Before Blake Shelton was a superstar, before The Voice and a long run of No. 1 hits, he was a young songwriter with one name at the top of his list of heroes: Earl Thomas Conley. So when the chance came to sit down and write a song at Earl’s house, Blake did what plenty of nervous people would do. He got up extra early. Then he drank coffee. A lot of it.
He told Country Weekly in 2002 that he must have gone through two pots that morning, just to make sure he would be awake and sharp. It did not quite work out the way he planned.
The Moment It Finally Hit Him
Blake told the full story in 2019, at the memorial for Earl at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. All that coffee caught up with him the minute he walked in. The very first thing he asked his hero was whether there was a restroom close by.
He went in, shut the door, and turned around. That was when it landed on him, in the least glamorous place possible. He was not in some Music Row writing room. He was standing inside Earl Thomas Conley’s home. And all he could think, by his own admission, was that his hero had sat on that very toilet.
The theater full of country stars, family and friends burst out laughing. Blake had told the same story to Country Weekly back in 2002. Seventeen years apart, it was clearly the detail he never forgot.
How a Fan Got Into That House
The introduction came from Mike Pyle, a songwriter and Blake’s good friend, who played in Earl’s band. Pyle had already brought Blake around when he was about 19 or 20, inviting him to a rehearsal room where Earl and the band were getting ready for a tour.
Blake was already a devoted fan. He later said he would practice Earl’s songs in his Nashville apartment, believing that if he could sing like Earl, he could make it as a singer. That day in the rehearsal room, he couldn’t stop watching how Earl took huge breaths before his big choruses. To a young singer, it looked like the secret behind that powerful voice.
A Shy Legend Who Only Wanted to Work
Once the three of them sat down to write, Blake faced a different problem. He could hardly get past the fact that he was in a room with the man he called his favorite singer of all time, in any genre.
“I couldn’t get over how normal he was.” – Blake Shelton
Earl, by many accounts, was a deeply shy man. Blake said Earl did not want to hear the praise. He seemed a little embarrassed by it. He just wanted to move past all that and get to work on the song.
That song was “All Over Me.” The three men wrote it at Earl’s house in 1999. It was released in October 2001 as the second single from Blake’s debut album, following “Austin,” and it climbed to No. 18 on Billboard’s country chart in 2002. That same year, Blake told Country Weekly that co-writing it with Earl was the highlight of his career.
The Hero Became a Friend
The fan and the legend stayed close for the rest of Earl’s life. When Earl Thomas Conley died on April 10, 2019, at 77, it was Blake who broke the news, calling Earl his all-time favorite singer, his hero and his friend.
Earl had not wanted a funeral, so the memorial that September was the closest anyone got. Blake chose to sing “What I’d Say,” his favorite country song of all time. And he said something that summed up the whole relationship. Over the years, he believed, Earl had come to accept that Blake truly worshipped him. Blake added that he remembered every moment the two of them ever shared.
Do you have a favorite Earl Thomas Conley song that stayed with you the way his music stayed with Blake?