Songfacts®:

• In this song, George Strait makes some smooth moves and successfully picks up a girl at a bar. It's an exemplar of '80s courtship, where bars were where many couples met. The guy usually had to make the first move, and the opening line was always the hardest. In this one, Strait goes with, "Excuse me, but I think you've got my chair." From there, he's off and running, following the playbook of buying her a drink, asking her to dance, and driving her home.
• Named by CMT as one of the 100 greatest country songs of all-time, "The Chair" was the result of a night-long songwriting binge by the country music songwriters Hank Cochran and Dean Dillon. The two had been writing songs all night long and, as Dillon puts it, "were about written out" when he strummed his guitar and sang the line, "Excuse me but I think you've got my chair." Twenty minutes later, the song was complete.
• George Strait is playing a character in this song. He never picked up a woman in a bar because he never had to: George married his high-school girlfriend Norma in 1971 when he was 19, and they stayed together.
• Hank Cochran was already a seasoned veteran in the music industry with classic songs like Patsy Cline's "I Fall To Pieces" to his name, and acted as a mentor to Dean Dillon, who was making his own mark in the business penning hits for Strait and other country artists.
  
  Dillon spoke with us in 2012 about collaborating with Cochran on the track: "There's some lines in that song which are just brilliant that Hank wrote. The line, 'Thank you, can I drink you a buy, well, listen to me, what I meant is can I buy you a drink, anything you please,' it just shows how flustered the guy was. He's tripping over himself to get to know this girl. And using every line in the book, basically, to get her attention. And I just thought that was really brilliant on Hank's part. But then you have to understand Hank Cochran was one of the most brilliant songwriters ever in country music."
• "The Chair" came early in George Strait's career. Released on his fifth album, Something Special, it was his seventh #1 Country hit. Remarkably, he kept up this hit-making pace for decades, landing his record 44th chart-topper in 2008 with "River of Love."