“Hey, do you want to come sing tonight?”
Amy Grant put that question to her youngest daughter, Corrina, one December evening in 2016. Amy was on her way to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where she and her husband, Vince Gill, play a run of Christmas shows every year. Corrina was 15.
Amy told the story to the music site Popdose in an interview published Dec. 12, 2016. Every quote from her in this article comes from that conversation, so they are 10 years old. They are worth a second look this week.
This Friday, Nov. 13, Amy releases “Tennessee Christmas (10th Anniversary Edition)”. It adds four new tracks to her 2016 holiday album. One of them is “From The Cold (The Family Mix)”, and the family in the title is real. The label’s announcement says it “includes Vince Gill and their daughter Corrina Gill.”
For readers who know the voices better than the family tree, Amy is the singer of “Baby Baby” and “Every Heartbeat.” Vince is the Country Music Hall of Famer behind “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” They married in 2000. Corrina, born in March 2001, is their only child together. Amy has three older children and Vince has a daughter, Jenny. “We’re a blended family of five kids,” Amy told Popdose.
She wanted all five on the 2016 album. Two could not make the short studio window that summer. “So I felt like three out of five, that was pretty good,” she said. The album credits list Corrina, Jenny and Amy’s daughter Sarah Chapman as singers.
Amy explained what she was after in a short film her label made about the album in 2016.
Amy explains the idea behind “Tennessee Christmas” in 2016
That brings us back to the question Amy asked on her way out the door.
Corrina’s older sister Jenny was already going. She sang backup in the show and had a solo that night. Corrina had other plans, and her mother gave Popdose the reason in one short sentence: “She had too much homework.”
Amy took it in stride. “You’ve got to do your homework when you’re 15!” she said, laughing.
The funny part is that Corrina was not shy about singing. Two nights before the interview, by Amy’s count, the teenager had joined her mom on “Grown-Up Christmas List,” and a video of it went up on Amy’s Facebook page. Nobody had planned her part.
“She didn’t even ask,” Amy said. “She sang a harmony part on the second verse and it was like pedal to the metal.”
Then came the review only a mother can give. Amy said she told her, “Well, you were very bold, but there were certainly some wrong notes in there!”
Corrina is 25 now, and she kept singing. Vince’s own channel has a clip of the two of them performing “When My Amy Prays,” the song he wrote about his wife. Corrina plays the keyboard beside him.
Vince Gill and Corrina perform “When My Amy Prays” together
Neither Amy nor Vince has said much in public yet about recording the Family Mix, and the announcement carried no quotes from them. The track itself arrives Friday with the rest of the album.
After that, the family heads back to the same stage. Christmas at the Ryman returns from Dec. 14 to Dec. 23. In 2023, Amy and Vince became the first artists to headline the Ryman 100 times. Whether Corrina sings this year may depend on what else is on her calendar.