Chris Stapleton, the Nashville songwriter whose biggest hit belongs to someone else

Chris Stapleton

Photo: Steve Kwak – Maryland GovPics / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1957 Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.
Occupation	Botanist
Awards	Grammy Award for Best Country Album · Grammy Award for Best Country Song · Grammy Award for Best Country Solo Performance · CMA Award for Album of the Year · CMA Award for New Artist of the Year · ACM Artist-Songwriter of the Decade

Chris Stapleton spent a decade as one of the busiest songwriters in Nashville, handing other men their number ones, and then became a star with a song he did not write. That paradox still sits at the centre of his career. The recording that made him, Tennessee Whiskey, is a cover of a country standard that two earlier singers had already taken up the charts. It is now the first country song the Recording Industry Association of America has certified double diamond. Meanwhile the man who once filled notebooks for a living fills stadiums with a catalogue he has not added to in almost three years, and when people ask about new songs he tends to shrug.

He grew up in Staffordsville, a small town in eastern Kentucky just outside Paintsville, in a family of coal miners; his father, Herbert Stapleton Jr., worked as an engineer in the mines. Christopher Alvin Stapleton had been delivered in a Lexington hospital on 15 April 1978, and the coalfield town is the place he means when he talks about home. At Johnson Central High School he was class valedictorian and played football, three times lining up against Tim Couch, later the first pick in the NFL draft. In 1996 he went to Nashville to study engineering at Vanderbilt University. He did not stay long. Once he met someone who was paid a salary to write songs, the degree lost its appeal.

Sea Gayle Music signed him as a writer, and over the next ten years he wrote more than a thousand songs. Six of them reached number one on the country charts in other voices: Kenny Chesney’s Never Wanted Nothing More, Josh Turner’s Your Man, George Strait’s Love’s Gonna Make It Alright, Darius Rucker’s Come Back Song and Luke Bryan’s Drink a Beer among them. He met Morgane Hayes, a writer at the publishing house next door, and they married in 2007. She would become his harmony singer, his sounding board and, eventually, his co-producer.

His own voice, a tenor with the grain of Southern soul, first reached record buyers through a bluegrass band. Stapleton fronted the SteelDrivers on their first two Rounder albums, which brought the group Grammy nominations, before he left in 2010 to concentrate on his family. A Southern rock outfit, the Jompson Brothers, followed and toured regionally until 2013, the year Mercury Nashville signed him as a solo act. The start was not promising. His first single, What Are You Listening To?, stalled, and the album it was meant to launch was never released.

The record that did come out, Traveller, was made with the producer Dave Cobb at RCA Studio A in Nashville, with a small band, Morgane on harmonies and a sound that looked back to the 1970s on purpose. It arrived in May 2015 and entered the Billboard 200 at a modest 14. Six months later Stapleton walked onto the stage of the Country Music Association Awards with Justin Timberlake and sang Tennessee Whiskey and Timberlake’s Drink You Away. He went home with Album of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year and New Artist of the Year, and Traveller climbed to number one. The album and its title track won two Grammys, and the record became, by Billboard’s count, the best-selling country album of the decade.

The “overnight success” label that followed was always a little absurd. Stapleton was 37 that night, with fifteen years of professional writing behind him, and the song that broke him belonged to Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove, who wrote it in 1981. David Allan Coe had cut it first and stalled at number 77; George Jones took it to number two in 1983. Stapleton’s slow, blues-heavy reading was never even sent to radio as a single, yet it reached the top of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. There is something uncomfortable in that for a writer of his output: the record most people know him for showcases a voice rather than a pen. The industry rewarded the voice, and it took two more albums of his own material for the songwriter to come back into focus.

From A Room: Volume 1 and From A Room: Volume 2, both from 2017 and both recorded in that same Nashville studio, each debuted at number two, and Broken Halos gave him a number one at country radio. That year he also launched the All-American Road Show, the touring banner he has used ever since. Starting Over followed in 2020, with Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers in the band. Around the albums he became the collaborator other genres call: Say Something with Justin Timberlake went top ten on the Hot 100, and he turned up on records by Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift and Adele. In February 2023 he sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Higher, co-produced with Morgane and Cobb, came out that November and opened at number three.

Since then the trophies have kept coming even without a new album. White Horse won two Grammys in 2024, It Takes a Woman won another in 2025, and in February 2026 Bad As I Used To Be, his song for the soundtrack of the racing film F1, won Best Country Solo Performance for a third year in a row. That made twelve Grammys from twenty-six nominations. The standalone work has been scattered and often borrowed from his own past: a duet with Miranda Lambert, A Song To Sing, and Heart Letting Go, a song he co-wrote years ago for Ronnie Dunn, recorded anew for Netflix‘s Nobody Wants This. Business ventures took up some of the space, among them a whiskey made with Buffalo Trace and a Daytona 500 entry fielded with Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team.

The silence on new songs is deliberate, by his own account. Asked by Rolling Stone in February whether he had been writing, he answered with one word: “Nope.” On the New Heights podcast he said he still enjoys it but does not “do a lot of that anymore”, and reports from the same period tie the slowdown to wanting more time with his family. Then, on 1 August, a storm held his show at Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati for more than an hour, and when he finally came out he told the crowd, “We might try a song we wrote about 10 minutes ago.” Nobody has released it, and nobody has announced a sixth album.

What he does have is the road. The 2026 leg of the All-American Road Show opened at Nissan Stadium in Nashville on 23 May and passed through Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ford Field in Detroit and Fenway Park in Boston. On The Late Show in May he sang Willie Nelson’s Living in the Promiseland with Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s harmonica player and an old ally of his own records. In September the CMA gave him four nominations, including Entertainer of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year. A bout of flu this week forced him to push back the final dates of the tour: Kansas City moves to 14 and 15 October and Lincoln, Nebraska, to 26 October. After that comes the CMA ceremony in Nashville on 18 November, where the songwriter who stopped writing may once again be honoured for singing.