Friends In Low Places, by Garth Brooks.
In my teenage years, before I listened to Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline, or that one time in college I had been up all night before a holiday break and heard Beethoven’s Ninth in a warm car service Lincoln on the way to Newark to fly home, I would say things like “I like every kind of music except classical and country” and that was pretty dumb, right there on the face of it.
I probably thought Garth Brooks was a fascist back then (he wasn’t!).
The first time I heard people sing along with this song* and mean it, I was in Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, and the people were sloppy, and they meant it.
The next time (?) I sang it with people and meant it, I was in a hotel conference room in Rotterdam in the middle of the night, and there’s video I won’t share here, but it was perfect.
Played the guitar with the wrist brace on, and did it earlier in the day so I’m not as tired as promised, but I am typing this at the end of a long one.
Kept it kinda simple, recorded the video first so I could mess up that pre-chorus a little bit and not need more than one take.
The black hat was required for this one, obvs.
*Every other link to a song in this project so far is to Spotify, but Garth doesn’t stream much by design, so this one is to Amazon. Also, I probably haven’t heard the original of this more than a couple times, including that day (day? night? New Year’s Eve?) in Key West. Also, I should’ve done the cheesy guitar solo.