Songfacts®:

• Brantley Gilbert teamed up with Hardy and Toby Keith for "The Worst Country Song of All Time." It isn't actually… the track is a rowdy, tongue-in-cheek tune that finds Gilbert and Hardy playfully slamming a series of country clichés; beer, honky-tonk women, fishing, sweet tea, dirt roads, trucks and the American flag are among the things they hate. Instead, they're loving on the city lifestyle, traffic jams, minivans, Kim Jong-un and Putin.
• Keith continues the sarcastic fun on the bridge when he declares:
  
  I'm too good for Solo cups
  Your mama's homemade fried chicken sucks
• Gilbert and Hardy co-penned the song with Hunter Phelps and Will Weatherly during a songwriters' retreat in Texas, after Hardy threw out the title. According to Gilbert, Hardy told them, "Guys, I know this is crazy, but I had a title I put down in my phone: "The Worst Country Song of All Time."'
  
  At first they all laughed thinking it was a joke, but then the four writers started throwing out lines they thought were funny. The next thing they knew, they'd got the song written.
• There's even an uncountry-like saxophone solo performed by Nashville based multi-instrumentalist Tyler Summers.
• Before releasing the single on June 18, 2021, the trio teased it for fans by staging a text conversation about the actual "worst country song of all time."
  
  "Toby Keith's 'Red Solo Cup,' is the worst of all time," Hardy wrote.
  
  "I agree with you about 'Red Solo Cup,' but 'Rednecker,' might give it a run for it's money," Keith replied.
  
  Gilbert responded, "I'm pretty sure I've got you both beat." He attached to his post an audio file stating, "The Worst Country Song Of All Time."
• This was the first song Gilbert released that he co-wrote with Hardy, Phelps or Weatherly. He said: "As songwriters, we have a group of people that we're extremely comfortable writing with and we usually already know what kind of song we're gonna write. But I branched out and wrote with some folks that I haven't written with before - and this song came out of one of the first times I wrote with Hardy, Hunter and Will. I'm just really stoked that I met those guys and have had the privilege and honor of working with them."
• Gilbert has counted Keith as a friend since they first toured together in 2012 so he'd hoped he might feature on this song. The singer explained to Taste of Country Nights that he and Hardy agreed that having a Nashville star such as Keith would lend their tongue-in-cheek tune some country cred. "We felt like we needed an old-school vet with the stamp of approval," Gilbert said. "I think having Toby on it makes it semi-okay. It doesn't feel like country music blasphemy quite yet."
• Keith told The Boot he agreed to the feature because "since I've been involved in some of the best country songs of all time, I thought it's fitting that I should be involved in one of the worst."
• Brantley Gilbert co-directed the video with comic book and TV writer Brian K. Vaughan.
  
  It opens with Gilbert and Hardy wearing loud, patterned shirts, dancing around a garage full of minivans and electric cars before having their party crashed by caricature politicians, including Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, the Clintons, and Vladimir Putin. When Toby Keith walks in, he asks the other two, "What the hell y'all doin'?"
  
  Hardy responds, "Writin' a song, Mr. Keith."
  
  "Let me fix it for you, alright?" Keith replies before grabbing the mic and singing his bridge verse.