Songs About Musicians #3: The Tim McGraw Chain

What Taylor Swift got me thinking about musicians as proxies for memories.

It’s hard to believe that next year will be the twentieth anniversary of the first Taylor Swift album and its first song (and single) ‘Tim McGraw’.

Back in 2012, enjoying Red and revisiting Swift’s earlier work, I experienced the coincidence of hearing her ‘Tim McGraw’ and Tim McGraw’s ‘Kristofferson’ (from his 2007 album Let It Go). It got me thinking about a possible chain of musician-referencing songs that could be traced back from Swift’s. I wrote briefly about this in an editorial for an academic journal that year. I also speculated about the chain receiving new links as Swift herself became a named subject in songs.

I didn’t realise that had already happened by then. I’ll say more about that below and mention some other songs that title themselves after Swift. First I’m going to work back along the chain, from Swift to earlier artists.

My thoughts for this third entry in the ‘Songs About Musicians’ series are guided by two questions. First, to what extent are these songs really about the musicians they name? Second, if these songs are about something else, what is the purpose of having a musician mentioned in the title or a prominent lyric?

Swift / McGraw

Taylor Swift, ‘Tim McGraw’
From: Taylor Swift (2006, also released as a single the same year)
Songwriters: Taylor Swift and Liz Rose

The Georgia stars, a Chevy truck, a little black dress, a box beneath a bed, an unsent letter, the moon, a lake, faded jeans, my favourite song. If ‘Tim McGraw’ is not exactly a list song, it can still be parsed as a set of evocative objects that do as much to tell the story as anything else in the lyrics and performance. That’s not unusual for Swift, who has built an impressive repertoire from the deployment and redeployment of key images, memories and transformative objects.

That ‘favourite song’ is the main memory object in Swift’s debut single. It’s the one by country singer Tim McGraw that the song’s protagonist hopes will remind a former lover of her. In the chorus, the singer McGraw is conflated with the song he sings so that just thinking of McGraw will act as a reminder of the song and of the dress, the faded jeans and the other memories recalled in the song.

It’s important, given the marketing of Swift as a country artist at this stage of her career, that the objects listed in ‘Tim McGraw’ can be easily connected to the US South, to the sonic-lyrical regime of country music and to an assumed class identification for its audience. As Kathleen Stewart observed in the decade preceding Swift’s debut,

In country music, an inhabited, negating space of desire challenges the class codes of ideologically marked objects: Cadillacs versus pickup trucks, diamonds versus rhinestones, champagne in fancy glasses versus beer in the can, people who pay their bills by home computer versus those who get their coffee already ground.¹

While such city/country binaries might well be challenged as the new millennium dawned, and while such adherence to ‘country objects’ would not be a mainstay of Swift’s songwriting, the connections between commodified objects and people would remain a feature of her work.²

Even as Swift moved away from country music towards pop, the ways in which she continued to use mundane objects in poetic ways arguably helped to connect the Swiftian song to the ‘metanarratives of loss and desire’ that Aaron Fox identified as central to country music’s engagement with the everyday. Fox traced the ways in which ‘commodified “objects” become speaking “subjects”, and heartbroken “subjects” consume themselves as commodified “objects”’ via country’s lyrical narratives.³

Nate Sloan builds on Fox’s work to argue that Swift, far from being an ‘interloper’ in country music during the early part of her career, instead ‘evinces mastery over the formal language of country, how a song is structured and tells a story on a macro level’.⁴ That’s certainly the case with her debut single, which is a story about teenage lovers and how they might choose to remember an early romance. Tim McGraw is not, in this song, a real musician with a career that might be recalled or honoured, or whose legacy might be continued. In this sense, this is less a song about a musician than the ones I’ve featured in previous posts for this series.

And yet, because we can never predict how memory is going to work, or what role the evocative objects we accumulate are going to play, or how we got from there to here, what shape the journey took, how we might want to paddle back upstream, because so much of this is out of our control, but mostly because songs, especially favourite songs, are the epitome of memory work, perhaps it really is about Tim McGraw.

McGraw was, at least, brought more clearly into the picture when Swift performed her song ‘about’ him ‘to’ him at the 2007 Country Music Association Awards. The performance culminated in Swift introducing herself to McGraw (‘Hi, I’m Taylor’) in a staged-for-TV gimmick that was mawkish but moving. Not quite the same context in which Dylan performed ‘Song to Woody’ for his musical hero, perhaps, but still a way of inviting an artist of a previous generation to lend endorsement or credence to the new kid on the block.

So, perhaps a song about a musician and perhaps not. One thing it is is an early example of something Swift would return to repeatedly and which I think is a really distinctive aspect of her songwriting: the realisation that memory is not only about the Proustian involuntary version that has us stumbling upon madeleines long after the event and without planning, but also a strategy where we decide in the present how we want a moment to be fixed for future recall.

There’s a good Wikipedia page on ‘Tim McGraw’ (the song, that is: of course there’s a page on the singer too, and another for Tim McGraw the album), so I won’t dig further into its background, form or other aspects here (you can find out what Swift’s favourite McGraw song was on the wiki). Instead, I’ll move on to the next link in the Tim McGraw Chain by listening to the man himself.

McGraw / Kristofferson

Tim McGraw, ‘Kristofferson’
From: Let It Go (2007)
Songwriters:  Anthony Smith and Reed Nielsen

I don’t really speak McGraw, but I can order a coffee. I know enough to get by. Long-term readers of Songs and Objects will have some sense of the kind of country music that caught my ear as a teenager and never really let go. It tended to be labelled ‘progressive’, ‘new’. ‘alt.’, ‘real’ and a bunch of other names. But it tended not to be the acts that were scoring the hits in Nashville and beyond during the 1980s and 1990s. I’d listen to the occasional hat-wearing country act like George Strait, Alan Jackson and Clint Black—and I always liked some of their songs—but that was partly to get a handle on what was different about the artists I spent more time with.

You could say I’d already made my mind up not to listen to acts like Tim McGraw by the time I became aware of him, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. But then, if I stuck to that stubborn line all the time, I probably wouldn’t have been listening to Taylor Swift back in 2006 or 7. I wasn’t completely turned off to Nashville, and so of course I heard some McGraw. And when I heard his 2007 album Let It Go, I really liked four or five of its tracks. One favourite was the Chris Stapleton-penned ‘Whiskey and You’; I still favour McGraw’s version over Stapleton’s, excellent as the latter is. Another was ‘Kristofferson’.

In a review of Let It Go for Engine 145, Brody Vercher wrote

‘Kristofferson’ falls into the current trend of using a well-known artist’s name as the title (‘Tim McGraw’ – Taylor Swift, ‘Johnny Cash’ – Jason Aldean) without really paying much tribute to the person in the song. Once you get past the gratuitous name-dropping the song is actually pretty decent. Once again it’s about a man who’s woman left him with a half-written goodbye letter. So he decides to sit down with his guitar and a bottle of 90 proof to finish the letter, you know, like Kristofferson would do.

It’s decent, alright. Not ‘Whiskey and You’ decent, but not far off. A commenter on YouTube says that McGraw ‘sings the crap out of it’. I think they mean he sings it really well, but you could read it as meaning he transcends the gimmickry that Vercher flags, purges the song of that kind of thing, and gets on with some great country singing. Listen to his voice move into country fry on certain lines. There’s feeling there.

But let’s not get carried away. We’re here to assess if these songs about musicians are actually about musicians. There Vercher has a point, and his twin Brady picks up on this in a review of ‘Kristofferson’ for the same publication:

Whereas the use of McGraw’s name in Swift’s song is used to evoke the memory of a relationship, “Kristofferson” simply capitalizes on the legend’s fame.

I don’t understand why the songwriters felt like sitting down and writing a song is something Kristofferson would do in this situation, nor how that would help the mournful narrator in his position. And if this is based on some event in Kristofferson’s life that I’m unaware of, it’s really too obscure for anyone to derive any meaning or relate to in any meaningful way.

Hmmm. I’m not sure I need the song to be literally about something that happened in Kristofferson’s life or inspired him to pick up a pen and a guitar. I’m interested in songs about musicians, and that can take the form of both biographical accounts and more allusive material. I don’t have any issue with Anthony Smith and Reed Nielsen, the writers of ‘Kristofferson’, imagining how songwriters like themselves, or a singer like McGraw, might identify with a master songwriter while in the throes of trying to convert misery into something usable.

But yes, okay, it’s about McGraw, via Smith and Nielsen, rather than Kristofferson. Let’s move along the chain.

Kristofferson / Cash

Kris Kristofferson, ‘Good Morning John’
From: Closer to the Bone (2009)
Songwriter: Kris Kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson wrote songs for and about a lot of people. In the last ‘Songs About Musicians’ post, I talked about his ‘Sister Sinead’. Years before that, he’d written a song about Hank Williams and other musicians, and earlier yet about a whole host of people in ‘The Pilgrim’. Any of those songs could move us along the chain to other songwriters, but I’ve chosen this song about Johnny Cash.

As reported in Billboard at the time Kristofferson released Closer to the Bone—the same album, by the way, that ‘Sister Sinead’ was on—’Good Morning John’ was written as a letter to Cash on the occasion of a sobriety party. ‘Everyone was supposed to say something inspirational, so I wrote a song’, Kristofferson revealed. I don’t have a date for the intervention, but it must date back at least a quarter century before Closer to the Bone given that Kristofferson performed it on Cash’s 1984 Christmas Special. In the clip below, we can see Cash sitting behind Kristofferson: shades of ‘Tim McGraw’ at the CMAs.

Not long after this, Waylon Jennings recorded ‘Good Morning John’ for his 1985 album Turn the Page. His rendition, like Kristofferson’s 1984 performance, is jaunty, with backing singers on the ‘John’ lines and a horn appearing halfway through.

The version on Closer to the Bone doesn’t do away with the jaunt, but it’s a more measured take, with backing vocals held off until the very end and the soft rasp of a harmonica replacing the horn.

The song is written from the perspective of an admiring, concerned friend. It praises ‘the dark and holy wonder that you are’, expresses brotherly love, looks to the future and celebrates a community of singers, artists and fans. It’s clearly about Cash, but it’s about him in the way that any Kristofferson song is about its subject. There’s abstract language, sideways perspectives, idealism, solidarity, metaphor, poetry.

See also the aforementioned ‘Johnny Cash’ by Jason Aldean for how else we might get to Cash and how we might move along the chain.

Cash / O’Daniel

Johnny Cash, ‘W. Lee O’Daniel (And the Light Crust Dough Boys)’
From: Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town (1987)
Songwriter: James Talley

This track was recorded by Johnny Cash for his 1987 album Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town. The album title connects to another of its musician-referencing songs, ‘The Night Hank Williams Came to Town’. I could devote several posts in this series to songs that have been written about Hank, but I’m holding off from that daunting task for a while. Instead, we have this track by folk-country singer-songwriter James Talley, who released his own version on his 1975 album Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love.

The song is named after Wilbert Lee ‘Pappy’ O’Daniel, the Texas politician, singer, songwriter. radio personality, bandleader and flour salesman. It’s also named after the Light Crust Dough Boys, the band led by O’Daniel that started the careers of Bob Wills among others. A song definitely themed more around music, then, than baking or politics.

Pappy O’ Daniel and his ‘Flour Hour’ will be familiar to viewers of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which a fictionalised version of the entertainer-cum-politician is transported from Texas to the Mississippi of the late 1930s.

Music and memory are the key to Talley’s song, as the narrator remembers the excitement caused by a Pappy Dan show in Tulsa ‘about thirty years ago’. There’s mention of a 1937 Chevy battling eighty miles through the Oklahoma dust and of worries about the economy and weather disappearing once the music kicked off. I’m not too sure about the historical accuracy; according to this O’Daniel profile, Pappy had left the Light Crust Dough Boys behind by the mid-30s and started a new group, the Hillbilly Boys. But it’s the remembered joy that’s important here, how the music made people feel. When the verses shift into the present tense to describe the show, it’s clear that the rememberer is fully back there.

Music’s ability to summon immediacy, to fold time, is strengthened by the Western Swing feel of the arrangement, which is both a reference to a style of the distant past (even more distant when Cash records it) and a sound that carries on being catchy and dance-inducing. This is so in the three versions of the song I know: Talley’s, Cash’s and Alan Jackson’s. All evoke Western Swing, with prominent fiddle. Cash’s producer Jack Clement adds horns to jazz things up, Jackson’s some honky tonk piano.

Talley’s original lyric has a verse that mentions moonshine and anticipated memory:

I got no troubles, I’m feelin’ no pain
I got moonshine whiskey down in my veins
So let the Light Crust Dough Boys and Old Pappy Dan
Play us a song we’ll never forget

Cash changes the lyric from ‘moonshine whiskey’ to ‘music’, perhaps recalling the necessity for those sobriety parties that had led to ‘Good Morning John’. Music seems like a pretty good thing to have running through your veins, something that’s probably going to help you remember the night better than the moonshine would. And that’s the thing that connects this song to ‘Tim McGraw’ as much as anything, that realisation that you are in a moment you’ll want to remember and that the music playing right now is the thing that’s going to do that job the best.

Songs about Taylor Swift

I’m not going further back down the Tim McGraw chain, partly because I don’t know that I can. Pappy O’Daniel sang about Texas, but I don’t know whether he wrote or sang any songs about musicians.

Time to move the other way along the chain, then, with some songs about Taylor Swift. There are many songs that are said to be about Swift, but I’ve chosen three that name her explicitly, just as the songs above mention their musician subjects by name. This is probably where I should issue a reminder that the music I write about at Songs and Objects is often the result of following an idea along a thread (or chain) as much as it is about endorsing songs or singers. Which is another way of saying there’s a turkey or two here.

Tyler Dean, ‘Taylor Swift’
From: ‘Taylor Swift’ (2010 single)
Songwriter: Tyler Dean 

I don’t know much about Tyler Dean, but I think he was the first artist to release a song (with accompanying video, no less) that used Taylor Swift’s name in its title. I certainly knew nothing of Dean in 2012, when I wrote the following for an academic journal:

I was intrigued. Here, in my phenomenology of listening, was Taylor Swift singing a song about Tim McGraw, a singer I'd recently heard singing about Kris Kristofferson, a singer who, over the course of his career, has written a number of songs about other singers. What started out as a game (how long could the chain be taken back? When would someone take it forward by writing 'Taylor Swift'?) developed into a set of observations on how country musicians work at self-authentication partly by reference to other country musicians.

From what I’ve since learned, Dean was signed to Curb Records (McGraw’s label at the time) as a teen singer. Curb’s website still lists him as an artist, with three singles to his name: ‘I Wanna Wake Up With You’, ‘That Smile’ and ‘Taylor Swift’.

Reviewing ‘Taylor Swift’ for Country Standard Time (seemingly some months prior to the video’s release), Jessica Phillips found it ‘too cutesy and predictable to appeal to too many ears’, essentially a gimmick by Curb to return the favour of Swift’s McGraw-citing debut. Comparing the two, she writes:

The major difference here is in the turning of the phrase. Swift smartly avoided putting her hit debut song in the ‘celebrity ode by a crazed teenage fan’ category by using Tim McGraw and his songs as a touchstone for memories of a teen girl’s summer romance.

Dean, however, delves headlong into a teen boy’s celebrity fantasy, wishing he had a girl like Swift. Seemingly eager to name-drop while Swift’s name is still hot, this song suffers from weak (and sometimes creepy) lyrics and an abundance of teen cliches.

I feel Phillips has done my job for me here, both in her evaluation of the song and in answering what purpose the named artist serves in the song. The only thing that seems off with the value of hindsight is ‘while Swift’s name is still hot’, but what we were to know fifteen years ago of the Taylorverse that was yet to come?

Trying to find something redeemable about this song, I’ll note its use of a reference to when the singer first heard Swift and how that seems to be the indelible memory that has led to his current, stalkerish obsession. Songs marking moments of epiphany, recognition and transformation: that’s something I’m always going on about in this newsletter, so I’ll take that from ‘Taylor Swift’ and move on.

Matt Cooper, ‘Taylor Swift’
From: ‘Taylor Swift’ (2022 single and TikTok)
Songwriter: Matt Cooper 

I also didn’t know anything about Matt Cooper before heading down this particular road. He seems to have been quite big on TikTok, and I get the sense his head is now in more of a Christian Music space than this ode to Taylor might lead one to suspect. This track is an even bigger pop-eats-itself moment than Tyler Dean’s. It’s witty, though, in its use of an immediately recognisable Swiftian sound and its playful incorporation of Taylor lyrics, song titles and—especially in the accompanying video—a basket of Swiftie easter eggs.

Cooper’s on the money with the functional aspect of music as soundtrack to life which Swift songs have so often been about.

Young love needs a soundtrack
Well you and me found that
I can turn time back with back to December
The whole world faded
When the radio played it
And you gave me that first kiss so fearless

It’s all there: music and/as memory, music and/as time travel, music and/as first kiss, as the only thing that’s going to fix a particular moment. The chorus ramps up the Swift-inspired mnemonics:

You belong with me, I belong with you 
Knew it at fifteen now we’re 22 
Singing Tim McGraw, cuz it’s our song 
A love story made for you and me 
Filling up blank space with our wildest dreams 
When those records spin, I can't forget 
Us singing with Taylor Swift

Racking up an average of two song titles per line, Cooper’s ‘Taylor Swift’ is both a kind of list song and a work of partial exegesis; it tells us as well as any written words about the emotional contours and mechanisms of the Swiftian song. I don’t feel I need add further commentary other than to flag this as another one that does the metonymic work of having its musical subject stand in for the experience the song is really describing: coming of age and trying to be a human in a media-saturated, always-on culture that might make you wonder if there really is anything outside of imaged and sounded experience.

Walker Hayes, ‘Taylor Swift’
From: New Money (2023)
Songwriter: Walker Hayes 

The third song in this selection, by country singer-songwriter Walker Hayes, shifts the perspective. Now it’s a father taking his daughter to see her favourite singer and, of course, making memories.

Two Taylor Swift concert ticket stubs
Cost me more than my mortgage does
And that was before
T-shirts, cokes, and popcorn
But hey how many times
Does your little girl turn nine

Partway through the concert, the daughter nods off, leading to a chorus that begins ‘Who am I that I get to hold a real life princess while she sleeps through her way too expensive birthday gift’. It scans awkwardly but Hayes makes it work, his phrasing broken up in a manner that, like Dean’s and Cooper’s songs, suggest Swift’s influence on the sounds as much as the topic of the song.

The payoff is a reference to ‘Tim McGraw’, the song that started this whole thing off.: ‘When she turns twenty-two and I turn fifty-six / I hope she thinks of me when she hears Taylor Swift’. There’s a reference to ‘22’ there too, a reminder of the endless easter eggs to be found when anyone follows Swift down the rabbit hole. And a reminder to me that ‘22’ is the first Swift song I ever wrote about, back in 2012 when I first started thinking about the links that have led to this post.

Memory and musical identification (whether with song, artist or both) have been key themes for the songs featured this week. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. Those themes have been present in several other songs about musicians that I’ve written about, and they are crucial aspects of Taylor Swift’s songwriting style.

I’ve now published three of these ‘Songs About Musicians’ posts in as many weeks, and I’m going to rest the series for a while so I can focus on other topics. I have ideas for future entries in the series, but I’d also be interested to hear any ideas readers think are worth exploring on this topic. Ideally, this would include groups of songs (minimum three) that have a connection to each other beyond being about a musician.

1. Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 125.

2. I explore this at greater length as part of a co-written chapter—James Barker, Richard Elliott, and Gareth Longstaff, ‘“Standing in Your Cardigan”: Evocative Objects, Ordinary Intensities, and Queer Sociality in the Swiftian Pop Song’, in Disrupted Knowledge: Scholarship in a Time of Change, edited by Tina Sikka, Gareth Longstaff and Steve Walls (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 259–79—from which some of this text is taken. It also forms the basis of a podcast episode available on this site: ‘Maybe This Thing Was a Masterpiece’.

3. Aaron Fox, ‘The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music’, Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 53.

4. Nate Sloan, ‘Taylor Swift and the Work of Songwriting’, Contemporary Music Review 40, no. 1 (2021): 4-5.