7 Country Songs Everyone Credits to Tennessee That Were Written Somewhere Else

A guitarist who barely spent any time on Music Row wrote one of the biggest country hits ever credited to Nashville.

Not one line came from the city.

That kind of mix-up happens all over the music business, but a lot fall on Tennessee.

These are the country songs everyone assumes came out of Nashville that started somewhere else.

1. “Convoy”

“Convoy” topped Billboard’s country chart and became one of the biggest trucker anthems the genre ever produced.

It started as ad copy.

Bill Fries voiced a bread-truck driver named C.W. McCall for an Omaha ad agency‘s Old Home Bread commercials, and composer Chip Davis wrote the music alongside him.

Both men worked out of Nebraska.

Not Tennessee.

Davis has said he never planned on writing country music at all.

The character turned into a working recording act almost by accident, and once “Convoy” hit national radio, listeners assumed C.W. McCall was a genuine country singer, the citizens band (CB) radio slang in the lyrics only reinforcing the assumption.

It came out of a bread commercial instead.

2. “9 to 5”

Dolly Parton wrote “9 to 5” for the 1980 movie of the same name, and it became one of her biggest pop and country crossover hits.

She wrote it on set.

Parton has said she came up with the rhythm by tapping her own acrylic nails together between takes, then finished the lyrics back at her hotel each night.

The movie filmed in Los Angeles.

Not a Music Row office in sight.

Parton is a Tennessean through and through, and Dollywood still sits in the Smoky Mountains.

The song came together two time zones from home, on a Hollywood soundstage.

3. “Wagon Wheel”

“Wagon Wheel” became a modern country standard once Darius Rucker’s 2013 version topped the country chart and turned into a wedding-reception staple, the kind of song country fans credit straight to Nashville.

Rucker even closed the 2013 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards with it, one of Nashville’s biggest nights.

Old Crow Medicine Show built the song around a chorus that already existed.

Bob Dylan recorded that chorus, an outtake called “Rock Me, Mama,” during sessions in Burbank, California, in February 1973.

Old Crow’s Ketch Secor found a bootleg years later and wrote new verses around it.

Rucker’s Nashville-made version came third.

The hook that everybody sings came out of a California studio decades before Old Crow Medicine Show ever performed it live.

4. “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”

David Allan Coe turned “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” into his signature song and called it the perfect country and western song.

Coe built his career as one of Nashville’s own outlaws, arriving in 1967 and sleeping in his car outside the Ryman Auditorium until he broke in.

It name-checks mama, trains, trucks, prison, and drinking, all in one verse.

Not Nashville’s work.

Steve Goodman and John Prine, two Chicago folk musicians, put the song together in a New York City hotel room in 1971.

Goodman needled the genre as much as he wrote that night.

Prine later added the final verse himself and turned down a writing credit for it.

Coe added a fourth verse of his own before he’d record it, and that combined recording is the cut country radio still plays.

Not one word of the original came out of Tennessee.

5. “Delta Dawn”

“Delta Dawn” turned 13-year-old Tanya Tucker into one of country music’s biggest new stars in 1972, and Helen Reddy’s pop cover made it a hit a second time over.

Alex Harvey wrote it with Larry Collins.

Harvey grew up in Brownsville, Tennessee, but the two men were still up long after a concert let out, gathered at Collins’ Los Angeles house near dawn, when Harvey said he felt his late mother’s presence in the room.

Collins grabbed his own guitar and joined in.

Twenty minutes, start to finish.

One Tennessean and one Los Angeles house wrote the song generations of country fans have simply assumed was homegrown.

6. “Rhinestone Cowboy”

“Rhinestone Cowboy” gave Glen Campbell his biggest crossover hit in 1975, topping Billboard’s pop and country charts at the same time, and became a country radio fixture for the rest of the decade.

Songwriter Larry Weiss didn’t write it in Nashville.

He’d relocated from New York to Los Angeles a few years earlier.

By his own account, the song came from him picturing himself walking streets he used to know back in New York, all while sitting in a California house.

Two coasts, no Tennessee stopover.

Campbell turned it into a country standard people still picture as pure Nashville.

7. “Rose Garden”

Lynn Anderson’s 1970 recording of “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden” won the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and topped the charts in multiple countries.

Songwriter Joe South never worked Music Row for it.

South built his career in Atlanta under the wing of local publisher Bill Lowery, who managed him through the run of hits that included this one, far from Music Row.

Atlanta, not Tennessee.

Anderson turned it into a Music City classic anyway, and country fans have credited the song to Nashville for more than fifty years.

Why the Industry Still Gets the Credit

Music Row has worked as the country industry’s publishing and recording hub since the 1950s.

It’s home to the labels, producers, and performing rights offices that turn a finished song into a hit record.

Labels record a song there, mix it there, and pitch it to country radio from there.

That’s the part listeners hear.