Songfacts®:

• "What's Your Country Song?" is a nostalgic tune that intertwines shoutouts to country hits with the idea that all people have songs that have shaped their lives.
  
  Everybody got a small town anthem
  Everybody got a story to tell
  When you're rollin down a two-lane highway
  And you turn your radio on
  Tell me which one hits you baby
  What's your country song?
  
  Rhett debuted the tune on his Instagram on April 19, 2020 during the coronavirus lockdown. The track's message that everyone has a song that encourages them and energizes them to continue life seemed to him a good fit for such challenging times.
• Rhett incorporates a number of country classics and more modern hits into the song. How many can you spot? They include:
  
  Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."
  
  Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
  
  Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine."
  
  Alan Jackson's "Chattahoochee."
  
  George Strait's "All My Exes Live in Texas."
  
  Garth Brooks' "Friends In Low Places."
  
  Barbara Mandrell's "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool."
  
  Jake Owen's "Barefoot Blue Jean Night."
  
  And even his dad Rhett Akins' '90's hit "That Ain't My Truck."
• Thomas Rhett wrote the song with his father, Rhett Akins, along with Jesse Frasure, Ashley Gorley and Parker Welling. They penned the feel-good tune in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas during his 2019 tour and released it as a single on November 12, 2020.
  
  "Some songwriting buddies of mine came, and this was the very first song we wrote on that trip," Rhett explained to Radio.com. "At first it started out as a piano vocal, and then we added some production to it and turned it into what it is now."
• Rhett told Radio.com's Kelly Ford the shout-outs to classic songs started as a joke when he name-checked his father's hit, "That Ain't My Truck."
  
  "We wrote the chorus first and then started to mess around with what the verse was gonna feel like," he recalled. "I immediately threw that line in about my dad and we all laughed. Then we were like, 'you know what, maybe all the verses need to be old school Country songs that we turn into a story.' I'm just trying to get my dad some props in there."
• The chorus came from Thomas Rhett noticing, "No matter where you live or where you're from, everyone has a little bit of country inside their bones." Rhett recalled to Radio.com's Katie Neal:
  
  "We wrote the chorus in like thirty minutes, but couldn't decide how to wrangle it all in to have it make any sense. I had had this idea on my phone called 'Where's Your Country' or something like 'Everybody's Got Some Country in Them' or something like that and I kind of got that idea from traveling as much as we do."
• Rhett told The Boot he hopes the listener won't hear the song titles the first time they hear it, but be concentrating on the story. Then the more they listen to the song, they start to pick up the titles and go, "Oh my gosh, I love that song, I love that song."
  
  Rhett added he anticipates some listeners will make their own interpretation of the song and ask themselves, "What were my songs that kind of defined my life? What songs did I hear on the radio that, when I hear them on the radio today, as a 30-year-old or 40-year-old, make me feel 17 again?"
  
• "What's Your Country Song" climbed to #1 on the Country chart dated March 27, 2021. It was Rhett's second visit to the summit following "Die a Happy Man ," which spent 17 weeks at the peak position in 2015-'16.
• It was Parker Welling who came up with the "What's Your Country Song?" title. Neither she nor Rhett Akins wanted to venture down the route of shoehorning song titles into the lyrics because it so rarely works.
  
  "So we had this debate," Welling told The Tennessean. "I don't prefer songs that do the title thing, but we were like should we do it? Should we not? So the compromise we came to was the chorus wouldn't do it. And if we did it in the verses, it needed to make sense as if we were not putting titles in it. So like, we had to connect these titles in a way that if you didn't know the title, the story still made sense."