Drew Baldridge is anything but a quitter. The singer-songwriter had a couple of record deals that didn’t pan out, but knew he still had a lot of music he wanted to share with the world. Undeterred, Baldridge released “She’s Somebody’s Daughter,” a song he penned with Jimmy Yeary and Cameron Jaymes, on his own. The song quickly took on a life of its own, making history when it reached No. 8 as the highest-charting, self-funded artist ever on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.

“She’s Somebody’s Daughter” is still climbing, and now seems poised to go all the way to No. 1.

“This is a crazy story of a song I wrote six years ago, after meeting my wife’s dad,” Baldridge says on Country Countdown. “Never thought it would get to where it’s at now, especially after losing my record deal. Never thought I’d have another shot at country radio. In the last year, I created my own record label, and sent it myself.”

Baldridge first released “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” in 2019, on the now-closed Cold River Records, although the label chose not to release it as a single because another artist, Tenille Townes, had a song out called “Somebody’s Daughter” at the same time. Baldridge released his song on streaming services, creating and releasing “She’s Somebody’s Daughter (Wedding Version)” for the father-daughter dance for his own 2021 wedding, to Katherine Kraus.

“I posted it on TikTok on our honeymoon, and it got 10 million views in a day,” Baldridge recalls to Billboard. “All these girls started this trend called the ‘daughter trend,’ where they would act out the song and then in the chorus, they’d have pictures of growing up with their dad. Before long, we had four or five hundred million plays on TikTok, and I had 100 million streams.”

The version of “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” out now is his third version, appropriately called “She’s Somebody’s Daughter (Reimagined).”

It was when Baldridge played “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” at a festival in 2023, and saw the crowd’s reaction that he decided to release the song on his own.

“I immediately got off stage, and I’m like ‘You know what? I can’t get labels as excited about this as I am…Screw it. I’m just going to do it myself,'” Balrdige remembers.

Baldridge soon realized that “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” was unlike anything he, or most other artists, had ever released in the past.

“I put a video of the song on TikTok, and the next day it had ten million views,” the Illinois native reveals. “Two years later, it has hundreds of millions of views. So I decided to send it to radio by myself. My goal was to get Top 40. Because I’d never been there. Once it did it kept flying up.”

Find “She’s Somebody’s Daugther” and all of Baldridge’s music and upcoming shows at DrewBaldridgeMusic.com.