Chris Stapleton

Chris Stapleton sat on a rickety stool in a dimly lit Kentucky bar playing blues for the eight people watching. The former high school valedictorian had dropped out of Vanderbilt University’s engineering program after a year and spent two unfulfilling years in business school and now spent his days working odd jobs, driving an ice truck, and playing in bars. He was also doing some songwriting, a simple hobby at the time. All he knew was that the engineering degree he had attempted was his father’s passion, not his, and business didn’t work for him either. Now, he was back home in Kentucky again. 

Soon enough, local songwriters in the area made him realize songwriting was an actual profession, not only a fun hobby. “I always thought that George Strait was singing a song, he made up, and that was the end of it,” he told CBS. “But the instant I found out that could be a job, I thought ‘That’s the job for me.’”

Stapleton came from a working-class family. His father was an engineer for a coal mine company, and his grandfathers and uncles had also worked in the coal industry. He discovered music through his uncle, who played in a band and Stapleton grew up learning chords and playing around the house. A high achiever at Johnson Central High School in Paintsville, Kentucky, Stapleton wanted to go into engineering because his father was successful in it. Later on, after Stapleton found success in music, he says, “But I’m glad I did [engineering and business] first because all the wrong roads bring you to the right roads.”

In 2001, Stapleton moved to Nashville to pursue music full time after the publishing company Sea Gayle Music reached out to him. Before that, he had simply traveled to Nashville to co-write with his friend Steve Leslie, a professional songwriter. During the trip, the two visited several publishing offices, mostly on Leslie’s behalf, but Stapleton immediately caught the attention of Sea Gayle executive Liz O’Sullivan. She later remembered: 

“They just popped in to say hi, and Chris was standing behind Steve. This is weird, but there was this intriguing thing about Chris. He had this really old soul. I said, ‘Do you write songs?’ and he said, ‘Yes ma’am.’ Later, he mailed me a CD of his songs. I listened to half of the first verse, then stopped it and called him. His mom answered the phone. When Chris called me back, I said, ‘You need to move to Nashville.’” 

Only a couple weeks later, Stapleton was headed to Tennessee with only a sleeping bag, an acoustic guitar, and a sack of clothes. He signed his publishing deal with Sea Gayle during his fourth day in town after settling into his 700 square foot garage apartment in Forest Hills. After using his first check to buy a futon and a TV, he got to work.

“Maybe it’s the result of watching his dad do backbreaking [coal mining] work,” O’Sullivan said, “but Chris had this intense work ethic from the second he started. He’d write two songs during the day and one at night. We’d be sitting down in my office, and he would start scatting some lyrics and suddenly say, ‘I’ve gotta leave and go write this song.’ It was amazing to watch him. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. I’d go to meetings and tell them about this new writer I just signed, and this buzz went all around town. People were fighting over his songs. By the end of the first year, he’d gotten more cuts than some writers get in their whole career.”

For the first three or four years, Stapleton was so focused on songwriting that the thought of performing didn’t even cross his mind. Writing was all he wanted to do. Stapleton told American Songwriter, “I didn’t really play live; I just wrote. … I thought, ‘This is my job, and it’s awesome.’”

Chris met his future wife, Morgane, when they were working as songwriters at adjacent publishing houses on Nashville’s Music Row in 2003. Over the next few years, he was credited on half a dozen No. 1 hits, amassing writing credits on over 170 songs. He wrote songs recorded by artists such as Adele, Tim McGraw, Luke Bryan, and Kenny Chesney. Chesney’s “Never Wanted Nothing More,” which Stapleton co-wrote, became a major hit and spent five weeks at No. 1 on the country charts.

Within Nashville songwriting circles Stapleton developed mini-celebrity status long before mainstream audiences knew his name, making him famous inside the industry before he became famous publicly. Much of that reputation came from his demo vocals. Demos are a rough draft of a song, almost like a rough sketch, so established artists can hear songs before deciding whether to record them. Many industry professionals considered Stapleton’s demos unusually powerful and emotionally expressive. Several profiles discuss how people in Nashville knew about “that voice” years before the public did. Stapleton was already a talented singer and performer, even if he didn’t realize it.

At one point, O’Sullivan invited Mike Dungan, the president of Capitol Records’ Nashville branch, to the Sea Gayle office, hoping he’d be so impressed with Stapleton that he’d offer to sign him on the spot. Which is exactly what happened. “Chris played some songs for us,” she recalled to American Songwriter, “and Mike said, ‘Wow, you could literally sing the phone book and it would sound good.’ So Chris got out the White Pages out and flipped to a random page and started singing the names. It was hilarious. Like, Saturday-Night-Live-skit hilarious. Mike loved it, and he offered him a record deal that night.” 

He signed with Capitol Records in the early 2000s, but the deal quickly fell through and no material was released. It’s not clear what happened, other than whispers that the record deal did not give him complete creative control. His creative control wouldn’t arrive until Mercury Nashville signed him to the deal that propelled him to stardom with his debut solo album, Traveller, but more than fifteen years would pass before that happened. In between, Stapleton was involved with two prolific bands, and also had a less successful solo release, a commercial flop called “What Are You Listening To?”

Chris Stapleton joined The SteelDrivers in 2005 after a series of casual songwriting sessions with the band’s founding multi-instrumentalist, Mike Henderson. Henderson, a longtime collaborator of Stapleton’s, brought the then-unknown singer to an impromptu jam session with his bandmates. They rehearsed some classic bluegrass standards, and after that one night the casual get-together officially formed into a fully committed band. The SteelDrivers would earn three Grammy nominations during Stapleton’s time with them.

By late 2006, band members realized they needed a musical calling card to distribute to fans and industry insiders. Henderson and Stapleton realized that their gritty, hard-driving alt-country sound was best heard live, so on November 8, 2006, the band hooked up recording gear at Nashville’s famous bluegrass bar, the Station Inn, for a do-it-yourself production they could produce fast and cheap. The result was a small batch of CDs without any official label, catalog numbers or standard credits that they sold out of cardboard boxes at their concerts and handed out to DJs. The only title on the CD is “Direct From Nashville Tennessee – Recorded Live 11/8/2006.” Unofficially the CD is called “Live From The Station Inn,” but whatever one called it, the reception for this album was electric. Although it wasn’t the first time Stapleton had been heard on a commercial recording – he had been credited as a background singer on “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” a song he co-wrote for Gary Allan in 2003 – this CD marked Stapleton’s first commercial appearance as lead voice. 

 Legendary bluegrass label Rounder Records quickly signed the band and in 2008 the SteelDrivers’ self-titled first album appeared. The record produced the Grammy-nominated single “Blue Side of the Mountain” and helped establish the band as serious artists in the public’s eyes, specifically within Americana and bluegrass circles. Reviewing the album for Slant Magazine, Jonathan Keefe wrote that the debut was “the kind of break from tradition that can bring some much needed new energy to a tired genre.”

Rather than focusing on sentimental nostalgia or polished country romance, the band’s music centered on prison imagery, alcoholism, regret, and violence. They were hard edged, a bit dark, and heavy with soul. Traditional bluegrass bands often develop through instrumental jam sessions and reinterpretations of older standards. The SteelDrivers were different because their foundation was songwriting.

They quickly won the IBMA Emerging Artist of the Year award and were nominated for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. They received strong critical reviews, even though they remained outside mainstream radio.

While with the SteelDrivers, Stapleton wanted to explore more genres and formed a Southern rock side-project band called The Jompson Brothers around 2007. Chris and Morgane also tied the knot in October of 2007. The Jompson Brothers lay slightly dormant as Stapleton balanced touring and being a husband, that is until Stapleton left the SteelDrivers in 2010. By this time, The SteelDrivers had a live album and two studio albums that both peaked at No. 2 on the bluegrass charts.

The Jompson Brothers started similarly to the SteelDrivers, as a result of late-night jam sessions in a Nashville garage. Chris Stapleton was the frontman and driving creative force behind the group. The members were musicians Stapleton had gotten close to while working in the Nashville music scene. J.T. Cure, the band’s bassist, had a long-standing musical relationship with Stapleton (Stapleton later brought Cure over to play bass during his massive solo breakthrough). Their drummer, Bard McNamee, and guitarist Greg McKee made up the rest of the group. “We all created alter egos, sort of as a joke, with the last name ‘Jompson.’ After a while, we started calling ourselves the Jompson Brothers,” Stapleton told WhiskeyRiff. 

They only ever released one album, but they toured regionally until 2013, opening for Zac Brown Band at one point. Their self-titled album didn’t chart commercially or achieve mainstream radio success, although later Stapleton fans view it as a cult-classic, drawing comparisons to Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. Country star Jason Aldean famously used the track “Secret Weapon” as his concert intro music, praising it as an ultimate hype song.

Mercury Nashville signed Stapleton in 2013 as a solo artist and he would release a single that same year. “What Are You Listening To” is bluesy and soulful, and it’s a creative heartbreak song asking the question, are you listening to sad songs or club songs as you bar hop? In other words, have you moved on? It’s a clever way to convey heartbreak, and an impassioned one in Stapleton’s singing. Unluckily, it generated little success, which scrapped Stapleton’s future album before it was even released. He was 35 then. 

In the midst of this professional setback, tragedy struck when Stapleton’s father, Herbert, died in October, 2013. Stapleton’s wife, Morgane, found a 1979 Jeep Cherokee online in Phoenix, Arizona, the couple flew to Phoenix and spent 11 days driving the old Jeep back to Nashville. Somewhere in New Mexico, Stapleton wrote the title track “Traveller,” later the title track of his 2015 debut album.

The Traveller LP released almost two years after “What Are You Listening To,” and when it did suddenly, Stapleton’s life changed. Traveller won album of the year at the Country Music Association Awards, and earned Stapleton CMA awards for New Artist and Male Vocalist of the Year. In 2015, alongside pop star Justin Timberlake, they performed a show-stopping medley of Timberlake’s ‘Drink You Away’ and Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” and, boom, Stapleton had caught the attention of worldwide media. People thought he came out of nowhere, especially after Traveller earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, and after Stapleton won Best Country Album and Best Country Solo Performance categories. It eventually won the ACM Award for Album of the Year and was named the top selling country album of 2016. Traveller became Billboard’s number one country album for 2016 and 2017. It has been certified 7x Platinum and its breakout single, “Tennessee Whiskey,” scored two successive Tunie awards for most-played song on Waffle House jukeboxes nationwide. “Tennessee Whiskey” ultimately became the first country song, and one of only three songs ever (as of mid-2026), to be certified double diamond by the RIAA.  

Stapleton continued to win accolade after accolade for the rest of his releases, and he gives credit to his wife, Morgane, “She’s great at keeping me focused and centered, musically and personally. None of the things we’re getting to do now would have happened, or even been possible, if she hadn’t been there.” Morgane Stapleton, who is a singer-songwriter in her own right, has a co-writing credit on Carrie Underwood’s 2006 hit ‘Don’t Forget to Remember Me’. They have five children, four sons and one daughter. 

Since 2015, he has been recognized with a plethora of honors and accolades, notching (as of mid-2026) 12 Grammys, 21 ACM Awards, 19 CMA Awards, five Billboard Music Awards and two iHeartRadio Music Awards, among others. In 2019, Stapleton was named the inaugural ACM Artist-Songwriter of the Decade.

Through it all, Chris Stapleton has kept his humility. In another GQ interview, Stapleton gives us some final words of wisdom: “If you stop and get too proud of yourself, you’re just gonna wind up not doing anything. People used to ask me what my favorite song I ever wrote was, and I always used to say, ‘It’s the next one I’m going to write.’ You keep moving. That’s the creative process: Trying to find something that falls down out of the air that wasn’t there before, and hope that it’s something worthwhile.”

by Kate Ransom – June 5, 2026