Red River Blue is the sixth studio album by American country music artist Blake Shelton. It was released on July 12, 2011, via Warner Bros. Records, and is Shelton's inaugural No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, debuting at the top spot on July 30, 2011. Its first single, "Honey Bee," peaked at number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. The album's second single is "God Gave Me You", written and originally recorded by Christian rock singer Dave Barnes. The title track is a duet with Shelton's former wife and fellow country singer Miranda Lambert. Background Shelton's marriage to Miranda Lambert and his debut as a judge on The Voice both occurred earlier in the same year as Red River Blues release, and one year before the album's release, Shelton had both joined the Grand Ole Opry and won the Country Music Association Award for Male Vocalist of the Year; the proximity of all these milestones to the album's release led Matt Bjorke of the website Roughstock to write that Red River Blue marked "the biggest album release of [Shelton's] career" since Shelton's self-titled debut album. Although the release date for Red River Blue was originally scheduled for September 2011, this was moved up to July of that year, so as to capitalize on the success of the album's lead single, "Honey Bee". In April 2011, Shelton said, "Playing your cards too close to your chest doesn't pay out. I feel like right now if I've got a single that's exploding, easily my fastest climber, I don't want to do something like wait and put (the album) out in the fall. It's when you rally the troops and say, 'Man, we've got to get this thing done.'" According to Thom Jurek of AllMusic, Shelton "only had half an album finished" at the time and was "given two weeks to complete the rest". Content The album's second single is a cover of "God Gave Me You", which was written and originally recorded by Contemporary Christian music artist Dave Barnes. Shelton explained that he first heard the song during "a low point" in his relationship with Miranda Lambert and said, "for whatever reason I was flipping through stations and landed on a contemporary Christian station, and that song came on and I almost had to pull the truck over. It was one of those moments for me where I