Songfacts®:

• Paul Overstreet has a lot of songs about fatherhood, including "Seein' My Father in Me" and "Daddy's Come Around." It figures he would write about this topic: he has six kids!
  
  Most of these songs focus on the joys of these familial bonds, but "The Day My Daddy Didn't Come Home" is very different. It's an autobiographical song about his own father.
  
  "I was the youngest of five, and when I was a kid, my dad got a job at a church that didn't have enough money to pay him to be a full-time preacher so he had to drive a milk truck," he said in a Songfacts interview. "And things happen when you're out driving a milk truck. He and my mom, there's not a lot of people who teach you how to be married. Marriage is hard, but we don't have schools to teach you how to do it. They just didn't make it.
  
  Us kids were always waiting for him to come home because he drove a milk truck, which had ice cream - it was a freezer truck. And he just didn't come home one day. He was gone to California with this lady that he had met. I was too young to understand exactly what was going on, but I remember all the pictures in my mind."
• Overstreet wrote this song with Allen Shamblin, whose co-writes include "I Can't Make You Love Me" for Bonnie Raitt and "The House That Built Me" by Miranda Lambert. When they started working on the song, it was based on Shamblin's story, but they ended up veering off and telling Overstreet's story.
• Overstreet's dad was still alive when he released this song on his Forever and Ever, Amen album. "Sometimes the truth is needed, but I felt bad when I put it out because my dad was still alive," he told Songfacts. "He goes, 'Well, I'm not proud of what I did.' I think it hurt him a little bit and I wished I hadn't have done it, but I felt like it was a song that needed to be heard."