Blake Shelton was 14 when his older brother, Richie, was killed in a car crash in Oklahoma in November 1990. For two decades he carried it mostly in silence. The night he finally talked about it with Miranda Lambert, it took a rerun of his own life story on a tour bus television to get him started, and by the end of that night the two of them had the beginnings of “Over You.”
The brother across the hallway
Richie Shelton was born on July 6, 1966, ten years before Blake. He was their mother Dorothy’s son from her first marriage, and Dick Shelton took him on as his own when Richie was about a year old. Blake has said his brother never thought of Dick as anything other than his dad.
Growing up in Ada, Oklahoma, Blake idolized him. He told 60 Minutes in 2014 that Richie’s bedroom was right across the hall from his, and that the music coming out of it was Hank Williams Jr., Waylon Jennings, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger. Blake wanted to look like Richie, dress like him and listen to whatever he listened to.
On November 13, 1990, Richie was riding in a car driven by his girlfriend near Ada when it struck the back of a school bus. Richie, 24, was killed, and so was the woman’s 3-year-old son. Years later Blake told Cowboys & Indians what that day did to his world.
It was literally like the world went silent.
Not long after, his father gave him the advice Blake would repeat for the rest of his life. You will never get over this, Dick told him. You will just have to learn to get used to it.
A rerun on the bus
Shelton and Lambert were both touring hard when the moment came. Late one night on the bus, flipping through channels, they landed on Blake’s own episode of GAC’s Backstory, which happened to be re-airing. It was at the part where his father was talking about Richie’s crash, and Dick said it again on camera: you don’t ever get over something like that, you just get used to it.
They switched off the television and started talking. According to both of them, it was the first time Blake had really opened up to Miranda about his brother. She later recalled being struck that even inside a marriage, you can still discover something new about the person beside you.
Writing it down
Lambert asked whether he had ever written about it. He had not. She told him she would never try to write his story, because she had not lived it, but that an outside perspective might help him tell it. She also wondered aloud whether the idea was too invasive. It was not.
Blake started with a melody, and the two of them added words. Some of the lines came straight from his life. After Richie died, the family gave Blake his brother’s albums, and the teenager played them again and again just to feel that Richie was still around. That detail went into the song.
Both of them cried while they wrote. Lambert later put it simply.
That’s the only time I’ve ever gotten that emotional writing a song.
Lambert added that it had been the same for him. Years later she described it as two songwriters meeting that night, more than a husband and wife, and said she told him the song was his story, to be as open as he wanted.
Why Miranda sang it
The song was Blake’s, but he knew he could not carry it on the road. Recording it himself would have meant singing it onstage every night, and he did not believe he could do that. So Lambert put it on her 2011 album Four the Record. Blake later explained his reasoning plainly.
I didn’t want to re-live it every night.
Barely a week later
RCA Nashville sent “Over You” to country radio as a single on January 9, 2012. Dick Shelton had been in declining health for most of the previous year and had been hospitalized with pneumonia in December. On January 17, 2012, he died at St. Anthony Hospital in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with his family around him. Blake and Miranda both postponed concert dates to be home.
The man whose words had become the heart of the song did not live to see it climb the chart. It went on to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
The night in Nashville
On November 1, 2012, at Bridgestone Arena, “Over You” won Song of the Year at the CMA Awards, the category that honors songwriters. Blake did most of the talking. He told the audience he had lost his brother in a car wreck at 14, and that it was his dad who had told him he should write a song about Richie. Beside him, Miranda wept openly.
I just needed the right person to write this song with.
The same night Blake won Entertainer of the Year for the first time. Backstage he told reporters that the Song of the Year trophy would get its own shelf. In April 2013 the song also took Song of the Year and Single of the Year at the ACM Awards.
Still used to it
The marriage ended in 2015, but neither has disowned the song. In 2018 Blake said he was still not over losing Richie, only used to it, which is exactly what his father had told him. In January 2019 he sang “Over You” himself at the Grand Ole Opry House in a tribute to his late friend Troy Gentry. In 2021 Lambert said she was glad the song had helped his family heal.
When Blake received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in May 2023, he dedicated it to his brother, Richie.