Luke Bryan has had his fair share of No. 1 country hits — 31, to be exact. However, one song that never reached the top of the charts nonetheless changed the trajectory of his career. In March 2011, he released “Country Girl (Shake It For Me.)” It was the lead single off his third studio album, Tailgates & Tanlines. And by April 2014, it was the third best-selling song by a male country music solo artist. “Country Girl” was everywhere in the early 2010s, even if you weren’t paying attention to the country charts. And, as Bryan recently revealed, the statistics don’t even tell the whole story of the song’s popularity.
“I mean, if you really want to go backstage, I don’t think people really understand how much that song was getting illegally downloaded at the time,” the American Idol judge recently told Backstage Country radio host Elaina Smith. “That’s another thing that, early in my career, I was caught up in the illegal part of songs. A lot of my songs, and Jason Aldean, every artist of that time frame.”
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Over a three-year period, Bryan said his record label estimated that listeners were illegally downloading “Country Girl” a staggering 20 million times a week. Before Spotify made streaming the new normal, sites like Napster and LimeWire were still in their heyday.
Luke Bryan Admits He Was “Scared” Of This Song At First
It’s difficult not to imagine the heights “Country Girl” could have ascended to without illegal downloading in the mix. But Luke Bryan doesn’t blame LimeWire for the song’s failure to reach the top.
“I think it didn’t go all the way to No. 1 just because I think a portion of people… just didn’t really know how to embrace “Country Girl (Shake It for Me),” he said. “And when I wrote it, I was kind of scared of it a little bit, because it was stepping out there. I mean, when I stepped out there in it, when I put this thing out, that was what I was.”
Of the song’s No. 4 peak, Bryan said, “You can’t go back and have that. But when I look going forward, what a life-altering song for me that I’ll get to play until I’m an 80-year old man getting to make some country girls have fun and dance.”
Featured image by Theo Wargo/Getty Images
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