Songfacts®:

• In this song Collie's girl is playing hard to please, and it finally dawns on him what she's after: something with a ring to it - a wedding ring. "Gonna have to put a ring on her finger if I'm gonna be her man," he concludes.
• Collie wrote this with Aaron Tippin, who had country hits as a artist with "There Ain't Nothin' Wrong with the Radio" and "That's as Close as I'll Get to Loving You." In our interview with Mark Collie, he said: "Aaron and I were struggling writers kicking around Nashville trying to get a door to open. I remember we got a whim. We wrote quite a few tunes in those days, and one day he said, 'We need to write something with a ring to it.' And I said, 'Okay.' So flippantly he said that, and it became that song."
• Garth Brooks covered this song and released it on his 1992 album, The Chase. After Collie and Tippin wrote the song, they were hoping George Strait would record it. He declined, and Collie's publisher suggested Brooks, who was a new artist working on his debut album. "I've heard him sing, he's no George Strait," Collie told her. The issue was settled when MCA Nashville head Tony Brown had Collie record the song himself as his debut single. Collie's version was a modest hit, reaching #54 on the Country chart, but the song proved far more lucrative when Brooks ended up including it on The Chase. Collie changed his tune. "He was no George Strait. He was Garth Brooks."
• James Burton played guitar on this track. Burton played on many Elvis Presley recordings and also some by Collie's heroes Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. "That guitar riff had as much to do with what made that song as anything that we did," Collie told us.