Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw and Tracy Lawrence were once a power trio, but it wasn't in a recording studio or on a stadium's stage. Instead, the future Nashville legends filled unlikely roles in a mutual friend's wedding party.
"You know, when I first moved to town, oddly enough, there was a girl named Tammy Rose who sort of took new artists under their wing when they first moved to town and Garth Brooks was a friend of hers," McGraw told Keith Urban on Beyond The Influence Radio on Apple Music Country (as quoted by Pop Culture). "I was a friend of hers. Tracy Lawrence was a friend of hers. And so when she got married, she asked Garth, me and Tracy Lawrence to be her bridesmaids."
Brooks confirmed an earlier telling of this bridesmaids story by McGraw to country radio personality Lon Helton.
"I need to correct him," Brooks said in 2017. "I was the Maid of Honor, thank you so very much. We were sitting there during the wedding saying, 'why didn't we have a bachelorette party?' That's what we should have done. Those guys were great. Tim and Tracy were great friends. That was a fun day."
McGraw hadn't been in Tennessee for long, so he was in awe of Lawrence and Brooks' stature within country music.
"Tracy and I had been friends for a while and he had his success, but Garth was there and I'm sort of in awe of Garth being there," McGraw adds.
Rose's big day became McGraw's first chance to thank the "Friends in Low Places" singer for changing the business.
"You know, I just want to thank you Garth, because you knocked the door down for all the things that I wanted to do as a country singer," McGraw said. "I wanted to come to town and record songs that had a broader melody or broader appeal and I wanted to do shows that were like the rock shows that I saw growing up. That's the kind of thing that I wanted to do."
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Of course, Brooks offered an uplifting response.
"He goes, 'Look, we all moved to town for that reason. I just got here first,'" McGraw told Urban. "And I thought that that was really sweet of him to say that, but really, really perceptive of him to say that too, as well, because we were all thinking those sorts of things. We all grew up in that environment. Seeing, watching, hearing all these different influences and wanting to include them in the genre of music that we chose to make."
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