Several people have asked me, “Why Stick Out Your Tongue? What does it mean?” Even my wife has asked me where it came from. I think the assumption is that it has naughty implications. I’m sure you can make anything suggestive, but it was never intended that way. The origins of using this phrase in a song and the inspiration for the song itself are not complicated.
In September of 2012, I wrote the song 4-H Chicken Shack. in recognition of the 50th anniversary of this important fixture of the West Tennessee State Fair. I released the song in 2013 along with a music video that featured my family home movies of me as a child at another fair. In 2015, I released a second video featuring photos of the actual 4-H Chicken Shack and the people that worked there. In September 2017, the company I work for decided to do our company picnic at the West Tennessee State Fair. I decided this would be a good opportunity to create a video for the song at the site of the inspiration for the song.
The real story of Stick Out Your Tongue starts with the making of this video in 2017. While getting footage to go along with the action described in that song, I also got a clips with some of the people that I work with. My wife shot some video with me standing next to a lady named Glenn Napper. You can see this at the beginning of the 4-H Chicken Shack video below:
I was looking for something for us to do instead of just standing next to each other. I just told her to “Stick Out Your Tongue”. She did and I did too. An idea was born. I would ask my friends to stick out their tongues as I went around the fair. I didn’t get any more videos of anyone doing this the rest of that day, but I took the idea with me.
Sometime in 2018, I purchased a new electric guitar. I had been playing around with some funk chord progressions on one of my acoustic guitars and the new electric guitar inspired me to play around with these more. I decided that I needed to put together something that was primarily instrumental but with a phrase shouted out by a crowd of people. Stick Out Your Tongue would be that phrase. Musically, the inspirations for this song are Average White Band’s Pick Up The Pieces and the Bar-Kay’s Soul Finger.
It would be 2019 before I started recording this song. The music tracks were recorded in the late summer of 2019, about the time my wife and I decided to move to a new house. Although I kept my recording equipment out during our transition to the new house, I never felt comfortable enough to record the voices until we were established in our new house. It would be winter of 2020 before these voices were recorded and the project was put together.