Songfacts®:

• This Jaren Johnston, Rodney Clawson and Lee Thomas Miller penned humorous romp features a playful vocal from McGraw. "It's fun, but when you listen to it, it's a very complicated sounding record, very intricate, a jazzy sort of record," he told Billboard magazine.
• This tribute to American women born where the weather's hot was released as the fourth single from Two Lanes of Freedom. McGraw said choosing the new single was easy. "At the beginning of the tour, we threw a lot of new songs into the set list, and that's always a risky thing when an album is so brand new," he stated. "It didn't take a whole weekend out there before the girls were shouting at us to play 'Southern Girl.' The song has a really cool groove to it that just gets everyone moving and sets the right tone for a perfect summer night."
• The song's music video offers up a taste of McGraw in concert, sewn together with footage from the singer's tour and his fans. McGraw said regarding the visual: "When we started talking about a video concept for "Southern Girl," I knew that this song belonged to the fans who have been out at our live shows all summer. We brought cameras out on the road and turned them around on the crowd, and they really helped us capture the fun summer groove of this song."
• Former American Bang vocalist and guitarist Jaren Johnston penned the song with Rodney Clawson and Lee Thomas Miller. He recalled to Roughstock: "We wrote it over at Big Loud Shirt. We were there an hour an a half, maybe two hours. It was the first time I'd ever met Lee, but me and Rodney have written quite a few together. It came out real easy."
  
  "We didn't even have that little Auto-Tune thing on the end of the chorus that day," Johnston added. "When I got home, I was listening to the demo, and it just wasn't hitting me. I felt like it was missing something. So I went back in and put that 'southern girl, rock my world...' that kind of thing on it. Supposedly, that is why they ended up cutting it. Tim had heard the song, and he loved the song and loved that part, except for the lyric. It was originally something like daisy dukes or something like that. So I looked at what color eyes Faith Hill has, and she has hazel eyes, so I said hazel eyes and golden curls [laughs]. So it worked out!"