevin Winter/ACMA2010/Getty Images for ACMA
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