Tim McGraw just dropped a new song, “I Called Mama,” in tribute to his own mother, Betty D’Agostino. Tim’s biological father is Tug McGraw, although he didn’t know that until he was an adolescent, and didn’t have much involvement with the professional baseball player until he was an adult. Tim, who was raised in his early years by his mother and stepfather, Horace Smith, is opening up about his troubled childhood, and the pain his mother quietly endured for years.

“My mom was a strong woman, and she raised us three kids and went through a lot of abuse in her marriages,” Tim said in an interview with Blair Garner. “So we saw a lot of that growing up and saw a lot of the black eyes and bloody noses and all that thing around our house.”

Betty and Horace eventually divorced, which created another hardship, this time financial, for the single mother.

“I remember being on our own and being at our home, and I was around 13 maybe, one night.” Tim recounted. “I got up late at night, it’s about two in the morning, and my mom had worked like three jobs at a time to try to keep the bills paid. And I remember specifically getting up one night to go get a glass of water and she was at our kitchen table, and she had bills spread out everywhere. She had her head down, she was crying and she didn’t see me walk by.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he continued. “It was just so heartbreaking to me . . . I don’t know that I really got it at that point. But older in life, I reflect on that a lot. I reflect on that scene and seeing my mom and how she hid that from us. And I just happened to catch that moment.”

Tim praises his mother for her influence over the years, which helped him have the career that he has had for the past three decades.

“My mom worked hard,” Tim praised. “She was a go-getter. She always tried to do her best and provide for us, and there were times when that was almost impossible. The thing my mom always taught us, that I always remember is, ‘Always have dreams.’ Dream bigger than your circumstances. And always treat people nicely. Treat people kind.”

Although painful, Tim’s troubled childhood also instilled in him the kind of husband and father he wanted to be for his own wife and children.

“When you grow up seeing that sort of thing, for me, that was certainly not the way I wanted to raise my family,” Tim noted. “That was specific in my mind for me, from the very beginning, when I knew I wanted to start a family, I fail all the time. I fail every day as a father, as a husband, as a son as a brother. But you always get back up and try harder.”

Download or stream “I Called Mama” at TimMcGraw.com.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Big Machine