Blake Griffith Took Tom Douglas's Advice and Never Left Grand Cane
Blake Griffith has written songs recorded by Tim McGraw, Lainey Wilson, CJ Solar, Kylie Frey and Randall King, and Neon Union, signed a publishing deal with Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Jeffrey Steele, and built a writing partnership with Tom Douglas, the songwriter behind The House That Built Me. He has done all of it from the same dirt road in Grand Cane, Louisiana, where he has lived his entire life, a drive of about eight and a half hours from Nashville.
The advice that kept him there came from a songwriter whose family land bordered his own.
Raised on a Grand Cane Farm
Grand Cane sits about 30 miles south of Shreveport in DeSoto Parish, not far from I-49. Griffith's family raises beef cattle there, a cattleman's life he still lives today. Until he was eight years old, home was a 14 by 72 single wide trailer on the family farm. When a house came up for sale across the road from their property, his parents bought it, and the family has stayed on that land ever since.
Music pulled at him early. His father, a devoted classic rock fan, filled the house with Rod Stewart, the Faces, and the Rolling Stones, and Griffith remembers being drawn to the sound as a four and five year old. He picked up the guitar at 13 or 14, took lessons for a short stretch, and taught himself the rest. When he joined host Ronnie Calhoun on LCM Live last October, he laughed about why the lessons didn't last.
"I was 13 or 14 trying to learn scales and theory," he said. "And I'm like, I just want to play Sweet Home Alabama."
He grew up on Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin, and later Brad Paisley and Keith Urban, whose guitar-driven sound showed a teenage Griffith that country music had room for a rock player.
"I kind of hate to say it because I write country music, but I'm a rock guy," he said. "I love country, too. But I live the country lifestyle, so that's way easier to write than trying to write Metallica riffs."
The Neighbor Who Became a Mentor
The property bordering his parents' new home belonged to the grandparents of Tom Douglas, the Grammy-winning songwriter behind The House That Built Me and Little Rock. When Griffith was eight or nine, Douglas stopped by to introduce himself while visiting town, bringing along a CD with Little Rock, which had just been released. Griffith asked him to sign it.
"Tom has been a huge inspiration and sort of a north star for me in my songwriting career," he said. "I owe a ton to that guy."
Going All In
Griffith has been with his wife, Catie, a nurse, since he was 16 and she was 14. They married young, and today they are raising two boys, Hudson and Riser, who spend as much time outside and barefoot as they can.
"I've been with my wife longer than I've been without her," he said.
He played in a band in his early 20s and made occasional trips to Nashville for songwriting events, but he says he wasn't fully committed until his wife was pregnant with their first son. Hudson was born in September 2013, and Griffith, then 27, decided it was time.
"I wanted to know that I tried," he said. "That's when I was like, you know what? I'm going to give this all I got and see what happens."
In 2014 and 2015, he drove to Nashville for every songwriting seminar he could find, networking at each one. Through Jeffrey Steele's songwriting boot camp, he got to know Steele's daughter Casey at 3 Ring Circus Music, the publishing company Steele founded. The relationship grew naturally, and in 2018, Griffith signed a publishing deal there.
Along the way, several publishers offered Griffith a deal if he would sign on as an artist. He turned each of them down.
"I don't really consider myself an artist," he said. "I don't like being in the spotlight. But I love the creative process. It really took me a long time to find my lane. I stayed true to myself."
The Advice to Stay Home
Around 2016, Griffith and his wife sold their house on the farm to his sister and moved into a rental in town, preparing to relocate to Nashville. Nearly every publisher and songwriter he met told him he had to live there to be taken seriously. Then he had dinner with Douglas.
"He looked at me and he said, 'Blake, I know what I'm telling you is the opposite of what everybody else is saying, but I think the biggest mistake you could ever make would be to uproot your family and move to Nashville,'" Griffith remembered. "He was like, 'The thing that makes you you is where you're from.'"
After praying about it and talking it over with his wife, they stayed. Today his parents live a couple hundred yards from his house, with his sister and her family close by in the other direction.
"I couldn't live with myself if I took my kids away from that," he said.
He is quick to add that his path isn't the right one for everyone. For years he spent one week a month in Nashville, building relationships one trip at a time.
"If I was giving advice to someone else, you probably need to be there," he said. "But everybody's different and every situation is different. You know in your gut."
Between trips, life in Grand Cane keeps him busy beyond music. Along with the cattle and the machine shop, Griffith spent several years on the competition barbecue circuit as an award-winning pitmaster and still runs a barbecue catering business on the side.
"There's not many things in this world that I know how to do, but I do know how to cook barbecue," he said.
The Story Behind Hallelujahville
The title came from home. In 2009, Griffith's friends in the Shreveport rock band Tyler Read released an album called Hallelujahville, and Griffith joked to their drummer that it sounded like a country song.
Eight years later, on his way to a write with Douglas and songwriter Brett Taylor, he remembered it. The three spent about a year on the song, but when Douglas played them his first demo, nobody in the room was sold, Douglas included.
"I said, 'Tom, if you're at your house by yourself on the piano, how do you do it?'" Griffith recalled. "He started playing the signature riff, and the light started blinking, and we were like, that's it."
A week or so after the new demo, Douglas played a show at the Bluebird Cafe where Faith Hill joined him on stage, along with a member of Tim McGraw's team who helps find songs for him. After the show, Douglas asked if he could send them one more song.
Hallelujahville went on hold in January 2018, and McGraw released it in the summer of 2020 on his album Here on Earth.
Before the pandemic shut down touring, Griffith and his wife drove to Oklahoma to see McGraw perform. Backstage, he got to meet McGraw, and before playing Hallelujahville that night, McGraw called him out from the stage by name.
"You talk about on cloud nine," he said. "I never will forget that."
Part of what makes the song so meaningful to him is how much of it is his own life. He gave his wife a promise ring at 17, and he still works in a machine shop alongside his dad, details that found their way into the lyric.
"Every word in that song is true about me," he said. "I love songs that are real."
Songs that keep growing
"You think you're not doing anything, but you're really just planting seeds," he said. "Some are going to die and some are going to grow, hopefully."
In April 2018, years before her run of No. 1 hits, Baskin native Lainey Wilson released High on Somethin', written with Griffith and Robyn Collins, as an independent single.
Baton Rouge native CJ Solar, one of the friendships Griffith built during his monthly Nashville trips, released The Future's Neon in 2022 as the title track of his album. Solar told Everything Nash that he, Griffith, and New Orleans songwriter Jim McCormick wrote it over Zoom in 2020. The two teamed up again on Don't Hate Me For That, released in November 2024.
In 2025, two more of his songs found new life, both written about six years earlier. Fort Worth, written with Steele and Shane Minor, became a duet for Louisiana's own Kylie Frey and Texas artist Randall King on Frey's EP Half A Mind.
Clean Hands, recorded by Neon Union, started with a photo. Griffith sent Douglas and Taylor a picture of his hands, covered in grease from his dad's machine shop, with a caption that read, "Even clean hands get dirty around here." Douglas wrote back that they were writing that one. Neon Union later performed the song on the Grand Ole Opry.
Cowboy Time Machine, from Griffith's first write with Steele and Douglas together, came from a title Steele offered while pacing his studio, and Griffith loved it enough to release his own version.
"Ninety percent of my songs are about Grand Cane," he said. "That's where my heart is, and that's what I know."
That same sense of place came with him to Jena this year, when he joined fellow Louisiana songwriters at the LCM Writers Retreat. After first sitting down with him on LCM Live, our team was glad for the chance to spend a few days writing and hanging out with him, and he was every bit as kind and easygoing as everyone who knows him had told us.
Why Blake Griffith
Blake Griffith turned down the chance to be an artist, passed on the move nearly everyone told him he had to make, and kept writing about the farm, the machine shop, and the people of Grand Cane. Those songs reached Tim McGraw, the Grand Ole Opry, and stages across the country, all while he raised his boys a few hundred yards from his parents.
Asked what he hopes the future holds, he doesn't talk about cuts or charts.
"The feeling you get when you walk into a room with absolutely nothing and you pull something out of thin air and walk out," he said. "It's hard to explain, but it's addicting. I just want to keep doing it."
For Louisiana Country Music fans, that's why he's our Artist Spotlight this month. Every song he writes still starts on that same dirt road in Grand Cane.
How to Support Blake Griffith
Stream Hallelujahville by Tim McGraw, Fort Worth by Kylie Frey and Randall King, and Clean Hands by Neon Union
Listen to Blake's own recording of Cowboy Time Machine
Follow Blake on social media for new music and cuts, linked below
Revisit High on Somethin' by Lainey Wilson, The Future's Neon and Don't Hate Me For That by CJ Solar
Follow Blake Griffith
Watch Blake Griffith on LCM Live
October 7, 2025
Frequently Asked Questions About Blake Griffith
Where is Blake Griffith from?
Blake Griffith is from Grand Cane, Louisiana, about 30 miles south of Shreveport in DeSoto Parish. He has lived on his family's farm there his entire life.
Who wrote Hallelujahville?
Hallelujahville was written by Blake Griffith, Tom Douglas, and Brett Taylor. Tim McGraw released it in 2020 on his album Here on Earth.
What songs has Blake Griffith written?
Blake's cuts include Hallelujahville by Tim McGraw, High on Somethin' by Lainey Wilson, The Future's Neon and Don't Hate Me For That by CJ Solar, Fort Worth by Kylie Frey and Randall King, and Clean Hands by Neon Union. He also co-wrote Cowboy Time Machine with Jeffrey Steele and Tom Douglas.
Does Blake Griffith live in Nashville?
No. Blake chose to stay in Grand Cane after mentor Tom Douglas encouraged him not to move, and he has built his songwriting career with regular trips to Nashville.
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