On October 17, 2005 The Grascals shot their very first video. The song was the Harley Allen-penned “Me and John and Paul,” which a mere 10 days later, earned the group an IBMA Song of the Year award. The video, directed by Lark Watts (who also directed Sawyer Brown’s powerful “They Don’t Understand”) is now available for viewing on cmt.com.

When asked about the process of filming the video, Jimmy Mattingly had this to say:

I’ve got to say, for me, and I’m sure I speak for the rest of the guys, that the whole process of making this video couldn’t have been any more pleasant. Harley Allen is just an awesome writer, and we all felt a special relationship to this song the first time we heard it. Once we recorded it, we started thinking right away that if we got to do a video, this is the song we’d pick. And we shot the video, with Lark Watts directing, before the song won at the IBMA’s. It just seems like everything’s coming together with it. Lark did a fantastic job. We were all really impressed with all the advance work he did and how prepared he was–how well he used everyone’s time. And then it worked out where my son was able to be in the video, along with one of his best friends, Keenan Collier, who’s Jonell Mosser’s son. Then, Danny’s nephew was home from serving in Afghanistan, and we needed a soldier, and we thought, “Who better than the real deal?”

We’re really pleased with the video and we hope everyone has a chance to see it soon on CMT and GAC. And when they do, we hope they feel the same strong emotion we feel every time we play the song.

Visit The Grascals’ artist page on cmt.com, and under Videos, click on Me and John and Paul to view the full length video.

[Editor's Note: cmt.com video is apparently incompatible with Macintosh as both your blog authors were unable to get the video to play]