genre country

Nashville’s community came to the aid of those in need this Thanksgiving week. Country artist Tracy Lawrence has been hosting his annual Mission: Possible Turkey Fry and Benefit Concert for two decades, frying up turkeys and helping put together Thanksgiving meals for those in the community.

This year, the event weathered a snag after a refrigerated truck broke down, spoiling 650 of the 3,600 allotment of turkeys. Lawrence then asked for the community’s help. Nashville’s denizens, including country artist and “Wind Up Missin’ You” hitmaker Tucker Wetmore, came to his aid.

Wetmore himself went to Costco and loaded his truck with more than 100 turkeys and took them to the turkey fry, helping Lawrence and many others cook up the poultry. Several artists and celebrities also helped out with the turkey fry, including Jamey Johnson, Charles Esten, Dustin Lynch, Meghan Patrick, John Crist, Rodney Atkins, Clint Black, Rhett Akins and Frank Ray, while artists such as Atkins, Black, Akins, Esten and Steve Wariner also donated turkeys.

Overall, people from Nashville and surrounding areas donated more than 2,400 turkeys, for a total of 5,350 cooked and frozen distributed turkeys, helping to provide upward of 50,000 meals.

“I cannot imagine a better 20th anniversary for the Mission:Possible Turkey Fry and Concert,” Lawrence said in a statement. “What started as a day of uncertainty turned into a day of our community coming together in a way I couldn’t have imagined. Between the fry itself and the benefit concert with my friends Gretchen, Chris, Eric and Halfway to Hazard, I was blown away once again by the kindness of our neighbors.”

The music portion of the event featured artists including Lawrence, Gretchen Wilson, Chris Cagle, Eric Paslay and Halfway to Hazard performing at Luke Combs’ Category 10. The event raised $355,000 for Mission: Possible from ticket sales, silent auction items and artist donations, and presented a check to Nashville Rescue Mission for $250,000. This year, the event also hosted a canned food drive on behalf of Second Harvest Food Bank to help those impacted by food insecurity.

See a video from the event below:

Megan Moroney and Morgan Wallen were never officially dating, or exclusive, as far as their fans know. But there was definitely something between the two country stars a few years ago when they were linked following the release of Moroney’s suggestive “Tennessee Orange,” a love song about a Georgia girl who falls in love with a charming Tennessee man that hit No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October of 2022.

“I think Morgan is great and his new album [I’m the Problem] is great,” Savannah, Ga. native Moroney told People magazine about the latest album from Sneedville, Tennessee’s Wallen, 32. “Him and I are still friends.”

Moroney, 28, said she is well-aware that people love to dig into the unspoken meaning behind her lyrics, telling the magazine that she is focused on “being honest” in her songs. “I never let the possibility that people might speculate who [a song] is about, stop me from writing about how this situation made me feel,” said the singer. In “Tennessee Orange” Moroney calls to tell her mom — and warn her dad — that “I met somebody and he’s got blue eyes/ He opens the door, and he don’t make me cry/ He ain’t from where we’re from, but he feels like home/ Yeah, he’s got me doing things I’ve never done.”

At the time, fans speculated about the possible Wallen link to “Tennessee Orange,” after the country stars started commenting on each other’s Instagram posts. In a 2024 Call Her Daddy podcast appearance Moroney said the pair “never exclusively” dated and wouldn’t confirm that the song is about Wallen, who she met right before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when she was a senior in college.

“We were friends for a long time. We were not just friends. And now we’re friends,” she explained at the time. “I feel like he’s a very private person. We weren’t exclusively dating ever and I think that both of our schedules… when we tried to hang out it was like, ‘OK, we have this one day of the whole month where we’re both maybe in town and then the other has something going on.’”

Between her song, the Instagram comments and Wallen’s 2023 One Thing at a Time song “Tennessee Fan” — about him meeting a sorority girl from Alabama who rolls her allegiance over to Tennessee after he takes her to a Vols college football game — fans had lots of thoughts on their potential love affair.

And though Wallen has not spoken in public about their connection, in a 2022 interview with SiriusXM’s The Highway in 2022, Moroney confirmed that the Vols shirt she wore in a promo photo for “Tennessee Orange” belonged to Wallen.