“Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle

Steve Earle wrote and sang "Copperhead Road", the title track of his third studio album, and MCA made it the record's first single in 1988; Earle produced it with Tony Brown, and Joe Hardy recorded and mixed. It's an outlaw family saga told by John Lee Pettimore III of rural Johnson County, Tennessee. His grandfather worked a still up a holler along Copperhead Road and rarely came to town except for supplies, his father made weekly liquor runs to Knoxville in a retired cop car bought at a surplus sale, and family legend says a revenue man who went after John Sr. on that road never came back.

It reached number 10 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, Earle's best showing there, and in 2023 the Tennessee General Assembly made it the state's 11th official state song.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.