Thirty-one years ago, according to the legend, two songwriters were having a “big lunch and a couple of cocktails at a place called The Tavern on 16th Avenue in Nashville.”
After the plates were empty and the glasses dry, the waiter came and laid their bill on table, and the converstion may have gone like this:
“I haven’t got enough to pay this,” Dee said.
“That’s better than me,” said Bud. “I ain’t even got my wallet.”
“What are we gon’ do?”
Then Bud reached in his pocket and found a dime. “We could call somebody.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t’ know, either, but that waiter’s looking over here. We got to do something fast.”
“Wait a minute ,” said Bud. “I know somebody who can help us out.”
“Who?” Dee asked.
“He works here, in the back,” Bud smiled.
“You sure he’s not the assistant to the assistan to the cook?” Dee smiled.
“Man,” Bud smiled, “l got friends in low places.”
They laughed and laughed at the phrase. When they finally caught their breath, Dee said, “That’s a song, man. Have you written it yet?”
“No.”
“Let me write it with you.”
“Not yet.”
Legend does not say how the two paid the bill, but they kept on writing together, hoping for a number one hit, and often using a guy who sold cowboy boots to sing demo records for their songs. They didn’t even mention “friends in low places“ for 16 months.
In 1989, they must have brought their lunch money as well as some “Texas Pete” to an O’Charley’s in Nashville, where they drank champagne to cool their gullets as they outdid one another with custom hot sauce which they concocted on the spot, to slosh on their chicken tenders.
All of a sudden Bud grabbed a napkin, took out a pen and wrote:
“Blame it all on my roots,
I showed up in boots
and ruined your black tie affair…”
He pushed the napkin over to Dewayne, who took it and scribbled:
“The last one to know
“The last one to show
“The last one you’d thought you’d see there …”
The napkin kept passing from one writer to the other, and within 20 minutes, not only the first verse, but all three remaining verses and the chorus to “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places” had flowed from subconscious to ballpoint.
Then they took their napkin to Dee’s nearby condo, where they picked up guitars and began to sing the tune, which flowed out as quickly as the verses and the chorus.
So, after a total of 40 minutes, the entire song was written.
“We gotta get somebody to sing this,” they said. “This one’s gonna’ be a hit.”
“We’d use Garth, but he’s in studio cutting his first album,” Bud mused.
“He can sing these two octaves, easy.”
“He sang demos for us, when he didn’t have a deal,” Bud said.
“Bet he’ll sing one for us now,” Dee smiled.
So they called Garth Brooks.
“Sure, I’ll come,” he said.
Before they cut the demo recording, the session guitarist suggested an intro built from the chords of the first verse. They used it.
Brooks’ guitar player suggested “Oasis,” as the name of the bar, after a dive in his hometown. They used it too.
After Garth and musicians finished his very last demo, Garth thought he was finished with the song. But he was not, for he could not get its chorus out of his mind:
“I got friends in low places
“Where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases
“My blues away … I’ll be OK
“I’m not big on social graces
“Guess I’ll step on down to the Oasis
“‘Cause I got friends in low places.”
He couldn’t ask to record it, right then, because all the songs for his first album were set.
“Could you hold it for me?” the still unknown singer asked Dee and Bud.
“Why sure,” they replied. “You’re the man to sing it. “
After Garth recorded the single in 1990, “I Got Friends in Low Places “ sold and sold and sold. Bud Lee and Dewayne Blackwell got the No. 1 hit they craved, and Garth Brooks got not only a No. 1 single, but his signature song.
How did all this happen?
For one thing, “I Got Friends in Low Places” went through the phases normally found in a creative work.
There was an irritant: two guys looking for a hit song were in a jam because they had run up a big tab and had no way to pay it.
In the midst of that trouble came the a line: “I got friends in low places.”
That line was like a seed planted in their minds, which would need to lie fallow for more than a year. During that waiting period, Bud thought about the song every day, but did not try to write it. Dee must have been thinking about it too, for after hot sauce and chicken tenders at O’Charley’s they wrote the lyrics, in tandem, in twenty minutes. A similar miracle occurred when they sang the brand new melody at Dee’s house.
Amazed at how quickly the lines came, Bud said that he worked a lot on this song … perhaps his entire 38 years at that point.
Almost 30 years later, the song is said to have sold 59 million copies worldwide, giving Bud Lee, Dewayne Blackwell, and Garth Brooks fame and wealth. Garth has sung “I Got Friends in Low Places” at every concert since he recorded it.
To me, “I Got Friends in Low Places,” is a demanding tune to play, and to sing, and it brings joy in spite of featuring a cowboy who turns to whiskey and beer lift his spirits.
For another thing, on a deeper level, the song shows something I believe writers, singer, and audience alike understand: often there is extreme value in friends who are considered, by society-at-large, to be of low estate.
Christmas honors one of them.
Leon Smith is a storyteller and regular contributor to The Anson Record.