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Chris Stapleton

Musician · b. 1978 · Staffordsville, Kentucky · Also a recording artist
Best known for Lead Vocals Guitar Songwriter

Chris Stapleton spent a decade as one of Nashville’s most-recorded songwriters and the voice of a bluegrass band before most listeners knew his name, then became one of the biggest singers in American music more or less overnight. The gravelled, blues-soaked voice was the same the whole time — what changed was who was standing in front of the microphone.

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  • Born 15 April 1978 in Lexington, Kentucky, and raised in Staffordsville, a small community in Johnson County in the eastern coalfields.
  • Co-founded the SteelDrivers and sang lead and played guitar with them from 2007 until 2010, on the band’s self-titled debut and Reckless. Most of that material he wrote with the band’s mandolin player, Mike Henderson.
  • Wrote or co-wrote hundreds of Nashville cuts along the way, including Kenny Chesney’s number one “Never Wanted Nothing More” — written with the bluegrass singer Ronnie Bowman — Darius Rucker’s “Come Back Song,” and George Strait’s “Love’s Gonna Make It Alright.”
  • Fronted the southern rock band the Jompson Brothers between the SteelDrivers and his solo work.
  • Traveller (2015) took the CMA Album of the Year and turned him into a headliner; his reading of “Tennessee Whiskey” — a Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove song that George Jones had cut in 1983 — became the record most people know him by. Numerous Grammys have followed.
  • Here he turns up on both sides of the catalog: as the writer of the SteelDrivers’ “Heaven Sent,” “Hear the Willow Cry” and “Where Rainbows Never Die,” and as the singer on “Tennessee Whiskey.”

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