Christopher Alvin Stapleton[1][2] (born April 15, 1978) is an American country singer-songwriter and guitarist. Born in Kentucky, Stapleton moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1996 to earn an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University, but dropped out to pursue a career in music. Shortly after, he signed a contract with Sea Gayle Music to write and publish his music.[3]
Stapleton has been recognized with several awards; these include 10 Grammy Awards, 11 Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards, and 15 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards. He was named the ACM's Artist-Songwriter of the Decade.[8] In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Stapleton at number 170 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.[9]
Early life
Stapleton was born in Lexington,[10]Kentucky. His mother, Carol J. (née Mace) Stapleton, worked at the local health department and his father, Herbert Joseph Stapleton Jr. (1946–2013),[11][12] was an engineer in the coal mines. He comes from a family of coal miners.[13][14] He has an older brother, Herbert Joseph III and younger sister, Melanie Brooke.[15][16]
In 2001, Stapleton moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a music career. As a songwriter, he signed with the publishing house Sea Gayle Music, a deal he got shortly after moving to Nashville.[21]
In 2007, he became the frontman for the bluegrass group the SteelDrivers. They had two hit records; each peaked at number 2 on the bluegrass chart before Stapleton left in 2010.[22]
In 2010, Stapleton founded a Southern rock band called the Jompson Brothers.[23] The band was made up of Stapleton on vocals, Greg McKee on guitar, J.T. Cure on bass, and Bard McNamee on drums. They toured regionally until 2013 and at one point, opened for the Zac Brown Band.[24] The band independently released a self-titled album in November 2010.[25]
In 2013, Stapleton signed to Mercury Nashville, a division of Universal Music Group Nashville, as a solo artist.[26][27] His first single, "What Are You Listening To?", was released in October 2013, but did not perform as expected.[28] The single was part of a record that was recorded, but never released. Stapleton also cowrote the theme—"All-Nighter Comin'"—to the WSM-AM show The WSM All Nighter with Marcia Campbell, an American radio show with a large trucker following. He cowrote the song with Vince Gill and Al Anderson, with Gill featured on vocals on the track.[29] Songs written by Stapleton have been included on to the soundtracks of several feature films, including Valentine's Day,[30]Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip,[31] and Hell or High Water.[32]
At the 2014 CMT Artist of the Year event, Stapleton performed with Lady A, who played Stapleton's song, "Drink a Beer", which Luke Bryan had recorded, in honor of Bryan, who was unable to attend the ceremony due to a death in his family.[35] Stapleton had previously sung it during Bryan's 2013 CMA Awards performance of the same song.[28]
Solo studio albums
Stapleton's debut solo album, Traveller, was released on May 5, 2015.[36][37] It was recorded in Nashville's RCA Studio A. Stapleton co-produced the album with producer Dave Cobb.[38] On the album he plays guitar and sings with a live band made up of bass player J.T. Cure (from the Jompson Brothers), pedal steel player Robby Turner, drummer Derek Mixon, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and wife Morgane Stapleton singing harmonies.[39] Stapleton emphasized the importance of the band lineup that came together during the making and promotion of the record, saying the familiarity he had with Cure and Mixon (he has known and played with Cure for over 20 years), plus Cobb's producing which included contributing acoustic guitar in the recording process, added to the richness of making the record.[40]
Stapleton said he composed the title track, "Traveller", as he and his wife were driving through New Mexico on their way back to Nashville in a 1979 Jeep that she bought for him after his father died in 2013, which they had flown to Phoenix, Arizona to take possession of.[41][29] His wife helped him to sift through 15 years worth of songs to pick nine songs to start recording with.[42]
In January 2016, Stapleton performed "Either Way", a song he wrote with Kendall Marvel and Tim James, at the Country Radio Hall of Fame's Country Radio Seminar in Nashville. It was previously recorded by Lee Ann Womack for her 2008 album, Call Me Crazy.[59] The track would be featured on his second studio album From A Room: Volume 1. Released on May 5, 2017,[60]Volume 1 takes its name from Nashville's RCA Studio A, where it was recorded during the winter of 2016–17.[61] The same month he embarked on his All-American Road Show Tour.[62]Volume 1 was certified gold in the US the next month, eventually giving Stapleton his second CMA for Album of the Year,[63] and became the best-selling country album of the year.[64] His third studio album, From A Room: Volume 2, was released on December 1, 2017.[65] Both albums Volume 1 and Volume 2 debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 charts.[66]
Stapleton was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live for a second time on January 27, 2018, where he performed songs from From a Room: Volume 2 with Sturgill Simpson.[67] In March, "Broken Halos" off From A Room: Volume 1 reached the top of the Country Airplay chart.[68] It earned him the accolades for Song and Single of the Year at the 52nd CMAs, while he won Male Vocalist of the Year for a fourth time.[69]
On August 28, 2020, Stapleton released a single titled "Starting Over", a song he previously performed on tour. It is the lead single from his album of the same name and marks his first single since 2018's "Millionaire".[70] He released a second single, "Cold", on September 25, 2020, to further promote the project.[71] He went on to win Male Vocalist of the Year for the fourth time at the 2021 Country Music Association Awards, and Male Artist of the Year for the third time at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards.[72] At the latter, he performed "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" with Patty Loveless.[73]
On August 6, 2019, John Mayer invited Stapleton onstage at his concert to perform a song they had both written the day before, titled "I Just Remembered That I Didn't Care" that has yet to receive a studio release. He stayed onstage afterwards for a performance of Mayer's "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room".[78]
On July 5, 2019, Stapleton together with Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran released Blow, on which Stapleton contributed in songwriting and vocals. Bruno Mars played all instruments on the track except for the bass guitar.[79] The song was written in a basement in Nashville.[80]
Over the course of 2019 and 2020, Stapleton recorded and wrote songs with Mike Campbell, formerly the guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who is now working with his solo project the Dirty Knobs. In addition to Campbell and fellow Heartbreaker Benmont Tench having played on Stapleton's album Starting Over, Stapleton also featured on the Dirty Knobs' album Wreckless Abandon.[81]
Stapleton is a soul singer[94] with a tenor vocal range. After attending one of his concerts in 2015, Los Angeles Times' writer Randy Lewis opined his singing recalls "the note-bending style of country that traces to Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell and the gut-wrenching expressionism of blues and R&B perfected by Ray Charles", while his guitar performances elicits "memories of Texas blues rocker Stevie Ray Vaughan".[95] Stapleton has cited Charles, Otis Redding, and Freddie King as some of his music influences,[96][97] along with Kentucky-based country artists, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam and Patty Loveless: "the list goes on and on. Those names are just part of life in Kentucky. You can't help but be aware of them and be influenced by them."[10]
Personal life
Stapleton is married to singer-songwriter Morgane Stapleton. The couple met when they were working at adjacent publishing houses, married in 2007,[40] and live in Nashville.[7]
Stapleton and his wife have five children: a son born in 2009, a daughter born in 2010, twin sons born in 2018, and a son born in 2019.[98]