Where Is China Grove - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction — and sometimes it’s not. The latter was the case with the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove.” The group’s Tom Johnston built the tune out of a piano lick, and made up a story about a “wacky sheriff” in China Grove, Texas. Others who heard it, however, made up their own stories. Johnston set the record straight with Bart Herbison of Nashville Songwriters Association International.

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There are so many urban legends to how that song got written. But what’s the real story?

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It’s kind of an interesting story around that song, because it was written around a piano lick. The lyrics anyway, not the chords. The chords, I already had. I was pretty much a guy that would walk into the studio with a song but no words, except on a few occasions, and that was one of them. We went in and we cut the track, and when we brought (keyboardist) Billy Payne in from Little Feat — he played on a lot of our stuff — he played a lick (sings), and that just gave me this idea for this wacky sheriff that lived some place down in Texas, and the name of the town he was working in was China Grove.

Go back a few years, and we were touring in a Winnebago in 1972, driving down that road, and I must have seen a sign, because there is a road sign that says “China Grove.” I didn’t “see it” see it, but I kind of must have seen it. I think that’s where I must have gotten the title from, but I didn’t realize that until a cab driver in Houston told me that a few years later. There really is a China Grove. It’s basically a nonsensical set of lyrics about a sheriff down in that area, right outside of San Antonio. Actually, China Grove is a feed store. But there’s another one in North Carolina, supposedly.

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There’s a website called Songfacts (with) all of the urban legends about China Grove. One guy swears that your tour bus broke down in China Grove, and you spent the night there, the whole Doobie Brothers band, and that’s how the song got inspired.

(laughs) Maybe that happened too, and I didn’t know.