Songfacts®:

• "Johnny" is a very somber answer song to the 1979 Charlie Daniels classic "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." In that song, the Devil challenges Johnny to a fiddle duel. If Johnny wins, he gets a golden fiddle; if he loses, the Devil gets his soul. Johnny outduels the Devil and sends him back to Hell where he belongs.
  
  In Eric Church's song, he sings about how we need Johnny more than ever right now because evil is everywhere, meaning the Devil must be loose. Someone needs to send him back to Hell.
• Church wrote the song in response to the 2023 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, where a shooter killed three children and three adults. He told the story during a performance at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville:
  
  "About a year ago we had a shooting here in Nashville at the Covenant School. Where my two boys go to school is about a mile from that school. The hardest thing I've ever done is drop them off at that school the day after the shooting and watch them walk inside. I sat in the parking lot for a long time, and as fate would have it, when I was pulling out, Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" was playing. I was driving back home, and there's a line in that song:
  
  Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard
  'Cause Hell's broke loose in Georgia, and the devil deals the cards
  And if you win, you get this shiny fiddle made of gold
  But if you lose, the devil gets your soul
  
  I remember thinking, we can use Johnny right now because the Devil's not in Georgia... he's everywhere. I went home and wrote 'Johnny.'"
• Church evokes various lines in "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" throughout this song for instance, when he sings:
  
  And there's fire on the mountain and the flames are closin' in
  Run, get your fiddle bow and send him to hell again
  
  That's a callback to the Charlie Daniels line:
  
  Fire on the mountain, run boys, run
  The devil's in the house of the rising sun
• Church got some help from two ace songwriters to complete this song: Luke Laird and Brett Warren. Other Eric Church songs Laird worked on include "Drink In My Hand" and "Talladega"; Warren does a lot of writing for Tim McGraw, including the tracks "Felt Good On My Lips" and "Hey Whiskey."
• Before the song was released, Church performed "Johnny" at a series of 23 one-man shows he played at his Nashville bar, Chief's, from April-June 2024. You won't see video because these were phone-free shows, done in a storyteller style like Bruce Springsteen's "Springsteen on Broadway" shows.
• The song is part of Church's 2025 album Evangeline vs. The Machine, which incorporated a choir and strings into many of the songs, including this one. It was a change of direction for Church that he foreshadowed in his 2024 Stagecoach Festival set, where he was backed only by a gospel choir.