Country music has no shortage of grisly murder ballads. Since its inception, the genre has had an affinity for the darker sides of life. That affinity has resulted in some mammoth hits, including Reba McEntire’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
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Though McEntire wasn’t the first to record the song, her version is still one of her signature songs today. We’re revisiting the meaning behind this southern gothic tale, below.
Behind the Meaning
The narrator in this song does a pretty good job of laying the story bare. The scene is set by the opening line, describing a man who has just come home from a vacation only to find out his wife has been cheating on him.
He was on his way home from Candletop
Been two weeks gone and he thought he’d stop
At Web’s and have him a drink ‘fore he went home to her
Andy Wo-Lo said, “Hello”
He said, “Hi, what’s doing Wo?”
Said, “Sit down, I got some bad news that’s gonna hurt”
The man’s best friend breaks the news that his wife has been hanging out with that “Amos boy, Seth” and that he too has slept with her.
From there, the story gets a little more convoluted. The man is determined to get revenge (of the murder persuasion) on his backstabbing friend. He grabs his dad’s old gun and heads over to the house to get his vengeance.
Once he gets to the house though, he finds his friend already dead at the end of a trail of footprints that were “too small for Andy to make.”
He went off to Andy’s house
Slipping through the backwoods quiet as a mouse
Came upon some tracks too small for Andy to make
He looked through the screen at the back porch door
And he saw Andy lying on the floor
In a puddle of blood, and he started to shake
After the man is arrested and wrongly convicted, the narrator reveals herself to be the man’s sister and the culprit of the murder. She sought revenge by proxy on Andy and her brother’s wife.
You see little sister don’t miss when she aims her gun
History of the Song
“The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” was written by Bobby Russell. Despite becoming a big hit, Russell wasn’t a fan of the song, so much so that he refused to record a demo. His wife at the time, Vicki Lawrence, felt differently and decided to record the song.
The song bounced around to several artists before Lawrence eventually decided to release it herself. Lawrence brought the song all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973.
McEntire re-recorded the song in 1991 for her album, For My Broken Heart. It found similar success to Lawrence’s version, charting on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs Chart.
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