Riley Green didn’t choose the title of his 2019 hit, “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” at random. The Alabama native credits his paternal grandfather, Buford Green, with his love of country music. Some of Green’s earliest childhood memories involve sitting around with his granddaddy and plucking strings on his old Epiphone guitar. So when the “Don’t Mind If I Do” crooner, 37, recently paused to think about which old-school country great he’d love to sip whiskey with, he didn’t hesitate.
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“It’d have to be Merle Haggard,” Green told Men’s Journal while promoting his new whiskey brand, Duck Club Bourbon. “Well, you know, this is a completely true story. First song I ever sang was ‘Mama Tried.’ My granddaddy Buford loved Merle Haggard.”
While his maternal grandfather was an avid sportsman who “never missed a ball game with any of his grandkids,” Buford (who died in 2010) was more artistically inclined—”wrote poems, really a witty guy, really good with words.”
He also loved Merle Haggard. “And I remember when Merle Haggard died [in 2016], I felt like my granddaddy died again,” Green recalled. “Like that was the only celebrity, somebody I’ve never met that I really had some type of emotional connection to, and that’s got to be through the stories and songs. Everything that he sang made me feel something and certainly takes me back to a place in my life. It’s got a nostalgia to it.”
How Merle Haggard Inspired Riley Green’s Love of Country Music
Ahead of releasing his third album, 2024’s Don’t Mind If I Do, Riley Green called the record a throwback to his early days of country music fandom.
Recalling the song that kickstarted it all, he said, “I can remember one of the first songs I ever heard that made me really feel something from the lyrics was ‘Sing Me Back Home’ by Merle Haggard. It was talking about the guy in prison, wanting to hear one last song. Something about that… something I could never comprehend, but that was what the song did. It took me to a place I had never mentally been before.”
Featured image by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for CBS
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