“Friends In Low Places”

A Reason To Smile

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If you’re new here, and a lot of you are, a quick explanation of what you’re about to read: Welcome to our weekly Reason to Smile. Because our current political climate can be more depressing than three straight days of rain, several years ago we decided to impart a weekly moment of joy every Sunday morning. We believe music can be the balm we all need… a song can change your mood in a minute. It’s no more complicated than that.

Twenty-nine years ago this month, more than a million people gathered in New York’s Central Park for a free concert. Few people thought a country singer could bring out a big New York City crowd, but when that country singer is Garth Brooks, all bets are off.

The concert, the only NYC stop on Brooks’ world tour, broke the record for the largest attendance at a concert in the park ever. The record still holds.

That August night in 1997, Brooks sang all his hits, including his biggest, “Friends in Low Places.” The concert aired live on HBO. A clip from the Central Park concert is unavailable, but here is another, highly entertaining version, live in Dublin, Ireland.

Brooks’ signature song had an inauspicious start. After Earl Bud Lee and Dewayne Blackwell wrote the song in 1989, they contacted Brooks, a friend who was selling shoes in Nashville, trying to break into the music business, to record a demo. They would use the demo to shop the song around to other artists.

When he recorded the demo, Brooks was on the cusp of making it big. His first album was about to be released. He knew “Friends in Low Places” was going to be a hit. After recording the demo, “for the next two weeks the chorus to this song kept running through my head.”

Since his album was already cut, Brooks couldn’t include “Low Places” on it, so he asked the songwriters if they would hold it for his next album. “Without a blink of an eye, they both said yes. Putting that kind of faith into an unknown artist is unheard of.”

They may have put faith in an unknown artist, but they knew talent when they heard it. Brooks made their song one of the most popular and enduring country music songs of all time.

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Stay Steady,

Dan