Laci Kaye Booth’s “George F****** Strait” is No F****** Good

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It sure is nice when young, up-and-coming artists acknowledge and pay tribute to the country music greats that came before them. Country is supposed to be the genre where the new doesn’t nudge out the old unceremoniously, but the music works like a continuum across generations, with each new artist and era paying tribute to the past one.

That is what native Texan Laci Kaye Booth attempts to do with her new song “George F****** Strait.” But similar to all the Bro-Country songs that name drop “Cash” and “Hank” yet take no the teachings or sonic inspirations from these titans, this song is more insult than tribute. And no, you don’t have to be a prude about the use of the F-word to come to this conclusion. But honestly, that doesn’t help matters either.

Booth said all the right things ahead of the song. “My very first concert was George Strait, the nosebleed seats at Houston Livestock show and rodeo. The majority of his music I’ve known by heart since I was a little girl. This song is about admiring and loving a cowboy as he ages, with the prime example being the King of Country music, the Troubadour himself.”

Well that’s all sweet and dandy. But when you listen to this song, it’s nothing like anything George Strait would ever touch. In fact, it’s the opposite of everything the career and catalog of “King” George stands for. Instead of being a traditional country song, it finds a bad marriage between modern Southern pop and this sort of country noir sound infecting Americana with the Stagecoach influence.


I don’t know. Maybe if you’re going to evoke the name of the great George Strait, you should actually try to make something he might nod in approval of. But something tells me tributing George Strait isn’t the point of this song at all.

It’s hard to tell what element of the song is the biggest cry for attention: the Strait name drop, or the F-bomb. And make no mistake about it, everyone’s eyes are wide open that the whole point of this song is to garner attention after she was dropped from her first label in 2022. This feels like a Hail Mary from Laci Kaye produced and co-written by Anderson East, but one that will get swatted down by a cornerback. Obviously, radio’s not going to play this, and George Strait fans aren’t going to get a kick out of it.

And yes, the F-word probably doesn’t belong in mainstream-facing country songs. That doesn’t mean it can’t be employed at all. But it has to be in the right time and place. While saying “George F****** Strait” is Laci Kaye Booth’s embrace of “Outlaw country” (ha!), Atwood Magazine proclaimed, “What I love about country singer Laci Kaye Booth is that she writes for women and girls.”

Is this really what you want your little girl listening to? This is one instance where the lack of support for women in mainstream country might actually work in our favor. But this song was likely to pass like a fart in the wind anyway. The idea behind the song actually isn’t bad—find a man that’s like a rock that you can rely on. But unfortunately, fluffy pop production and F-bombs aren’t reliable or appropriate when it comes to country served Strait.

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