A dusty-road love letter to small-town days, where old trucks, old songs and old memories keep rolling right alongside the heart
There is a warm, sun-faded tenderness running through “Chevys and Fords” – the 2019 single that brings Billy Ray Cyrus together with younger songwriter Johnny McGuire. It’s the kind of song that doesn’t just talk about trucks; it talks about time—about Sundays and bar-nights, first kisses and last chances, about the way life in a small town seems to circle around the same gravel parking lots year after year.
Released as a digital single on July 19, 2019, “Chevys and Fords” arrived at a remarkable moment. Just months earlier, Cyrus had been swept back into the center of pop culture through the runaway success of “Old Town Road (Remix)” with Lil Nas X. Instead of chasing more genre-bending flash, his next move was almost stubbornly simple: a straight-ahead country song about the trucks he grew up around, cut with a younger artist who had written the tune from his own memories. The track was released through BBR Music Group / BMG on the Stoney Creek Records imprint, produced by Mickey Jack Cones and written by Johnny McGuire, Jordan Walker, Rodney Clawson and Ben Hayslip. Clocking in at just over 4 minutes and 25 seconds, it’s a mid-tempo country piece that moves with the familiar roll of a highway you’ve driven all your life.
On paper, the song’s chart story is modest. In official discographies, “Chevys and Fords” is listed as a non-album single with no peak on Billboard’s main country singles chart, despite receiving some playlist adds at country radio and appearing on industry airplay lists. Cyrus has even spoken, half-amused and half-wounded, about being told the song was “too country” for some stations—a strange twist for a man who once helped define the mainstream sound. Yet that lack of big-chart fireworks almost suits the track: it feels like a song meant not for quick radio rotation, but for people who know exactly what it’s singing about because they’ve lived it.
The story behind “Chevys and Fords” is as down-home as the song itself. Johnny McGuire, freshly out of the duo Walker McGuire, had written the song as his first solo single – a reflection on the kind of trucks that lined the streets and church lots of the world he knew. He met Billy Ray Cyrus on a TV taping in Los Angeles. When Noah Cyrus’s guitar broke, McGuire lent his own; Billy Ray thanked him and said the classic showbiz phrase: If I can ever do anything for you, just say the word. McGuire took him at face value, sent along “Chevys and Fords”, and within days Cyrus replied with a simple, generous answer: Let’s do it. Let’s get in the studio.
Musically, the track leans into a clean, contemporary country sound: steady drums, bright electric guitars, a groove with just enough swing to feel like a two-lane highway under your wheels. There is nothing experimental here; the production is clear, open, and built to hold two voices side by side. McGuire’s slightly grainy, youthful tone blends with the deeper, weathered drawl of Billy Ray Cyrus, and together they sound like two generations telling the same story from different ends of the timeline.
But it’s the meaning of “Chevys and Fords” that gives it such emotional weight for anyone who has lived with one foot always near a tailgate. Without needing to quote a single line, you can feel the world it describes: old pickups faded by sun and years, lined up outside church on Sunday mornings, finishing the week outside bars on Saturday nights. Trucks that have carried families, hauled hay, taken teenagers out under the stars to talk too late and drive home slow. The song isn’t really about brands; it’s about the lives those vehicles quietly witnessed.
For many listeners, especially those who grew up when the make of your truck said more about you than any social-media page ever could, “Chevys and Fords” opens a door to memory. You might find yourself thinking of a particular dashboard, a certain bench seat, the crack in the windshield that was never fixed, the radio that only got two stations but always seemed to find the right song at the right time. The track treats those images with affection, never mockery. It understands that, for a lot of people, those machines were the backdrop of first loves, hard talks with fathers or sons, long drives back from bad news or good luck.
There’s also a quiet poignancy in hearing Billy Ray Cyrus sing this in 2019. Here is a man in his late fifties, fresh off the most unlikely pop reinvention of his life, turning not toward neon beats but back toward Flatwoods, Kentucky, back toward the steel and dust that shaped him. Paired with Johnny McGuire, who was just beginning again after one chapter had closed, the song becomes a cross-generational handshake: an older artist saying “I remember,” and a younger one saying “This is still how it is where I’m from.”
For an older listener, the song’s comfort lies in that sense of continuity. The world may have changed—screens everywhere, roads busier, music scattered across endless platforms—but somewhere there are still rows of Chevys and Fords outside small churches and small bars, and young people are still sitting in them, dreaming of getting out or deciding to stay. The song doesn’t promise escape; it simply honors the beauty of those ordinary scenes, the way they quietly add up to a life.
In the end, “Chevys and Fords” is less a vehicle song than a memory song. It uses metal and chrome as a frame, but what it hangs inside that frame are faces, evenings, tail lights fading down a country road. It’s a reminder that the roads we once took for granted, and the trucks we once thought were just a way to get from here to there, were in fact carrying us through the most important chapters of our story. And sometimes, all it takes is a song like this—two voices, one shared past—to make those chapters feel near enough to touch again.