Chris Stapleton is so good… even some of the biggest names in country music don’t want to touch a song that he’s sung before.
It took a while for Stapleton and his iconic beard to break through in the country music industry, but once he did, he was almost immediately one of the brightest stars of the genre. For the longest time, he was just a songwriter, and in the days before he became known as a country star, Stapleton was helping other stars of the genre put together projects.
Darius Rucker told a story on Absolute Radio Country that explained how intimidating it was to work with Chris Stapleton prior to him hitting it big… only because when his was the voice on the demo, it was hard to imagine doing something better:
“Now I want to talk about an iconic country artist who worked with me on my album ‘Charleston, South Carolina 1966.’ Chris Stapleton. I’ve written a few times with Chris, and he is an amazing songwriter and an amazing singer.
We wrote this song and we were about to record the record and my producer says, ‘What do you think about this song?’ And I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I feel it.’ So we record every day, and every day, my producer asks me about this song. He says, ‘Why don’t you want to cut this song?’
It’s the last day (when he asks this). I was like, ‘Man, have you heard the demo?’ Chris had sung the demo and it was so great, I didn’t want to sing it, because he had done it so well.”
Rucker pushed off recording the song until basically the last second. In the end, his producer was right in pushing for it, despite Darius not wanting to take a stab at it because, in his mind, Stapleton had already perfected it.
The frontman of Hootie & The Blowfish was eventually convinced to cut it, and now he’s glad that he did:
“My producer was like, ‘We’ll change the key, cut it, and if you don’t like it, we won’t put it on the record.’ And of course, it was the first single on the record, and one of my fastest moving songs to number one. (It was) ‘Come Back Song.'”
Yeah, just a little track called “Come Back Song.” No big deal. It just rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard US Hot Country Charts and went platinum.
It’s honestly hilarious to imagine the conundrum that Darius Rucker found himself in. Here he was, a fan of the song, yet he was scared to record it himself because a future country music superstar had technically sang it first. At the end of the day, it all worked out, and Chris Stapleton said that writing “Come Back Song” helped him live rather comfortably from that point on:
“I’ve been fortunate enough to write a few hits for some people… it’s allowed me to make a living doing what I did a long time for free, but this is the song that I wrote with, and for, Darius Rucker.”
Here’s his version in case you wanted to check it out:
“Come Back Song” by Chris Stapleton
And then obviously the version that Rucker cut that quickly became one of his most popular tracks:
“Come Back Song” by Darius Rucker
Yeah… I can see why Darius Rucker was reluctant to cut it.
This whole story reminds me of a little piece of writing I put together called “Songs That Would Sound Better If Chris Stapleton Sang Them.” Spoiler alert… there are a whole lot of songs.
