> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.generationcountry.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How Bull*hit Hour Became Patty Loveless’ “Jealous Bone” - URL: https://www.generationcountry.net/how-bull-hit-hour-became-patty-loveless-jealous-bone/ - Published: 2026-10-13T22:12:30.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T22:12:30.000Z - Description: Every Wednesday morning, Steve Bogard and Rick Giles gave themselves an hour to talk before they tried to write. One innocent story, one perfectly country phrase and one guitar lick later, they had a song Patty Loveless made sound dangerous. - Author: Jared Ingersol - Tags: Behind the Song, Steve Bogard, Patty Loveless, Rick Giles Every Wednesday morning at nine, Steve Bogard and Rick Giles met for the hour that was not supposed to count. “We usually started about nine for ‘bullshit hour,’” Bogard says. “Rick made the coffee and there was a little kitchen in his studio, where we'd share whatever interesting happened in our lives, marriages and the biz.” It produced some very serious country music. Bogard and Giles kept their Wednesday appointment for roughly fifteen years, first at Giles's home in Sylvan Park and later at the studio he bought on Division Street. “There were very few Wednesdays we didn't get a song,” Bogard says. The titles that came out of those sessions included Reba McEntire's “New Fool at an Old Game,” Tanya Tucker's “Hangin' In,” BlackHawk's “There You Have It,” Restless Heart's “We Got the Love” and Rascal Flatts' “Prayin' for Daylight.” “Jealous Bone” began before the day's official work had even started. ## THE TITLE IN THE CONVERSATION “‘Jealous Bone’ is a Wednesday song that definitely came from ‘bullshit hour,’” Bogard tells Generation Country. The spark was a harmless real-life misunderstanding. Giles had drawn some friendly attention from a woman at ASCAP, and a remark or conversation about it made its way home to his wife, Pat. Bogard is emphatic that nothing improper had happened. The episode came up the next morning during bullshit hour. “Rick and I were talking about it the next day, and I remember saying, ‘It's not like Pat doesn't have a jealous bone in her body,’” Bogard says. They knew they had the title. Bogard and Giles had taken a common expression and turned it into anatomy. The lyric moves through the body—the heart, blood pounding through the veins, every part of the narrator calling her lover's name—always returning to the bone, until jealousy feels less like an idea than a physical reflex she was born carrying. The trigger is not evidence of betrayal but the heads that turn when her lover enters a room. She knows what the onlookers are thinking because she is thinking it, too; desire itself gives her reason to fear. She wants him entirely to herself, even as she recognizes that unless she loosens her hold, she may drive him away. The instinct to possess the relationship could be what destroys it. Loveless's recording changed one word in the opening line. Bogard and Giles wrote “something” deep down inside the heart; on the record, Loveless sang “somewhere.” Bogard noticed immediately. “She sang the wrong lyric on the first line, but it didn't matter, because her performance was so authentic,” he says. The change makes the opening stranger and, arguably, better: “somewhere” gives jealousy a hiding place. In Loveless's mouth, the unusual construction sounds like emotion arriving faster than grammar. ## NEITHER MAJOR NOR MINOR The unease is in the chord, too. “The song isn't major or minor,” Bogard says. “The one chord just doesn't have any thirds, so when you hear a bar band do it, it's not always right.” The third is the note that ordinarily tells the ear whether a chord is major or minor. Remove it, and the harmony refuses to declare itself: the groove moves with confidence while withholding the reassurance of a settled emotional color. Then there is the guitar figure. “We tried to make sure the signature lick was not ‘on’ a big Fogerty hit,” Bogard says. “But later Mac McAnally told me he tried to play our altered lick, but Tony Brown insisted on the one that made the record. Glad we never got sued.” Bogard did not name the John Fogerty song in his answer. A contemporary *Country Music* review did. Writing about *Up Against My Heart* in 1991, Marjie McGraw called “Jealous Bone” a blues-rocker with attitude and specifically heard Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Green River” in its guitar licks. That period description independently catches the resemblance Bogard and Giles had already heard—and tried to steer around—while they were writing it. The resemblance helps place the song within Loveless's music. “Jealous Bone” is country, but it does not arrive as a tidy two-step or a fiddle-led weeper. It has swamp in the guitar, a blunt rhythmic insistence and a streak of soul underneath the lyric. In a December 1991 single review, *Billboard* heard “rhythm and funk” and called the track increasingly contagious. *Cash Box* heard a sultry edge, a fast pulse and a sassy performance, praising the force and control in Loveless's vocal. *The Gavin Report* heard “grit and substance.” ## THE MAN ON THE DEMO Nothing in the song's early life required a female demo singer. “Rick sang all our demos and was a great and inventive background singer, so we never did a female version,” Bogard says. They trusted Giles's vocal to sell the attitude, harmonic tension and hook without pretending to be the woman who might someday record it. The handoff came through Mark Brown, a publisher who, Bogard remembers, had worked for producer Tony Brown at Silverline/Goldline and was then at Warner Chappell. “It was Mark Brown, a publisher who had worked for Tony at Silverline/Goldline and was at Warner Chappell at the time, who took it to Tony for Patty,” Bogard says. Tony Brown and Emory Gordy Jr. produced Loveless's recording. MCA placed it first on *Up Against My Heart*, released in September 1991, as if that guitar lick were the front door to the album. MCA released “Jealous Bone” as a single in December. MCA 54271 backed it with Kevin Welch and John Barlow Jarvis's “I Came Straight to You.” The timing put it at the end of one chapter in Loveless's career. *Up Against My Heart* was her fifth and final studio album for MCA. Later in 1992 she would leave the label, undergo surgery on a vocal cord and begin the Epic run that made her one of the decade's defining singers. “Jealous Bone” catches the earlier period at full voltage: the mountain cry in her voice meeting the rock, R&B and country strains she had never treated as mutually exclusive. On January 5, 1992, Sawyer Brown introduced Loveless on NBC's *Hot Country Nights*, and she tore into what *Billboard* called a rollicking performance of the song. Radio kept it moving through the winter. “Jealous Bone” spent 20 weeks on *Billboard*'s Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart, reaching No. 13 in the issue dated March 28, and it reached No. 22 on Canada's *RPM* country chart. ASCAP later counted “Jealous Bone” among its 1993 Country Music Award winners, honoring Bogard for a title born before the day's official writing had even begun. Loveless sings the verses with control rather than panic, letting the physical details accumulate until she leans into the hook and makes “bone” sound less like a metaphor than a diagnosis. Bogard's word for the performance is authenticity. She holds desire, fear and self-knowledge in the same vocal, making a woman pulled in opposite directions sound completely human. ## BISCUITS, JAMS AND ONE ACTUAL BONE MCA introduced *Up Against My Heart* with a scavenger hunt elaborate enough to survive in two different memories. *Country Music* magazine reported that nine teams left the Country Music Hall of Fame parking lot in vans, following clues built around the album's songs. They listened to the record as they crossed Nashville. At a market on Franklin Road, contestants found a “Jealous Bone” in a shopping cart. Another stop required them to dance to “Hurt Me Bad (In a Real Good Way).” The last clue promised “biscuits and jams,” which sent the group west on Highway 100 to the Loveless Cafe for the finish. Bogard brought a bone of his own. “My young son had found an old cow hipbone in the woods behind our house,” he says, “and I brought it to the party and got her autograph on the bone.” “It still hangs in my office,” Bogard says. --- *Steve Bogard supplied his recollections in written responses to Generation Country. His quotations have been lightly copyedited only for punctuation, capitalization and obvious typographical errors; their meaning has not been changed. Release, chart and contemporary critical details were checked against period trade publications and archival records.* *Read Generation Country's* [*Songwriter Spotlight on Steve Bogard*](https://www.generationcountry.net/songwriter-spotlight-steve-bogard/) *for the larger story of the writer behind “Carrying Your Love with Me,” “Prayin' for Daylight,” “Every Mile a Memory” and hits across four decades.*