‘Forever Country’ Makes Fans Cry

The video opens with a somber Brad Paisley gazing out a window. The music starts. And he kicks off “Forever Country,” the new video celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Country Music Awards, which are coming up on Nov. 2.

What unfolds is a melding of three iconic country songs: John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” and Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

More than 30 artists are featured.

Somehow, the three create a fresh new single with a line for nearly every one of the 30 stars who participated.

The song is simply credited to “Artists of Then, Now & Forever,” but Billboard listed all the acts featured in the video:

Alabama, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Brooks & Dunn, Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Brett Eldredge, Vince Gill, Faith Hill, Alan Jackson, Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Martina McBride, Tim McGraw, Ronnie Milsap, Kacey Musgraves, Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Rascal Flatts, Reba, Darius Rucker, Blake Shelton, George Strait, Randy Travis, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, and Trisha Yearwood.

See if you can spot them all.

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The Country Music Association commissioned the video, which was produced by CMA Board member and award winner Shane McAnally and directed by Grammy Award-winning director Joseph Kahn.

“When the CMAs called me, they solicited my opinion about whether there were any country songs that I would like to do a video for, for the 50th anniversary,” McAnally told Billboard.

He thought about “trying to get the entire history of country music into one song.” What he pitched to the CMA board was the idea of a mashup, and he wasn’t sure it would work.

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“We definitely started with songs in mind that had the same tempo and same chord progressions,” said McAnally.

“Originally I wanted to incorporate [Glen Campbell’s] ‘Gentle On My Mind.’ [Kenny Rogers’] ‘The Gambler’ was another song we had in one of the original mashups. But everybody kept coming back to ‘I Will Always Love You,’ saying that was sort of the quintessential song. And I kept resisting, saying, ‘How in the world am I going to get that song to work with these other songs?'”

McAnally said most of the vocals were done as the stars came through Nashville over the last several months on tour stopovers. In the two days leading up the CMT Awards in June, nearly everyone was in town and was able to stop by the sound stage.

Virtually all the musicians who were asked to participate made it into the finished product — although a few artists either couldn’t do the vocal or couldn’t do the video, McAnally told Billboard.

Only one artist appears in the video but not on the music track — Randy Travis, who suffered a life-threatening stroke in 2013. “He gives that look,” said Kahn, “and even though he’s not singing, he’s connecting.”

As for putting the stars in a field, Kahn said, “I generally hate green-screen videos. I wanted it to feel stylized, but also organic, like they were actually there, so that was a big challenge.”

He added, “The amazing thing was that every artist showed up on time and then did their job and then left — which is unheard of in the music industry!”

“The 50th Annual CMA Awards” will be hosted by Paisley and Underwood and broadcast live from Nashville, Nov. 2 (8:00 p.m. ET) on ABC.