Since 1935, Florida’s official state song has been “Old Folks at Home,” the old “Swanee River” tune Stephen Foster wrote in 1851. Foster never visited Florida. He never saw the Suwannee River either. This week, after the death of John Anderson, a growing number of country fans began asking a simple question: why not a song written by someone who actually grew up there?
John Anderson died peacefully in his sleep on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at the age of 71. Only three days earlier, he had been in Nashville for the Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony, celebrating the newest class of the institution he had joined himself in 2024. After the news broke, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted a short tribute.
“RIP to a great country artist and the pride of Apopka, FL, John Anderson. ‘Seminole Wind’ is one of the best songs of all-time about Florida.”
That post is what set everything in motion.
The Song That Came to Him on the Way Back to Tennessee
John Anderson was born in Apopka, near Orlando, in 1954, and he grew up there before heading to Nashville in his teens. By the early 1990s, he had lived in Tennessee for two decades. “Seminole Wind” was born out of a trip home.
According to his career biography, he wrote the song after visiting his 95-year-old grandmother in Florida and driving around the state, seeing how much the land he remembered had changed. In a 1992 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, he described it as an emotional stretch of time, and said the opening words of the chorus came to him just as he was leaving to head back to Tennessee.
The song he finished is a lament for the Everglades, drained and paved over in the name of progress, and for the Seminole people who lived there, including their war leader Osceola. It names real Florida places, from Lake Okeechobee north to Micanopy. Years later, he still made a point of how it began.
“I wrote that song without ever thinking of it commercially.”
His record label at the time worried it was too regional to work on national radio. Released as a single on August 10, 1992, it climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard country chart, and the album of the same name was certified double platinum. The music video was filmed on the Seminole Tribe’s Big Cypress Reservation, with Seminole dancers taking part. John Anderson later said it pleased him a great deal that the Seminoles embraced the song.
John Rich Answers the Governor
John Rich had been close to John Anderson for years. The two wrote together, including Rich’s 2009 single “Shuttin’ Detroit Down,” and Rich called him “Uncle John.” In his first posts after the death, Rich called him his favorite country artist of all time.
When the governor praised “Seminole Wind,” Rich replied directly.
“@RonDeSantis should consider making ‘Seminole Wind’ the official state song of Florida. John Anderson captured the spirit of this state in his song, and was a native born Floridian. Gov DeSantis, would you consider making that happen? A bunch of us would fly down if you would.”
He also shared an old clip from a 2007 CMT special of Big & Rich performing “Seminole Wind” alongside John Anderson himself.
A Petition That Waited Eight Years
The idea did not start this week. On July 29, 2018, a fan named Brian Denton started a Change.org petition titled “Change Florida’s official state song to ‘Seminole Wind’ by John Anderson.” His argument was straightforward. Foster never visited Florida, the river in his song could be almost any river, and the tune’s history as a minstrel song made it hard to sing with pride, even after the state revised its lyrics in 2008. “Seminole Wind,” he wrote, was a song about something every Floridian could agree on: the state’s land is unique and worth protecting.
The petition now lists Governor DeSantis among its decision makers, along with several Florida members of Congress. It was a quiet effort. As of this writing, it shows 89 verified signatures.
A second petition went up on November 11, 2025, started by Jackson Robbins. It takes a different route, asking that “Seminole Wind” replace the state anthem rather than the state song. Florida has had both since 2008, when lawmakers kept Foster’s song with new lyrics and adopted “Florida (Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky)” by Jan Hinton as the anthem. Robbins pointed out that the song speaks to Florida’s history and its Seminole people, and that neighboring Georgia chose “Georgia on My Mind” as its own state song in 1979. That petition shows 22 signatures so far.
What It Would Actually Take
A governor’s post alone cannot change Florida’s state song. The song is written into Florida law, so replacing it would mean a bill passing the Legislature and being signed by the governor. Florida has been through that debate before, in 2007 and 2008, and the result was a compromise rather than a clean swap.
For now, the governor has praised “Seminole Wind” in public but has not responded to John Rich’s request. The offer from Rich and his friends to fly down still stands.
John Anderson spent most of his adult life in Tennessee, but he never stopped writing about the Florida he came from. Whether or not the state makes it official, a lot of people already hear his song when they think of home.
Where were you the first time you heard “Seminole Wind”?