Carrie Underwood grew up a long way from the bright lights. Home was Checotah, Oklahoma, a small town of about 3,350 people. She was the youngest of three girls.
Her mom, Carole, is a retired teacher. Her dad, Steve, worked at a paper mill.
When Carrie became one of the biggest stars in country music, her parents didn’t change much at all. They stayed in the same modest house where she was raised. She wanted to buy them a new one, and they wouldn’t let her.
“My parents are really great people who want nothing to do with any of this,” Carrie told Marie Claire in 2013.
That’s a lot of folks’ parents, isn’t it? Proud as can be, but happiest at home.
And the Underwoods weren’t big on showing their feelings out loud. “We were never a huggy family,” Carrie said.
Small towns shaped her, and she has a song about that, too. Here’s Carrie on her own channel talking about “Thank God For Hometowns,” so you can hear how she feels about the kind of place she came from.
Carrie talking about her song “Thank God For Hometowns”
Steve Underwood is a man of few words. But his daughter has found plenty of words for him.
On her 2012 album “Blown Away,” there’s one song Carrie says is about her dad. It’s called “The Girl You Think I Am.”
She told People it’s “the one song on the album most likely to make me cry when I think about it or when I hear it.”
Carrie said people close to her family would spot him in it right away. “Anybody that knows my family will probably be able to very much pick out the lines that are about my dad.”
So what is it about Steve that gets her every time?
“When I think about my dad I know that he thinks I am so much better than I am for real,” she said.
Then she listed what he sees when he looks at her. “He thinks I’m brave. He thinks I’m beautiful. He thinks I can do anything. He thinks I’m fearless.”
For a quiet dad from a quiet house, that’s a whole lot of love. Carrie put it this way: “I would love to be the girl that he thinks I am because he holds me up so high and thinks I can do no wrong.”
And she added, “he is my biggest fan.”
Plenty of us grew up with a dad like that. He didn’t say much at the supper table, but you always knew he was in your corner.
This is the song itself, so you can listen for the lines Carrie says are about her dad.
Carrie Underwood’s song about her dad
Carrie’s parents never asked to be part of the fame. They’ve stayed happily out of it.
But every time this song plays, a quiet paper-mill man from Oklahoma gets a little piece of the spotlight anyway. If your own dad was the strong, silent type, you might want a tissue handy for this one.