Josh Turner Celebrates No.1 ‘Hometown Girl’ With Songwriters in Nashville

After a slow climb up the charts (48 weeks, to be exact), Josh Turner notched his fifth No.1 single with his hit “Hometown Girl.” The song came from a conversation between songwriters Marc Beeson and Daniel Tashian after Beeson shared that a past love had popped into his head.

“There was old crush of mine from high school that had just popped in my mind recently before we wrote it. She was just in the back of my mind and I didn’t really talk about it,” Beeson told Sounds Like Nashville and other media at a No.1 celebration for the track. “Daniel’s one of those guys who’s a really intuitive music guy. And I just walked in that day. It was just him and me. And he said, ‘Hey, man, what do you think of this?’ And he started playing this music. I was like, ‘God, that is so cool.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t know if this fits.’ I just threw something at him and he goes, ‘That’s great.’ He had a little phrasing thing and then the next thing you know…”

After a short time, the two had a song that would soon become Turner’s latest chart-topper and the lead single from his new album Deep South.

“‘Hometown Girl,’ when I first heard it… That melody, first of all, just stuck in my head. Before I even knew what the words were, I was humming that melody all the way home. And I’m thinking, ‘Man, this is a pretty good sign here,’” recalled Turner. “Then when I started digging in to the lyric, I loved what it said and I felt like it was something that my fan base could really connect with and relate to because I feel like a lot of the female fans here recently have complained about a lot of the songs objectifying them and this song was the exact opposite of that. It was edifying them, it was lifting them up, it was looking past just their outward appearance. It looked deeper than that. So that appealed to me.”

The track clearly appealed to fans and radio alike, as its ascent finally made it to the No.1 spot on the Mediabase Country Chart. To celebrate its relentless success, Turner, Beeson and Tashian joined together with members of the country music industry for a party at SOUTH, and relish in what had happened.

“This has been a cool process for me because I had no idea where this was gonna go. This record was a culmination of the old and the new and everything in between and, like I say, ‘Hometown Girl’ was a huge part of me trying to find a new way to make Josh Turner music. Like I say, I’ve been very pleased to see how the fans have enjoyed listening to this and that it wasn’t some experiment gone awry. I have to be content and satisfied with what we do in the studio in order for me to be able to sleep at night, whether it’s commercially successful or not,” concluded Turner.

The baritone singer hopes to continue his streak of hits with his new radio single, “All About You,” out now.