George Strait’s Manager Helped Write What Became One of His Biggest Hits in 1996

George Strait has cut songs by some of country music’s best songwriters, including Dean Dillon, Bill Anderson, Bob DiPiero, and more. But one of Strait’s biggest hits was actually co-written by his manager, Erv Woolsey.

In 1996, Strait released “I Can Still Make Cheyenne”. On his Blue Clear Sky album, Woolsey and Aaron Barker are the two writers of the song.

A heartbreaking song about a man prioritizing his job over his significant other, “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” says, “She said, ‘Don’t bother coming home / By the time you get here I’ll be long gone / There’s somebody new and he sure ain’t no rodeo man’ /  He said, ‘I’m sorry it’s come down to this / There’s so much about you that I’m gonna miss / But it’s alright baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne / Gotta go now baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne.’”

Barker later reveals that the idea for “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” came from Woolsey.

“He told me he had this idea about this cowboy who calls home and says, ‘I’m gonna come home,’” Barker tells The Tennessean. “His wife or girlfriend or whatever just says, ‘Don’t even come home. You’re gone all the time. I’m out of here.’ And that the cowboy kind of says, ‘Well, fine then! I’ll just move on to the next rodeo,’ and it would have been Cheyenne. So that was the kind of the genesis of this song. And it bounced around out of Erv for a couple of years.

“I didn’t quite lock on to where he was headed with it,” Barker adds. “I’m not a cowboy. I didn’t get that life. But as George introduced me to the rodeo thing — because George is big into that — I would see that lifestyle and understand more about it.”

What Aaron Barker Says About Erv Woolsey Writing “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” for George Strait

By the time “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” was written, Barker had already had plenty of hits as a songwriter. His numerous songwriting credits include “Love Without End, Amen” and “Easy Come, Easy Go”, both by Strait. So it stands to reason that most of the writing came from Barker, although Woolsey contributed plenty.

“I did write the song, technically, on my own,” Barker explains. “I wrote it in a hotel room here in Nashville. One night, it finally all clicked, and I loved it. I don’t like my own work very much, but boy, when this played back, I got it.”

Still, without Woolsey’s knowledge of the rodeo lifestyle, “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” likely would have never been the hit that it became.

“I played it for Erv, and he corrected a couple of my technical things that I wasn’t familiar with,” Barker recalls. “For example, in the song, it says, ‘Didn’t make the short go again.’ I didn’t know what a ‘short go’ was. I had the word ‘finals’  in there. That made sense to me. … He said, ‘No, it’s the short go.’ He corrected some of that technical language, so it was a collaboration.”

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