Hillbilly Bone (song)  "Hillbilly Bone" is a song written by Luke Laird and Craig Wiseman and recorded by American country music artist Blake Shelton for his extended play "Hillbilly Bone". The song features guest vocals from Trace Adkins, and its chart run overlapped with his singles "All I Ask For Anymore" and "Ala-Freakin-Bama." The song won the 2010 Academy of Country Music award for "Vocal Event of the Year," giving Shelton his first Academy of Country Music award. Adkins included the song on the deluxe edition of his album, "Cowboy's Back in Town", which was released on August 17, 2010. "Hillbilly Bone" is an up-tempo country song, backed primarily by electric guitar. It has a theme of rural pride, in which the narrators state that one does not have to be from the South or Appalachia to enjoy the same pastimes as someone who is ("We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside"). The song is set in the key of G major with a main chord pattern of G-C7-E7-C-G. An eight-bar electric guitar solo precedes each verse and the final chorus. Adkins sings vocal harmony on the entire song, and the last half of the second verse. Craig Wiseman and Luke Laird wrote "Hillbilly Bone" during a songwriting session in which neither of them were able to come up with a song idea. Laird then began performing an improvised rap as a joke. After Laird wrote the opening couplet "Yeah, I got a friend in New York City / He's never heard of Conway Twitty," the two finished the song within two hours. Shelton said that he was listening to a demo disc in his car, and when he first heard the demo for "Hillbilly Bone," he did not think that it was suitable for him, so he skipped to the next song on the disc. Later on, when the disc restarted, Shelton said that the demo "hit [him] way better" the second time he heard it, and that he liked it more each subsequent time that he listened to it. Shelton also thought that it sounded "like something Trace Adkins would cut," and asked producer Scott Hendricks to bring Adkins in to sing it as a duet. The song has been met with generally positive reception from music critics. Tara Seetharam of Country Universe gave the song a B rating, saying that it "is a novelty song through and through, but it's catchy and dynamic, and it laughs at itself."