Country music and football have long overlapped. Take Hank Williams Jr.’s rollicking “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night” (1989) for ABC and the NFL, an adaptation of his 1984 Top Ten single, “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight.” “Our Special Forces are in full flight,” he sings. “We’re coming by air and on the ground / Monday night football’s takin’ over the town.” Or turn up Brad Paisley’s blue-collar work anthem, “Country Nation” (2015), in which he namechecks two SEC schools:
We work in the factories and the fields
assembly lines, the coal mines and the steel mills . . .
We’re Mountaineers, Volunteers,
We’re the Tide that rolls, we’re Seminoles . . .
But as a Bama Fan in Vols country—and I mean country, as I live in Nashville—my interest was piqued when I began to hear a growing number of country songs featuring SEC schools. For instance, Ray Fulcher’s “Love You Son, Go Dawgs” (2020) mixes familial love and team spirit, and Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Big Orange T” (2022) nods to the unity of Tennessee fandom. Then, within the span of two years, several Romeo and Juliet–style tales about lovers from rival teams were released: Conner Smith’s “I Hate Alabama” (2021) and its follow-up, “Orange and White” (2022); Megan Moroney’s “Tennessee Orange” (2022); and Morgan Wallen’s “Tennessee Fan” (2023). These songs don’t just reference football—they’re SEC soap operas set against collegiate backdrops. “In the stands in Tuscaloosa / Might’ve lost by 22,” Conner Smith sings, “But I hate Alabama / ‘Cause that’s where I lost you.”
Even after factoring in that I’m much older than the college-age demographic that these songs center, the sheer drama and self-conscious gravitas they express had me rolling my eyes—but not looking away. I had to know more about the melding of fandoms and the identities and commercialism that drive these now-global phenomena.