Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Country Music Rocks	(favorable)
Country Standard Time	(favorable)
Country Weekly	(favorable)
Great American Country	(favorable)
Recording Connection
Roughstock
Slant

Hillbilly Jedi is the fourth studio album by American country music duo Big & Rich, released on September 18, 2012. It is the duo's first new studio album since Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace in 2007. The album's lead-off single, "That's Why I Pray," was released on May 21, 2012 and was followed by two more singles, "Party Like Cowboyz" and "Cheat On You."Hillbilly Jedi received mixed reviews from critics.

In 2008, just a year after the duo released Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace, John Rich announced that the duo would be going on hiatus so that Big Kenny could recuperate from an old injury. Both members released solo songs during this period before reuniting in mid-2011 to release the single "Fake ID" for the Footloose soundtrack and began to tour. Later that year, the duo announced plans for a new album. Shortly after the release of "That's Why I Pray," Rich went on record as saying that he felt that the song could be the biggest of the duo's career.

Alphin said that the album's title "came out in a writing session we were doing with Richie Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi the other week. They are going to record the song on our new album and a line in the song was "hillbilly jedis with attitude." All of a sudden, Bon Jovi stops and says, "Hillbilly Jedis? That’s it. I’d buy that shirt." We were like, "Hey, that’s about a descriptive as you can get of what we are."" Bon Jovi was instrumental in securing the album's title, even going so far as to call George Lucas to ask for permission once the group realized that the word "jedi" was copyrighted.

Reviews for Hillbilly Jedi have generally been mixed. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic ended his review by stating "Hillbilly Jedi merely raises one question: weren't Big & Rich better off following their own paths?" In his review for Slant Magazine, Jonathan Keefe mentioned that "the only thing noteworthy about the album is that George Lucas allowed Big & Rich to refer to themselves as Jedis" while Rob Burkhardt, in a similarly negative review, mentioned that the album is "just a recycling of an old schtick, a feeble attempt to revive a party everyone already went home from. And it doesn’t go over well."

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Wikipedia