Songfacts®:

• This song was written by Truckers guitarist Mike Cooley and derives from his interest in the career of Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who was active in the Reagan and Bush campaigns of the '80s. "He was the guy that Karl Rove and all of the modern dirty tricksters looked to – he was one of the granddaddies of it all," he explained. "That song is from his point of view, fictionally of course. It's him making his pitch, telling what he understands about young, Southern men."
• Cooley wrote six tracks on English Oceans. Uncut magazine commented to frontman Patterson Hood there's a lot more of the guitarist's songs than normal on the album. Hood replied: "I wanted him to be more a part of it than he had on he last few records. Cooley had come through a period when he wasn't writing at all and he beat himself up a little bit, which made it worse. So he came in with all those songs and that made me want to write extra hard because if I was putting a song between two of his, it had to be good all people would skip my track."