Stephony Smith talked to Nashville's Tennessean newspaper about the strange inspiration behind the hit she co-wrote for Tim McGraw with Jeff Stevens and Stan Lynch.

I went to the kitchen to make breakfast, and I felt like something else was in the kitchen that day. I looked down and it was a big all-curled-up brown snake on the floor. I just gasped. I thought, 'What am I going to do?' Where I was standing in the kitchen, I didn't have a lot of choices. I had a broom in the closet but it had a rubber tip, and I thought, 'I can't do anything with that.' I had a huge stainless steel salad bowl, and I thought, 'I'll put that over it and figure it out after that.'

As soon as I moved, it (crawled in the space between the dishwasher and cabinets). I called Jeff Stevens and Stan Lynch, who I was writing with, and told them to get out here and help me figure out how to get this thing out from behind the dishwasher ... We couldn't find it. We go to the office and we're sitting there, and Jeff is real country, and he kinda started making fun of me for being a sissy about it. He said, 'Back when a hoe was a hoe, my mama woulda just chopped his head off.' And he kept right on talking. I was gasping, like, 'That's what we have to write today ... you know, back when a hoe was a hoe and a coke was a Coke.' They were like, 'Oh yeah, here we go.' It took the snake to get the song out.

Hear the song