Eric Church shared the story behind a ballad he performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Sunday nigh (September 21).

The award-winning country star delivered a powerful performance — backed by a choir — of “Johnny,” which he wrote with songwriters Luke Laird and Brett Warren. It’s one of eight tracks that appears on Church’s latest studio album that arrived earlier this year, Evangeline vs. The Machine. Church initially intended to perform a different song on the late night talk show, but pivoted at the last minute. Host Jimmy Fallon said “there was not a dry eye in the house” during rehearsal. Church explained on the show that he wrote “Johnny” after the Covenant School tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee. Church and others in the country music community mourned for those lost in March 2023.

“The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, we had a school shooting in Nashville, at the Covenant School. And dropping my — I have two boys, 13 and 10, and the day after that school shooting, dropping them off at school was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Church explained to Fallon. “And I watched them walk in. And you feel, you feel helpless. I’ve never — I’m 48 years old. I’ve never felt anything like that, and I didn’t know what to do. So, as they walk in the school, I just pulled in the parking lot because I felt like I needed to be there. And as I’m sitting there, the interesting thing to me was I was lost in my own world. But I happened to look to my right and look to my left, and there were other parents sitting there, and we were lined up, as, you know, the wolves guarding the sheep.

“And in the background…it didn’t register at the time, but Charlie Daniels’ ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’ was on the radio. And there’s that line, you know, ‘Johnny, rosin up your bow, play your fiddle hard. ‘Cause hell broke loose in Georgia, and the devil deals the cards. and if you win, you get this shiny fiddle made of gold. if you lose, the devil gets your soul.’ and I remember thinking, ‘the devil is not in Georgia. He’s here.’ and I went home and I wrote ‘Johnny.’ And I twas about the guy that we need Johnny to come back and send the devil where he needs to be.”

“Johnny” was described in a press release earlier this year as “a soul-stirring reinterpretation inspired by ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ and the Covenant School tragedy.” Church said when he previewed the song at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville that his sons attend school “about a mile” from the Covenant School, and “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life — parent or otherwise — is dropping them off at that school the day after the shooting and watching them walk inside. I sat in the parking lot for a long time, and as fate would have it, as I was pulling out, Charlie Daniels was playing, ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia.’ I remember thinking, man, we could use Johnny right now, because the Devil’s not in Georgia, he’s everywhere. I went home and wrote ‘Johnny’.”

Watch Church’s conversation with Fallon here (which also includes a story about Taylor Swift as a teen, how Church stepped in to help his home state of North Carolina after Hurricane Helene last year, his live shows and more), and watch the performance below.

Anne Hudson