Songfacts®:

• Many singers proclaim their love as being deeper than the ocean, but most of those songs were written by folks on the coast. In the American heartland, the nearest ocean can be thousands of miles away, so that metaphor doesn't hold. In this country love song, Randy Travis instead says his love is deeper than the holler, a Southern way of saying "hollow," meaning a valley, particularly the kind found in his home state of North Carolina.
• This song was written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, who like Travis, had come to Nashville. Overstreet is from Mississippi, Schlitz from North Carolina. They had previously written Travis' songs "On the Other Hand" and "Forever And Ever, Amen."
  
  Their model for "Deeper Than The Holler" was the Motown hit "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," but with different geography.
• Released as a single from Travis' third album, Old 8x10, "Deeper Than The Holler" gave him his eighth #1 Country hit. Travis was on an incredible run, but his success was hard-earned. He had been toiling for about a decade (using his real name, Randy Traywick) before landing a record deal and releasing his first album in 1986.
• The line, "From the back roads to the Broadway shows with a million miles between" was inserted by Don Schlitz as a nod to his wife, an actress and huge fan of Broadway musicals.