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Keith Urban Channels Merle Haggard In Song

Keith Urban celebrated the number-one success of his song “Coming Home” in Nashville yesterday afternoon (10/23). Keith shared songwriting credit on the song with a few other writers, including the late…

Keith Urban Channels Merle Haggard In Song
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Keith Urban celebrated the number-one success of his song "Coming Home" in Nashville yesterday afternoon (10/23).

Keith shared songwriting credit on the song with a few other writers, including the late Merle Haggard. He said, "I wish I could have written with people like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. I thought if you take a sample from one of their records and took it into a writing session, it would be the same as that writer coming and going. I got this little riff and then used that as a spark to start writing a song. And I thought that that would be the same thing as that person being in the room and sparking an idea to write a whole brand new songs."

Urban even reached out to Haggard's wife and son. He continued, "Teresa, I've reached out to her like immediately that I had the idea to use 'Mama Tried' the riff, because I didn't just want to go in and rerecord it or I actually wanted to lift the intro from the actual recording. And so I really wanted to get her blessing for what I was doing with the song because it was taking a little bit of an artistic license with an iconic piece of music and manipulating it in a way that I hope she felt was still respectful to the original. But she loved the song, thankfully, and I reached out to Ben Haggard as well. And he also was very supportive."

Nancy Brooks has been working in the country music industry for almost 30 years. She has interviewed pretty much any country star you can think of. In the late 1990s, she started working with Dolly Parton. And yes, Nancy reports that Parton is as sweet as you would think. She loves her life in country music and has been backstage at every CMA Awards show since the late 1990s. Many of her stories are from her one-on-one interviews. She was there at the beginning of the incredible careers of many music superstars today, including Taylor Swift, Shania Twain, and Blake Shelton, and has interviewed them multiple times throughout the years.