Placing third on Nashville Star in 2003, Miranda Lambert vowed to make a name for herself in country music. Last month, the nine-time Female Vocalist of the Year celebrated 20 years in the industry with a scorching Ella Langley duet at the 60th annual ACM Awards. On this day in 2010, Lambert, now 41, topped the country music charts with her haunting ballad “The House That Built Me.”
The Story Behind “The House That Built Me”
“The House That Built Me” is the third single from Miranda Lambert’s third studio album, 2009’s “Revolution.” Writer Allen Shamblin based the lyrics on his own experiences returning to his childhood home in Huffman, Texas, each year.
It took Shamblin and co-writer Tom Douglas seven years to perfect the song. “We wrote it, demoed it, turned it in and got absolutely no response,” Douglas told The Tennessean in 2014. “We were so convinced we had a classic, we’d get together for years and think, “What is wrong with it? Why isn’t it resonating?”
Eventually, they figured it out: The song simply had too much story.
“We took out a lot of information and kind of drilled it down to the essence,” Douglas said. “As soon as we demoed that, we turned it in, and it was a palpable reaction.”
Did Blake Shelton Really Gift This Song to Miranda Lambert?
Originally envisioning it “as a guy’s song,” producer Scott Hendricks sent the demo to Blake Shelton. But the second Miranda Lambert, Shelton’s then-wife, heard the song, they both knew it belonged to her. In fact, her parents, Rick and Bev Lambert, were shocked to find out she hadn’t written the track that so closely reflected her childhood.
“I mean, I just started bawling from the second I heard it,” the three-time Grammy Award winner told Today in 2010. “He was like, ‘If you have a reaction to this song like that, then you need to cut it.’”
After Lambert did just that, “The House That Built Me” became the fastest-rising single of her career, reaching the Top 20 in its eighth week. When the song eventually reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart—her first—it held steady there for four weeks.
“The House That Built Me” snagged CMA Awards for Song of the Year and Music Video of the Year, along with a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. It also swept the ACM Awards, winning Song, Single, and Video of the Year.
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