I’m known for my deep research. If someone is going to take weeks and months to write, record and release a song, it’s the least I can do. I also try to find a connection with the artist somehow. In the case of Paige King Johnson, or PKJ as I am tempted to call her, she connected with me in the very first sentence.
In a quiet North Carolina town 22 miles south of Raleigh, as a young 9-year-old girl, Paige King Johnson spent her days imitating the styles of Loretta, Patsy, Waylon, and Merle.
As every 9-year-old growing up in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire knows, their hometown is twinned with Raleigh, North Carolina. What we also knew, even without knowing it, was the music of Waylon Jennings. The Dukes of Hazzard was right up our street. I knew I was going to love Cowboys Ride Away.
Having moved to Nashville at only seventeen, it is clear that Paige’s talent began to emerge very early on. She had already been singing at least eight years at that point, or half her life. This deep experience of music but also life more generally shows in her lyrics and voice.
Drunks get lost in the bottle
Saints lean on their faith
The lost just keep on hoping
Tomorrow’s a better day
Everybody’s got their own way
Of pushing through the pain
Preachers hit their knees
And cowboys ride away
Paige grew up on a farm so she knows all about farm life, admitting that she was even driving farm vehicles as a young teenager. She brings this real-life experience and combines it with a love of Westerns in this catchy, hooky tune.
As she explains, “I grew up as a cowgirl back in North Carolina, riding horses, showing lambs, and just being a farm kid. That meant I also grew up watching all the best Western movies where the cowboy always rode away in the end. Pete (Sallis) brought this title into a write one day, and I immediately started envisioning all those old Westerns again. And before we knew it, we had finished this whole song!”
The last line of the verse “Just gotta ride fast enough to try and outrun the hurt“ strongly reminded me of the The Fall Guy theme tune, a cowboy song by Lee Majors, one of my favourite TV themes of all time.
Cowboys and cowgirls are so symbolic of American rural life and country music, and so different from anything seen on an English farm, that we cannot fail to be entranced by the image.
On our tiny little farms, quite often hilly and suitable only for sheep, a couple of sheepdogs and a whistle is enough to keep the herd in line. We cannot conceive of an enormous ranch that needs cowboys on horses to do the same job. So we end up loving America and the south more deeply because it is so exotic, so different from what we know in our own lives.
I do love this new song, but you might also take a little time to familiarise yourself with Paige’s previous releases. I’ve linked to the video for Water Down The Whiskey below.
Paige King Johnson is a Belmont-trained songwriter with a home base in Nashville and North Carolina. She has opened for Kane Brown, Oliver Anthony, Randy Houser, Joe Nichols, Gabby Barrett, Clint Black, Diamond Rio, Scotty McCreery, Kylie Morgan, Lonestar, and Neal McCoy. She is just now fresh off an Opry debut with Pam Tillis, seven Carolina Country Music Awards deep, charted on MusicRow, premiered videos on CMT and Heartland, serves as the official Got To Be NC musical ambassador, and contributes regularly to WRAL television with stories that spotlight music and culture in her home state. In short, Paige is multi-talented. You can follow her on Instagram, TikTok and read more on her own website.
