Randy Travis’ “I Told You So” becomes a triple-threat

By R. Keith Rugg, 5-26-09

I don’t watch music videos, I don’t own an iPod, and I don’t watch the country music awards shows.  I blog about the music that I hear on the radio, the tracks that are on the artists’ albums, and every once in a while I get to take in a concert performance or interview a musician.  So you-all might already know all about the subject of this posting, but the rejuvenation of Randy Travis’ “I Told You So” piqued my interest enough to get me to do a little bit of digging on it.

What got me to perk my ears up was that I heard a particularly nicely-done cover of Travis’ “I Told You So” a couple of different times on the radio before I finally caught the deejay saying it was by Carrie Underwood.  And then I started hearing Randy singing it a few times.  And then I heard a version with both of them performing it as a duet.  Now, I switch the radio station around a lot when I’m driving, so for a while, I wasn’t quite sure if I was just catching different sections of the same performance- you know, one time just hearing the bit with Randy singing, another time just hearing the Underwood section- but I finally figured out that it actually was three different versions of the song.  And I thought, what a great idea, to put it out the original male version, a cover version with a female voice, and to tie the two together with a duet version.

The back story in a nutshell (if you’re like me and don’t keep your tube tuned into the country music news) is that Carrie Underwood wanted to record a cover song for her 2007 album Carnival Ride, and happened upon one of her favorites, Travis’ “I Told You So,” on her iPod.  While she was performing it at the Grand Ole Opry in March of 2008, she was approached onstage by Travis and invited to join the venerable country music institution.  Then in January of 2009, or so the story goes, a country deejay in Cincinnati cut and pasted the Travis version and the Underwood version together into a bootleg duet, which spread throughout the country in a way possible only in the age of digital sharing and electronic social networking.  In mid-March of this year, Travis and Underwood performed it as a duet on “American Idol,” and an official single of the duet was released for airplay.  At just about the same time, a Randy Travis greatest hits album was released; “I Told You So: The Ultimate Hits of Randy Travis.”

So, as I mentioned before, what a great idea, and a great way to bring attention to all three versions of the song.  The question is, whose idea was it?  Did this all come about because of an outlaw mix of the cover and the original?  Like the Cincinnati deejay is quoted as saying about the duet performance and single, “C’mon, they wouldn’t have done this because of some little station in Cincinnati doing a version.”

Given that the new Travis album is also tied into the whole “I Told You So” buzz, I’m figuring that it’s all falling together pretty much like some recording industry marketing guru planned.  But still, what a cool idea to think that the whole duet thing might have been driven by the idea of the disc jockey in Ohio.  If so, both Underwood and Travis owe a tip of the hat to that deejay, ‘cause it really WAS a good idea, and country music is the richer not only for the Carrie Underwood cover of the song, but also for the duet version of “I Told You So.”