In the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music, Harvey says the tune is really about his mother, a heavy drinker who died in an apparent suicide by crashing into a tree when the songwriter was a teen (sometime between 1958-1959). Harvey had just returned from a TV gig with his band; he had asked his mother not to go, worried she would embarrass him by drinking too much and making a spectacle. The guilt over his mother's death stuck with him for years. A decade later, he was hanging out at Larry Collins' house with a group of country musicians. Everyone fell asleep except for Harvey, who stayed up strumming his guitar. That's when he saw his mother.

"I looked up and I felt as if my mother was in the room. I saw her very clearly. She was in a rocking chair and she was laughing," he recalled. "My mother had come from the Mississippi Delta and she always lived her life as if she had a suitcase in her hand but nowhere to put it down. She was a hairdresser in Brownsville. She was very free-spirited, and folks in a small town don't always understand people like that. She never really grew up."