Ella Langley, the Alabama songwriter whose Choosin’ Texas outlasted every Hot 100 No. 1

Ella Langley

Photo: Rick Munroe / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 3, 1999 Hope Hull
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter
Awards	Academy of Country Music Award for New Female Artist of the Year · Academy of Country Music Award for Female Artist of the Year · Academy of Country Music Award for Single of the Year — Choosin' Texas · Academy of Country Music Award for Song of the Year — Choosin' Texas · Country Music Association Award for Musical Event of the Year — You Look Like You Love Me · Country Music Association Award for Single of the Year — You Look Like You Love Me · American Music Award for Favorite Country Female Artist · MTV Video Music Award for Best Country — Choosin' Texas

The song that now holds the longest reign in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 is a midtempo country lament about losing a man to a woman from Texas, and a remarkable number of Americans say they have never heard it. Ella Langley wrote Choosin’ Texas in roughly half an hour at a songwriting retreat, after Miranda Lambert told her about being pulled over with a pet kangaroo in the passenger seat and remarking on the officer’s Texas plates. The line that grew out of that story, about a man two-steppin’ around the room, has since outlasted Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You at the top of the chart. A year before that record fell, the Alabama singer had cancelled a month of concerts because she could no longer keep up with the pace her own breakthrough demanded.

Elizabeth Camille Langley grew up in Hope Hull, a rural community outside Montgomery, where she was born on May 3, 1999, into a musical family. She was homeschooled until seventh grade and learned to sing in Southern Baptist churches. Among her earliest musical memories is sitting beside her grandfather at the piano, singing Frog Went a-Courting. After he died, her father had his guitar restrung for her, and that same night, at 14, she looked up the chords to Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds and taught herself to play it. Her earliest audience, she has said, was the family’s cow pasture. She gave her first public performance at a talent show at Hooper Academy and, after graduating, enrolled at Auburn University to study forestry.

Forestry did not hold her for long. She co-wrote her first song, Clear the Clouds, with her aunt and spent two years playing bars and festivals around Alabama before moving to Nashville in 2019. There she worked the writers’ rounds and, in 2021, signed a publishing deal with Sony Music Publishing. The songwriting paid before the singing did: she co-wrote five tracks on Elle King’s Come Get Your Wife. In February 2023 Jamey Johnson introduced her at her Grand Ole Opry debut, and the following week she signed with Sony Music Nashville and Columbia. The EP Excuse the Mess arrived that May, a few weeks after That’s Why We Fight, a bruising duet with Koe Wetzel.

Her debut album, Hungover, came out in August 2024 and entered the Billboard 200 at a modest No. 77. A duet changed the trajectory. You Look Like You Love Me, a flirtatious barroom exchange with Riley Green, spread on TikTok, became her first Hot 100 entry and climbed to No. 1 on Country Airplay, where Langley was the only woman to reach the summit that year. The Country Music Association named it Musical Event of the Year that autumn and, a year later, Single and Song of the Year. Weren’t for the Wind followed as her first solo country radio No. 1, and a second Green duet, Don’t Mind If I Do, made it three. At the 2025 ACM Awards she took home five trophies, among them New Female Artist of the Year.

Then she stopped. In August 2025 Langley cancelled seven shows, including two dates on Morgan Wallen’s stadium tour and a show at Red Rocks, writing that she had been fighting sickness and was “feeling more run down than ever.” She has since spoken openly about depression and about the impostor syndrome that shadowed her through that spring’s awards season, and she pushed her second album into 2026 rather than rush a follow-up. In a format that treats a viral hit as a deadline, the delay looked like a gamble. In hindsight it bought her the most important year of her career.

Choosin’ Texas, released in October 2025 and co-produced by Lambert, debuted at No. 39 and reached No. 1 the following February, making her the first woman to top the Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay at the same time. Dandelion, the album built around it, arrived on April 10, 2026, named for a weed that survives almost anywhere and, as her makeup artist pointed out, brews into a liver-detox tea: the natural sequel to Hungover. It opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 169,000 equivalent units, the biggest streaming debut ever for a new country album by a woman in the lead. Rolling Stone’s Will Hermes described her as an artist “destined for the trenches that divide the indie Americana scene and the king-making world of country radio,” and the singles proved her equally at home in both camps: Be Her climbed to No. 2, held off only by Choosin’ Texas, and I Can’t Love You Anymore, her first duet with Morgan Wallen, reached No. 4. In May she won seven ACM Awards in a single night, breaking the record of six shared by Garth Brooks, Faith Hill and Chris Stapleton.

That scale has produced its own argument. When Choosin’ Texas logged its 23rd week on top in September and broke the record, a wave of listeners announced online that they had never heard it. Billboard’s Andrew Unterberger conceded that a song custom-designed to become the most indomitable No. 1 in Hot 100 history “probably wouldn’t look or sound like” this one. The data explains the disconnect: no blockbuster week, only 20 to 30 million streams every week for more than half a year and a radio audience that kept growing into the autumn. It is a hit that lives on country radio and on streaming playlists, and a listener who never visits either can miss it entirely. The record does not mean a shared mainstream has returned. It shows how far a song can travel inside one enormous audience without ever crossing into another’s line of sight.

Langley, a Christian who has lived in Nashville since 2019, has spent the autumn on her first arena headline run, the Dandelion Tour, built around a slate of women as opening acts, among them Kaitlin Butts and Avery Anna. On October 7 it reaches Red Rocks, the Colorado amphitheater she had to skip in 2025, ahead of two nights at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. On October 2 she and Lambert released Snakeskin Boots, an outlaw-tinged duet the two wrote together.

The next verdicts arrive within days of each other. On November 16 the Recording Academy announces its nominations, after leaving her out entirely at the 2026 Grammys, and on November 18 she walks into Bridgestone Arena as the leading nominee at the 60th CMA Awards, with nine nods that include her first for Entertainer of the Year. Nashville’s oldest institution now has to decide whether the woman behind the longest-running No. 1 in Hot 100 history is also its biggest draw.

Tags: singers, country, Choosin' Texas, Ella Langley, Miranda Lambert, Dandelion

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