Story Behind The Song: Blake Shelton - "Boys 'Round Here"

Before the song hit radio airwaves, Blake Shelton was getting his fans fired up about his new yet-to-released single "Boys 'Round Here." Now that the tune has impacted country radio, it has become an instant hit. Read On Here to find out how the song's writers came to create the hit single!

Before the song hit radio airwaves, Blake Shelton was getting his fans fired up about his new yet-to-released single "Boys 'Round Here." [Lyrics] Now that the tune has impacted country radio, it has become an instant hit for not only Shelton, but also the song's three writers -- Peach Pickers Rhett Akins and Dallas Davidson, as well as Craig Wiseman. Roughstock sat down with Akins before diving into another writing session to discuss the inspiration behind "Boys 'Round Here."

"‘Boys ‘Round Here’ is definitely a song that me, Dallas nor Craig knew when we woke up that morning that that would be the song we were going to write that day," Akins tells Roughstock. "I didn’t even know if it would get recorded because it was just so crazy. It was one of those where we knew it was going to be really awful or it was going to be the biggest thing ever. We went to Craig’s office, and Craig had this little beat machine. He turned the beat machine on, and we just started jamming on the guitar for a minute. Dallas goes, ‘I’ve got a title called ‘Boys ‘Round Here.’ He looked up at the wall, and Craig’s got a picture of The Beatles on his wall. We wanted to write a real redneck song about country boys all over the place. I guess The Beatles were in Dallas’ head from looking at that poster, and he says, ‘Boys ‘round here don’t listen to The Beatles.’ We just went from there. "Craig calls it ‘The Hobo Soup Song,’" laughs Akins. "Hobo Soup is just whatever you’ve got, throw it in the pot and hopefully it will taste good [laughs]. We just threw every crazy thing we could think of into this song, from ‘chew tobacco, spit’ to ‘teach me how to dougie’ [laughs]. Dallas and I were obsessed with this ‘Dougie’ song at the time, and I don’t know how that made it into the song. I guess just from us being goofy. 

"Then we thought we needed something real different," Akins continues. "We didn’t want the song to stay the same all the way through, so we were trying to think of something new to write for the back half of it. I was kind of leaning back in my chair, and I was yawning. My yawn was sort of in tune with what was playing in the background. Dallas thought I was going ‘oooooooo,’ but I was really yawning. Dallas was like, ‘What was that!?’ I was like, ‘That was a yawn.’ He said, ‘Well it sounded good; do it again!’ [laughs] So the yawn turned into ‘Ooooooo, let’s ride,’ that Miranda [Lambert] and The Pistol Annies part. That just made the back half of the song totally different. It was a complete 180 to how the song was going. We were laughing and cutting up. A lot of the stuff like ‘What? (That’s right!)’ and ‘Country boy can survive’ – just all the crazy stuff in there – was just Craig and me and Dallas just cutting up. 

"I honestly thought we would go and do a real demo of the song because I thought none of the crazy stuff that we were saying and doing in the song would ever make the real demo," adds Akins. "Craig sent it out that night to Scott Hendricks as it was … raw, bad singing, cutting up, Dallas didn’t sing half of the lyrics right … I was like, ‘Why did you do that!?’ Craig goes, ‘Because it’s awesome!’ I was like, ‘Nobody’s going to cut that. It’s too crazy.’ And of course, Blake of all people heard it and fell in love with it. Actually, everything that you hear Blake singing on the record – all the crazy little adlibs and things – are exactly what we did on the little worktape demo that I thought would never even make the demo, and if it did, nobody would ever put that on their record. Blake did, and he used every bit of it. I guess that’s why it works because we just didn’t care. We were like, ‘Let’s just do it. If we’re having fun with it, maybe somebody else will, too.’ That’s how that came about."

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