Trace Adkins – Ladies Love Country Boys

One of the men who wrote Trace Adkins’ first No.1 in almost ten years had just been dropped by his own record label.

In 2006, Jamey Johnson was a songwriter with no record deal. BNA Records had released his debut album, The Dollar, then dropped him when his second single failed to chart. That same year, a song he had co-written was on its way to the top of the country chart for someone else. Ladies Love Country Boys gave Trace Adkins his first No.1 since 1997. The writer who couldn’t get his own records played had handed a star the comeback hit he’d been chasing for almost a decade.

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Johnson and Adkins already had history. Johnson was from Enterprise, Alabama, and had spent eight years in the Marine Corps Reserve, playing country bars around Montgomery between drills. He reached Nashville by 2000 and found work as a writer, and in 2005 he, Dallas Davidson and Randy Houser handed Adkins Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, which reached No.2 on the country chart and No.30 on the Hot 100. The next Johnson song Adkins cut took a different route. It’s still a country boy’s boast, but with a story built in: a woman raised to be proper finds that her upbringing is no match for a man from the country.

Johnson wrote it with George Teren and Rivers Rutherford, and Rutherford brought a hitmaker’s track record. Raised in Germantown, Tennessee, he had written Brooks & Dunn’s Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You, which Billboard named the No.1 country song of 2001, along with Tim McGraw’s Real Good Man and Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton’s When I Get Where I’m Going. Frank Rogers produced the track for Adkins’ album Dangerous Man, which Capitol Nashville released on August 15, 2006, keeping Adkins’ deep baritone up front over a band that swaggers rather than rushes. The label followed it with the song as the album’s second single on September 18.

The end of a long wait

The climb took six months. The Billboard Hot Country Songs chart put Ladies Love Country Boys at No.1 on the charts dated March 10 and March 17, 2007, Adkins’ first chart-topper since (This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing nearly ten years earlier. Kenny Chesney’s Beer in Mexico replaced it. The song also reached No.61 on the Hot 100 during a twenty-week run, and Billboard ranked it No.25 on its 2007 year-end country chart. On May 10, 2007, BMI and the song’s publishers, EMI-Blackwood Music and House of Full Circle Music, held its No.1 party at Dan McGuinness pub in Nashville. That November, BMI named it one of the award-winning songs at its 2007 Country Awards, honoring Johnson and Teren as writers.

Michael Salomon, who had directed many of Adkins’ videos, shot this one, and CMT added it to its rotation in early November 2006. Salomon plays the title as a joke. Adkins sings from the top of a tall building, then walks a city street as a crowd of women grows behind him, block after block. When he finally slips away, the women spot another cowboy on a street corner and go after him instead. The ending makes the point the song only implies: it’s the type that matters, not the individual man.

Johnson didn’t stay in the background for long. Living in a friend’s house after losing his deal, he kept writing. George Strait’s Give It Away, which Johnson co-wrote with Bill Anderson and Buddy Cannon, had already reached No.1. In 2008 he put out That Lonesome Song online, Mercury Nashville signed him, and the album went gold. Rutherford went into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019. Adkins kept charting, and the next time Music Videos Club picked up his story it was with You’re Gonna Miss This.

Ladies Love Country Boys sounds like an easy song, and that’s why it worked. Three professionals built it so that the hardest part to sing is the title, and Adkins, after a decade without a No.1, delivered it like a man who knew the line was true. The song carried a struggling writer’s name to the top of the chart while that writer’s own records were being ignored, and a year later the industry was paying attention to Johnson as an artist too.