Jamey Johnson doesn’t rush a story. On a recent episode of The Justin “Danger” Nunley Podcast, with his wife sitting beside him on the couch, the Alabama singer went back to the song that made his name. He also cleared up one line he says a lot of listeners misunderstand. Whiskey Riff reported the conversation on Nov 4.
If you need a refresher, “In Color” came out in 2008 on his album “That Lonesome Song.” In it, an old man flips through black-and-white photos with his grandson and explains what those years really looked like, from the Great Depression to World War II. It climbed to No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. In 2009 it was named Song of the Year at both the ACM Awards and the CMA Awards.
With the 60th CMA Awards coming up on Nov 18, it’s a good time to look back at it. Veterans Day is next week too. Jamey was born in Enterprise, Alabama. He spent eight years in the Marine Corps Reserve before Nashville. He also co-wrote George Strait’s No. 1 “Give It Away,” and he has been a Grand Ole Opry member since May 2022.
Jamey sings “In Color” at the 2009 ACM Awards
This performance from the Academy of Country Music’s own channel shows him singing it the year it took home Song of the Year.
The song started with three songwriters swapping family memories. “We were talking about our own grandfathers. Lee Thomas Miller, James Otto and I,” Jamey said on the podcast.
Miller told the same story to American Songwriter back in 2017. He said “we spent a long time talking about our grandfathers, who were in WWII.”
From there, the idea came fast. “You know, the premise of the song is sitting there looking through an old photo album,” Jamey explained. The oldest pictures in their families were all black and white, and then color slowly crept in over the years. “You could watch the technology of photography change from decade to decade.”
Nobody threw a party when they finished. “We just wrote a song,” he said. “I think all three of us, when we got done, we knew we had written a good song.” But he added that none of them thought they had just written the greatest song of their careers.
So which line do people get wrong? It’s in the third verse, and it came straight out of Jamey’s own family. “The whole third verse of that song came from this picture that I have of my grandparents on their wedding day,” he said.
In that old photo, his grandfather, his pawpaw, looks as serious as a man can look. “He is not grinning at all. He’s all business,” Jamey said. His grandmother, his meemaw, is a different story. “She’s got a sweet smile on her face.”
That picture is the key to one line in the verse. Most listeners figure the old man in the song is describing himself on his wedding day. According to Jamey, he’s describing his bride. “In the line, you think he’s talking about himself,” he said. “It’s her.”
He also said you’d have to understand his pawpaw’s sense of humor to really get it. Then he summed up how a song like this gets made. “It’s little things like that.”
Jamey tells the story behind “In Color” on the Nunley podcast
This is the full conversation from the podcast’s official channel, with his wife right there next to him. The “In Color” part starts at about 8:41, the spot Whiskey Riff picked for its story.
Once you know about that wedding picture, the third verse sounds a little different. The old man in the song is still looking at the girl he married, and he’s still proud of that smile.