Writing
According to Earl Bud Lee, one of the song's co-writers, the idea of the song was born when he and some songwriting friends gathered for lunch one day at Tavern on the Row, a popular Nashville eatery. When the check came, Lee realized he had forgotten his money. He was asked how he was going to pay for the meal, and he replied, "Don't worry. I have friends in low places. I know the cook." Lee and his songwriting partner, DeWayne Blackwell, immediately recognized that the line "friends in low places" had potential, but they didn't act upon it immediately.
Some months later, Lee and Blackwell were at a party, celebrating a recent #1 hit by another songwriter. They began to talk about the dormant "friends in low places" idea, and "at that very moment, it all started to come together in a song," Lee said. Because nothing else was available, they wrote the song on paper napkins. When the songwriters polished "Friends in Low Places", they contacted Garth Brooks to see if he would record a demo for them.
Guitarist Jim Garver would add the name of the bar in the song, "The Oasis", after an establishment in his hometown of Concordia, Kansas.
Read more about this topic: Friends In Low Places
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape, I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts [in her journal], at the very moment—my opinion of people when I first see them, and how I alter, or how confirm myself in it—and I am much deceived in my foresight, if I shall not have very great delight in reading this living proof of my manner of passing my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I know, and a thousand other things in future.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)