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As CMA Fest — formerly known as Fan Fair — celebrates 50 years of being an indelible connection point between scores of country music artists and their most ardent fans, three top-shelf artists are on board to guide viewers through some of this year’s biggest moments from the show. Explore See latest videos, charts and […]
Country Music Hall of Fame member George Strait set a new attendance record at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, venue American Family Field on Saturday (June 3), when Strait’s headlining concert brought in 46,641 attendees — the highest-ever attendance in the venue. The concert also featured Chris Stapleton and Little Big Town. American Family Field is home to major league baseball team the Milwaukee Brewers.
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“We have been fortunate to have a number of fantastic shows at American Family Field since we opened our doors. Our expectations for George Strait, Chris Stapleton and Little Big Town were very high and those expectations were blown away,” Jason Hartlund, executive vp/chief commercial officer for the Milwaukee Brewers, said via a statement. “We set venue records for concert attendance and gross ticket revenue, among others. The Brewers have worked with Messina Touring Group for over a decade and have always enjoyed the relationship. We look forward to working together on many future shows [at] American Family Field.”
The Milwaukee show on June 3 is just the latest record-setting Strait has been doing recently: The accolade follows the recent record-setting attendance on May 27 at the Buckeye Country Superfest at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, Ohio, which welcomed 63,891 attendees. Other artists on the Buckeye Country Superfest lineup were Stapleton, Little Big Town and Warren Zeiders.
Strait currently has eight additional concerts on the books for the rest of 2023, including a two-night stop at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 28-29, an Aug. 5 show at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, as well as a double-header at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, on Nov. 17-18.
Strait’s most recent album, 2019’s Honky Tonk Time Machine, marked his 27th album to debut at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Country Albums chart. Strait previously noted to Billboard that he’s not ruling out a similar touring run in 2024, saying, “Whether or not we do it again the following year depends on how we all feel it went when we’re finished with these shows.”
Messina Group CEO Louis Messina, who has promoted Strait’s concerts for approximately three decades, also previously added that a short touring stint could possibly happen next year. “It depends upon how he likes it or doesn’t like it,” Messina said. “The good thing about George Strait is we can do anything that he wants to do.”
Swifties in attendance at Taylor Swift‘s second Chicago stop of the Eras Tour got a special surprise courtesy of country star Maren Morris. Towards the end of Swift’s show on Saturday (June 3), the singer stopped to address her audience and offer them a never-before-seen treat. “Tonight, I’m gonna play a song I’ve never played […]
Keke Palmer is on a Taylor Swift kick. The actress served fans a mini cover of her favorite Swift tune in a new video from W Magazine, just days after she gave “Karma” a glowing review. Her top pick is actually a classic from Swift’s debut era. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See […]
Iconic entertainer and eight-time Grammy winner Tina Turner died at age 83 at her home in Switzerland on Wednesday (May 24). Her debut on the Billboard charts came in 1960 as part of Ike & Tina Turner, when “A Fool in Love” debuted at N. 10 on the Hot R&B Sides chart, ultimately reaching No. […]
Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” rolls up a fifth week atop Billboard’s Country Airplay chart – and becomes his first top 10 on the Pop Airplay tally.
The song holds in the Country Airplay penthouse (on the tally dated June 10) with 33.4 million audience impressions (down 1%) May 26-June 1, according to Luminate. It’s the second of Wallen’s nine No. 1s to rule for five weeks or more, after “You Proof” dominated for a record 10 frames beginning last October.
“Last Night” is also just the sixth song so far in the 2020s to top Country Airplay for at least five weeks. It joins “You Proof”; Bailey Zimmerman’s “Rock and a Hard Place” (six weeks starting this April); Dustin Lynch’s “Thinking ‘Bout You” featuring MacKenzie Porter (six, 2021-22); and Luke Combs’ “Forever After All” (six, 2021) and “Better Together” (five, 2021).
Also a crossover hit, “Last Night” rises to No. 10 on Pop Airplay, becoming Wallen’s first top 10 on the chart. He previously reached No. 16 on the list in December with “Wasted on You” and No. 22 in August 2020 as featured on Diplo’s “Heartless.”
As previously reported, “Last Night” has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks (with Wallen at the start of 2023 having fueled country’s share of Hot 100 top 10s to its highest level in more than a decade).
He continues to chart two songs in the Country Airplay top 10, as the title track to his album One Thing at a Time holds at No. 9 (18.9 million, up 3%).
Start of ‘Summer’
Brian Kelley’s “See You Next Summer” (Nashville South/Big Machine) marks the week’s highest entrance — and his first solo entry — on Country Airplay, at No. 29 with 4 million in audience. The song was released May 26 and received hourly plays that day on participating iHeartMedia stations.
Florida Georgia Line — the duo of Kelley and Tyler Hubbard — has banked 16 Country Airplay leaders, among 19 top 10s. (The act is on hiatus.)
Hubbard’s “Dancin’ in the Country,” meanwhile, holds at its No. 2 Country Airplay high, with 28.7 million impressions (down 10%). The song became his second solo top 10, after “5 Foot 9” topped the chart for a week last November.
When Bailey Zimmerman takes the stage to perform his brooding, multiweek Country Airplay chart-topper “Rock and a Hard Place,” the memories of a particularly bad breakup come flooding back to him.
“There was a girl I really loved. I wanted to give her the world and bought her a ring, and then she did some really messed-up stuff,” Zimmerman says. “Every time I see people cry during ‘Rock and a Hard Place’ when I’m singing it live, it takes me back to that moment. I remember being in my truck, screaming the lyrics to [Morgan Wallen’s] ‘Sand in My Boots’ because I was so sad and hurt. The line in ‘Rock’ about ‘We’ve been swinging and missing’ just resonated with me.”
When it comes to his career, Zimmerman (who is signed to Warner Music Nashville/Elektra Music Group) has been doing plenty of swinging — and making lots of contact. Now he’s not just screaming the lyrics to Wallen’s song: He’s opening the superstar’s stadium tour this summer. Less than four months after notching his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart with “Fall in Love” in December, “Rock” reached the top spot, too. “Fall in Love” was still on its way to No. 1 when Zimmerman’s management team began seeding radio executives with the follow-up single.
“ ‘Rock’ checked all the boxes — great lyric, great melody, and it perfectly fits the direction Bailey is going,” says The CORE Entertainment co-founder/CEO Kevin “Chief” Zaruk, who co-manages Zimmerman with 10th Street Entertainment. “The feedback we received was that it would be an even bigger hit.”
The early stations that jumped on “Rock and a Hard Place” were prescient: The song (written by Heath Warren, Jacob Hackworth and Jet Harvey) achieved even more chart success than its predecessor, leading Country Airplay for six weeks. And in April, it became Zimmerman’s first top 10 on the all-genre Hot 100.
In less than three years, the 23-year-old native of Louisville, Ill., has gone from burgeoning TikTok star to bona fide hit-maker and, now, Billboard’s inaugural country Rookie of the Year. After high school, he began working on a natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia and gained a modest TikTok following for his videos of custom-lifted trucks. Singing was simply a hobby for Zimmerman until December 2020, when he uploaded a video of himself performing “Never Comin’ Home,” a song he had written with high school friend Gavin Lucas. The track went viral, and Zimmerman gave his union notice the following day.
“It was funny, because they were like, ‘You mean we should just take you off the schedule for a bit?’ And I was like, ‘No, I quit. I’m done,’ ” Zimmerman recalls. He continued writing songs and moved to Nashville to record, adding producer Austin Shawn to the core group of collaborators helping him craft his raw, unflinching brand of rock-tinged country. Zimmerman recorded in a spare bedroom in Shawn’s house, cutting his vocals in a small closet. “It’s the same room [where] I met Bailey for the first time, where we talked about lifted trucks and dirt bikes for about three hours straight,” Shawn says.
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Zimmerman signed his co-management deal in 2021 and announced his label deal the following year. Now he’s one of several artists who have recently ascended swiftly from social media virality to packing venues. (The Neal Agency books his shows.) He’s acutely aware that he sidestepped years of the grueling club shows that typically pave the way to country stardom — and that his learning curve is happening publicly. A few months ago, a clip of him singing off-key live went viral, leading him to post an endearing video in which he apologized for sounding “absolutely awful” before launching into a sturdy a cappella version of “Rock and a Hard Place” to prove he had simply experienced an off night.
“You can say, ‘You didn’t have to go through the 10 years in the bars to get where you are at.’ At the same time, [those artists] had plenty of time to deal with things like your mic not being on or your [in-ear monitors] going out — they could learn all that in clubs,” Zimmerman says. “I had to learn it in front of thousands of people.
“The first two years were rough,” he continues. “I got [vocal cord] nodules and had to not talk for almost three months. My voice was so weak, and I had to build it back slowly — I never went hoarse for a show, thank God, and I never needed surgery. But my voice is stronger now, and I’ve learned how to take care of it.”
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Not that Zimmerman has had much time to ponder his whirlwind success. Following its May 12 release, his major-label full-length debut, Religiously. The Album, entered the Top Country Albums chart at No. 3 and the Billboard 200 at No. 7.
“We’ve been working so hard, and to see the songs touching people like they have is amazing,” Zimmerman says. “And to be Rookie of the Year for Billboard is such a big deal. I can’t wait to call my mom — she’s going to freak.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Ashley McBryde is sitting in a hotel room in Oxford, Miss., cracking up, thinking about the people who tried to tell her what to do. People like the staff at her first publisher, who laid out their version of Music Row Songwriting 101 to her early on.
“It was like, ‘Here’s who’s cutting records — so there can’t be any cursing, and it can’t be about drinking or staying the night with anyone,’ ” McBryde recalls. “What am I going to write about, corn dogs? That was really challenging, and the songs were terrible.”
The singer-songwriter can laugh about it now. Three critically acclaimed albums, six Grammy nominations and one win later, the 39-year-old Arkansas native has carved out a sweet spot between niche Americana and stadium-scale country-pop, where songwriting matters more than anything else.
But crafting that niche took McBryde years of pounding the Nashville pavement — so by the time she got the aforementioned unsatisfying publishing deal, she had honed her ability to work a crowd through endless bar gigs. “The music wasn’t as unusual as the way that she spoke,” Warner Music Nashville co-president Cris Lacy recalls of a 3rd & Lindsley showcase where McBryde performed in 2016. “There was a really clever wit and a different type of storytelling just in her banter.”
WMN held back, “just wanting to watch for a while,” in Lacy’s words, but manager John Peets signed on immediately after that show. “I’ll do this right now. This is amazing and doesn’t sound like anything else,” Peets remembers thinking. He told McBryde: “You never have to write a song that you hate ever again.”
McBryde’s differences from most prospective Nashville hit-makers drew Peets to her. “She was kind of on the front end of that regrounding in traditional country sounds that we’ve been seeing,” says Peets. “She wasn’t a 19-year-old blonde girl, either.”
Ashley McBryde photographed on May 3, 2023 at Skyway Studios in Nashville.
Diana King
With Peets’ help — putting her in rooms with veteran songwriters and encouraging her to write personal, honest songs — McBryde refined her writing to better match the sharp, between-songs banter that audiences had found so appealing. With her 2016 EP, Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, McBryde felt much closer to finding her voice. “Finally, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This tastes like the meal I would prepare,’ ” she says. It included “Bible and a .44,” a vivid, heartfelt homage to her father that helped her break through after fellow Peets client Eric Church invited her to sing it onstage at one of his shows; Lacy signed her to WMN soon after.
Since then, this year’s Country Power Players Groundbreaker has found success without much help from country radio. After more than a decade in the business and seven years on the country charts, McBryde has notched only one No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay list: her 2021 duet with Carly Pearce, “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.”
“It does piss me off when someone walks out of their mother’s womb into headlining arenas and releasing songs that go No. 1 instantly, 1,000%,” McBryde says. “Because if I put that person who skipped all the steps in a single bar I played in North Little Rock that’s full of bikers and truckers, they couldn’t catch anyone’s attention.”
Radio’s failure to reflect McBryde’s rise speaks to its entrenched problem of gender inequity. “It’s not because female artists haven’t been consistently making great music,” she says. “It’s just that it’s easier to play songs on the radio that sell trucks. I guess it’s sort of pendulum-like, and I think things are starting to swing back in a more equal direction.”
In her songs, McBryde is never explicitly political — yet she also doesn’t shy from topics like religion and inclusivity. “I was raised in a really, really rigid, strict Church of Christ home,” she says. “I was really successfully trained to fear, and we know that hate comes along with fear.” She’ll skip “Shut Up Sheila,” a potent rebuke of an imagined Bible-thumping relative off 2020’s Never Will, at some tour stops (it uses the word “goddamn”), but the refrain of “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” — “Hallelujah, Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers” — will never be censored. “It felt really good to say,” McBryde says of the track from 2022’s Lindeville, which, like Never Will, was nominated for best country album at the Grammys.
McBryde long wondered if she would ever get to the heart of Music Row, and now that she has, she still sometimes questions if she belongs. “You can’t change the direction the machine is going unless you’re inside it,” McBryde says. “You can’t change any of the rules unless you understand how it is played.”
Now she’s just trying not to push herself as hard as she felt she had to in those early days. She’s still working through the effects of a serious 2021 horseback riding accident and fought so hard to resume touring that at one point she was pushed up to the side stage in a wheelchair, then wheeled back to bed after her set. “On one hand, I’m a woman of country music, damn it, and this is what the f–k we’re made of,” she says. “On the other hand, something groundbreaking was learning to just stop and take care of myself.
“That’s something that’s different for me than it has ever been: I’m not in a hurry anymore,” McBryde concludes. “We’re good. It’s going to happen.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Kimberly Perry has launched her return to country music as a solo artist with her new song, “If I Die Young Pt. 2,” from her upcoming album, Bloom, out June 9 via RECORDS Nashville. The new song revisits one of the signature hits from her work as part of sibling trio The Band Perry, “If […]
Singer-songwriter Jelly Roll topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “Dead Man Walking” in May 2022, hit No. 1 on Country Airplay seven months later with “Son of a Sinner,” and went on to spend a record-setting 28 weeks atop the Emerging Artists chart. The Nashville-area native has sold-out shows at both Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Bridgestone Arena; he also took home multiple honors at the CMT Music Awards in April. Now, he’s on the cover of this year’s Billboard Country Power Players issue. On Friday (June 2), he will release the full-length project, Whitsitt Chapel.
During his cover story interview with Billboard‘s Melinda Newman in Nashville, Jelly Roll opened up about his journey from spending time behind bars to selling out arenas and topping the charts in multiple genres. Jelly Roll spoke of how, at age 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult.
“I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he told Billboard. “This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did.”
He also expressed a lingering bitterness over how the judicial system offered him such little opportunities for rehabilitation, despite his young age. Jelly Roll was facing a potential 20-year sentence, though he ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years of probation.
“They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he told Billboard. “I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt. I was charged as an adult years before I could buy a beer, lease an apartment, get a pack of cigarettes … I feel like the justice system at that point kind of parked me on my only set path.”
Given Tennessee’s zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, the charge is still on Jelly Roll’s record, and thus has lingering repercussions. Jelly Roll cannot vote, volunteer at most nonprofits or own a firearm. Until recently, he also could not get a passport, which impacted his ability to tour internationally. He also told Billboard about his attempt to buy a home in a gated community with its own golf course (Jelly Roll is an avid golfer); he was ultimately rejected.
“Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at,” he told Billboard. “My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago.”
He recalls the moment he began to turn his life around, after learning of the birth of his daughter, Bailee. When he was 23, Jelly Roll was incarcerated for drug dealing. Then, on May 22, 2008, he learned that his daughter had been born.
“I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different. I have to figure this out right now,” he said.
He was transferred from the violent offenders’ unit to the education unit and began studying for his GED, passing the test on his first attempt. After his release, he met his daughter on her second birthday. Bailee now resides with Jelly Roll and his wife, Bunnie, whom he married in 2016. He calls Bunnie “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he says. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”