The Daily Times

It’s called “Maryville City,” but the two musicians behind the online video phenomenon want to assure everyone: It’s a Blount County thing.

With shout-outs to Rockford, Louisville, Friendsville, Walland, Townsend and Alcoa, Brandon “Hollywood” Holliman and Darris “Dirty D” Paxton have written a local summer anthem that’s exploding in popularity on such social networking sites as Facebook. Uploaded to the video hosting website YouTube only six days ago, the video — an homage to Blount County with shots of familiar places such as the basketball courts at Sandy Springs Park — has already generated close to 16,000 views.

For the two guys who came up with the song, such statistics are mind-blowing.

“No way! I never would have thought people would flock to it like that,” Paxton told The Daily Times during an interview this week from the home of Holliman’s mother, Deborah Holliman Decker.

Just as Alcoa rapper Mr. Mack did with “Where You From (Da 865)” several years ago, Holliman and Paxton have bottled lightning with “Maryville City” — a feel-good hip-hop track with head-nodding, window-thumping beats, a video of landmarks and countryside scenes familiar to anyone from this area and a sense of hometown pride. It’s been shared far and wide, getting props from everyone from Blount County expatriates (a sample YouTube comment: “I grew up in Maryville and live in Boston now. I am gonna blast this on my commute to work every morning. Great song, awesome job!”) to the guys’ family members.

“When I heard it, I knew it,” Decker said. “I said, ‘This is it! I want this for my ringtone!’ And I say that not just because he’s my son. I hate to say it, but some of his music, I don’t like.”

The Hollimans moved to Blount County when Brandon was 9. Over the next several years, he collected such influences as LL Cool J, Slick Rick, Eminem and Heavy D to come up with a style all his own. He met Paxton in the early 1990s, and the two attended Maryville High together before Paxton transferred to Alcoa. Paxton comes from a musical family of singers and a piano-playing grandfather, and not long after he started hanging out with Holliman, he started writing his own rhymes.

Together, they formed a local hip-hop group known as Congress; various other projects came and went, but Hollywood and Dirty D continued to collaborate, even after Holliman moved to Chattanooga for a brief time. It was last summer that “Maryville City” started to come together.

“We were listening to this website where deejays and artists put their beats up, and we would surf for hours to find the right beat,” Holliman said. “The first time I heard it, I thought it was tight.”

At that point, Paxton started scribbling furiously. After a few minutes, he had the opening line: “I’m from Maryville City ...”

“Never did I think I would hear Maryville City in a song that sounded as good as that did,” Holliman said. “It just sounded good to my ears.”

After it was completed, they decided to hold the song over the fall and winter and debut it in time for summer 2011. They shot the video earlier this month, and Holliman uploaded it last Friday — meaning within a week, it’s on track to break 20,000 views.

Of course, it’s not without its detractors. Two pages in the online bulletin board of the website Vol Nation (http://www.volnation.com) bash the video for its select locales and using the term “Maryville City” as an all-inclusive title for all of Blount County.

“People hate on it, but they don’t see the Maryville we see,” Holliman said. “I read some of those comments, and I said, ‘I love my Vols, but that’s Vol-hating nation.’”

“If they weren’t hating, we wouldn’t be doing something right,” Paxton added.

The two hope to capitalize on the song’s success as soon as possible. They want to include it on a CD with other music — something for everybody,” Holliman said — but in the meantime, they’re simply enjoying the ride. And just as the video has made fans proud of their community, it’s made the guys behind it proud to have created it.

“It’s just a feel-good video,” Paxton said. “Everybody’s smiling, the people in it look happy. I guess we could have put in some girls in those little short-shorts, but we wanted it to be good for our mothers to look at and our kids to look at.”

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