“There’s a Pride to Being a Hillbilly”: Blake Shelton Compares New Song to “Ole Red” and “God’s Country”(Exclusive)

Blake Shelton calls it a mix of “Ole Red” and “God’s Country.” And those who pushed play on Shelton’s new album, For Recreational Use Only, immediately heard what he’s talking about.
Shelton launched his new 12-song album with “Stay Country or Die Tryin,’” an up-tempo ode to growing up so far from town that your gas tank better be full before you start the drive home. At Shelton’s insistence, the song opens with a bobwhite quail. And he means it – at his insistence.

“I just caught a lot of confusion from the record label,” Shelton said of his determination to let the bird open the album. If the song makes it to the radio, they’ll edit the quail out. “Even Scott Hendricks was a little bit taken aback by it.”

Hendricks laughed at the idea and said animal sounds are “all over this album.”

“It’d be a good game to go find them, get points for finding them,” said Hendricks, who produced the album.

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Blake Shelton Fought to get Bobwhite Quail on Album

The defiant country anthem isn’t about birds, but as Shelton said, hillbilly pride.

“The lyric is just a bunch of almost phrases and things that are picturesque to growing up in the kind of backwoods and country, and that diehard mentality,” Shelton said. “It’s, ‘I know where I come from.’ That’s kind of how we are — a little very prideful, a little bit stubborn. And that’s kind of the guy in that song. There’s a pride to being a hillbilly and not going to town for any-damn-thing. You know what I mean?”

Shelton loves to challenge himself vocally, and the track has so much energy that he said he will kick himself for making those choices when he’s trying to perform it live.

“I love being able to lean into it as a vocalist,” he said. “It’s fun in the studio – and there’s the bird.”
Shelton says the quail is only on the vinyl. He wanted it on there so badly that he rushed to get the album done because the vinyl had to be ordered early to arrive by the release date.

He compared his quail to the spoken opening of Alabama’s “Mountain Music.”

“(Alabama singer) Randy (Owen) had, ‘You see that mountain over there? Yeah?’” Shelton said. “Then the song started, but you don’t hear that on the radio. You hear the radio edit, and then when you have the record, you hear Randy do it. I just wanted a little thing for the album. So, I had to fight with the label and Scott Hendricks to get that, at least on the vinyl, the bobwhite quail at the opening of the song.”

Alabama “Just Wrote Great Songs”

The harmonies on Shelton’s Craig Morgan duet “Heaven Sweet Home” are reminiscent of Alabama, too. But that wasn’t intentional.

The singer said it’s taken him nearly this long to realize Alabama’s influence on his music. He honored Owen in November with a tribute performance at the BMI Awards, where the performing rights organization presented Owen with the BMI Icon Award.

“They just wrote great songs, but they made incredible records that just still to this day stand up against anything you hear on the radio,” Shelton said of Alabama. “They were just incredible artists.”

(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)