After 17 years, the Zac Brown Band’s patriotic “Chicken Fried” returned to the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time since 2009.
It’s holding the No. 32 spot, and Billboard pointed to Fourth of July celebrations and the band’s performance at the FIFA World Cup halftime show during the semifinal between France and Spain at AT&T Stadium in Dallas for its resurgence.
Other patriotic hits saw a boost in popularity over the last few weeks. Classics like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” join “Chicken Fired.”
Hits from Miley Cyrus, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Kenny Chesney also bumped up on the chart.
Zac Brown and longtime collaborator Wyatt Durrette penned “Fried Chicken,” and the Zac Brown Band first recorded it in 2003. It appeared on their 2005 album Home Grown, but according to Parade, the song’s journey to success was not “straightforward.”
“Country group The Lost Trailers recorded the song in 2006 after receiving Brown’s permission to include it on an album,” the outlet reported. “However, Brown did not want the track released as a radio single.”
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The Zac Brown Band rerecorded the song in 2008 under producer Keith Stegall for The Foundation, their major-label debut album.
Later that year, “Fried Chicken” became the band’s first charting single and hit the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s country chart.
According to Whiskey Riff, it scored a “9x platinum certification from the RIAA, 859 million streams on Spotify alone and nomination for Single and Song of the Year at the 43rd CMA Award.” It was also the first debut single to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart since Heartland’s 2006 “I Loved Her First.”
Brown revealed that it took years to write the smash hit.
“It was a process. The guy that I was writing with, he had had the chorus of that,” he told podcaster Zach Sang of Durrette. “It was written on a napkin behind the bar, and I loved that. So when we kind of had an idea of what the chorus was, we made a list of all the things that we love about being in America and being free. Then we pulled from that list all of the things in the verses.”
“For the first two years, we had a whole another verse that was kind of a funny verse, but I knew it wasn’t the right one,” Brown explained. “I knew we could beat that one. Then the patriotic verse came to me, and that’s when [there was a chance] to give props to all the people that have sacrificed so that we can be free here living our American dream. So that we can be free here to play music and create and grind and do the things that we do.”
@zachsangshow You know I like my chicken fried @Zac Brown Band @Zac Brown #zacbrownband #lyrics #songwriter #zachsangshow #fyp
The Fourth of July might be over, but “Chicken Fried” is holding strong as one of this summer’s top patriotic anthems.
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