Mississippi

Album: Mac Powell (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • Sometimes songwriters get suspicious when a song is birthed without any apparent effort. After Third Day frontman Mac Powell first wrote this barnstorming tune for his debut Country album, he was concerned it came too easily. In his Songfacts interview, Powell explained: "It just kind of popped in my head. I was actually driving down to the studio. I recorded about an hour south of Atlanta, about an hour and a half south of where I live. Ideas just kind of popped in my head, and I thought, okay, this is too easy. This has got to be somebody else's song, because it just seems like a song someone would have written before. So I scoured the Internet and I asked as many people as I could, and nobody had heard the song. I was very fortunate to come up with the idea."
  • The "one Mississippi, two Mississippi," part of the songs is a reference to a way of counting by seconds that Powell used to do in his younger days. He told us: "That is something that I did as a kid. When you're playing games to go hide and seek, or when you're rushing the quarterback on flag football, we'd always go, "One, Mississippi, two, Mississippi." So it was one of those things that I thought, Do people even still know what this means when I do this? Especially at the end, I didn't know if it was just a southern thing, how you learn how to spell Mississippi is to say M I crooked letter crooked letter I crooked letter crooked letter I hump back hump back I. But I just thought, okay, is this a southern thing? Is this a little kid thing and people don't know or what? So I was a little scared. But most people know what I'm talking about." (Read more in our interview with Mac Powell.)

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