Down In Mississippi (Up To No Good)

This song is about a woman who can't stand her mundane, unappreciated, predictable life, so she makes a run for it, going down to Mississippi where she is up to no good. No more doing dishes and washing clothes; she's going to hit the casino with her friends.

This is a track from Sugarland's debut album, Twice The Speed Of Life. At the time, they were a trio of Kristen Hall, Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles; Hall left the group after the album was released.

In a Songfacts interview with Kristian Bush, he told the story behind this song. "It was the very beginning of Sugarland. We were trying to figure out what a country song was. My history of country music was pretty deep, but my ability to be current and understand the '90s and early 2000s country music was not very deep at all. I had been in a different genre. And my gateway drug was Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball. I said, 'That's like a Daniel Lanois record... holy smokes! If that's country music, I can do this.' And then I heard a Steve Earle record, and I was also blown away. And then a couple of Dixie Chicks records. I was like, 'Wow. This is not what people think it is. This is incredibly well-crafted, emotional. Songs that will stand the test of time.' And as I was trying to get at those, we were coming up with, 'What a clever thing to say - 'down in Mississippi and up to no good.'' We wrote it about - literally - a girls' weekend, because they had just started to have float barges on the Mississippi and put casinos on them. It was a thing that people did, but they didn't really tell each other that they did it. It was maybe in your mind what the southern version of going to Las Vegas is. I thought that was fun, and it was also a crazy country-tempo song."