Vince Gill and Darius Rucker Recall Their Humble Songwriting Beginnings and the First Time They Heard Themselves on the Radio

No matter how big an artist gets, they had to start somewhere. Even expert songsmiths like Darius Rucker and Vince Gill didn’t come out of the womb with a golden pen in their hands. Much like anyone else, they spent years honing their craft through trial and error, successes and failures.

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In 2017, Rucker and Gill sat down to share a list of their firsts. The conversation included their first cars, first concerts, the first songs they wrote, and more. While their careers started at different times and their paths to stardom are like night and day, they both remembered the first song they penned.

[RELATED: “I Went Nuts”: Vince Gill Recalls the First Time He Heard One of His Songs on the Radio]

Darius Rucker and Vince Gill on Their First Songs

Before Darius Rucker started his solo country career, he was the frontman of the award-winning rock band Hootie and the Blowfish. They released their first single “Hold My Hand” in 1994. However, the “Beers and Sunshine” singer was writing songs long before then.

“I wrote this song called ‘Destiny’ with a friend of mine back in the day,” Rucker said before Vince Gill broke in. “About a stripper?” he asked before bursting into laughter. “No. It should have been though,” Rucker replied, laughing.

“It was not a good song,” Rucker recalled, getting back on track. He went on to say that he and his friend who played piano wrote it at the end of middle school. So, Rucker was likely in eighth grade when he wrote his first song.

“I wrote a song for my mom,” Gill recalled. “She was from Kansas and it was called ‘Kansas Girl Smile.’ It was pretty good,” he recalled. The “One More Last Chance” singer added that he was “15 or 16” when he wrote the song.

Hearing Themselves on the Radio for the First Time

Like many artists, Vince Gill and Darius Rucker remembered the first time they heard their songs on the radio.

“First time I heard myself on the radio was ‘Hold My Hand’ but it doesn’t count because my guitar player was the DJ on the college radio station,” Rucker recalled, laughing. “He played it himself. But that was the first time I heard us on the radio. It was ‘Hold My Hand’ on the college radio station.”

“I was home in Oklahoma and was a junior in high school in 1974,” Gill began. “Our local band had made a record and had no expectations at all. But lo and behold, the station played it. I was driving down the road on I-40 when I heard it,” he added. “I got on my CB radio ‘Breaker, breaker they’re playing my record!’”

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