Chris Stapleton: Country’s Breakout Star Talks Big Year, New Music
There’s an inscription inside Chris Stapleton’s wedding ring that doubles as one of the highlights of his concerts: “You Are My Sunshine.” Before he and his wife Morgane said, “I do,” the former Ms. Hayes had the title to the oft-covered Jimmie Davis classic secretly engraved in Stapleton’s wedding band.
Dave Cobb — the producer behind Stapleton’s now gold-certified Traveller and the upcoming compilation Southern Family, on which the Stapletons perform “You Are My Sunshine” — is amazed to hear this. For all the time he and the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter have spent together, both in the studio and on the stage, Cobb never learned this intimate yet important detail.
“Yeah, it’s engraved in there,” Stapleton says quietly, slipping off his wedding ring. “That’s our story.”
Cobb is satisfied. “I never saw the inside of your wedding ring,” he says.
“‘Cause that’d be weird,” quips Morgane, the Mama Bear and wise-cracker of the musical family, which sends her husband into one of his huge, room-filling laughs.
Stapleton, Morgane and Cobb are gathered in the lobby of RCA Studio A, where Morgane, with help from Chris, is about to record “You Are My Sunshine” for Cobb’s concept album Southern Family. Despite a legacy of Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley all making albums there, the Nashville facility came inches away from the wrecking ball in 2014. Had the studio not been saved at the last minute by a Nashville philanthropist, Stapleton’s Traveller, as the Nashville Scene pointed out earlier this month, would have made tragic history as the very last album to be cut in the warm, woody room.
Instead, Traveller went on to achieve a more noble milestone, winning Album of the Year at the November CMA Awards and, thanks to an instantly legendary performance with Justin Timberlake, rocketing to the top of the all-genre Billboard 200, where it stayed for two weeks. Stapleton was now in the public consciousness, the subject of #WhoIsChrisStapleton tweets and a stream of articles and TV appearances. Even TMZ’s Harvey Levin was suddenly clued-in to the bearded, decidedly un-TMZ artist, referring to him colloquially on-air as “Stapleton,” as if he’d known the name for years.
For Stapleton, Morgane and Cobb all the attention has been a bit bewildering. “It’s like getting in a bad car wreck and you don’t feel like you’re hurt for a while,” says Cobb, who was producing a band in Germany when Traveller‘s surging sales figures came in (176,000 in the week after the CMAs). “I don’t think I slept for two days.”
The Stapletons, meanwhile, found themselves pondering the weight of it all.
“It’s just heavy glass, and it means a shit ton,” says Morgane, referring to her husband’s trio of CMA trophies, for Album, Male Vocalist and New Artist. “It was a performance and three awards, and life is completely different.”