You’d think a country superstar could treat her parents to anything she liked. Carrie Underwood has found out it’s not that easy when your mom and dad would rather you didn’t.
Steve Underwood, Carrie’s dad, worked as a paper mill operator. Her mom, Carole, taught elementary school for 25 years. They raised Carrie in Checotah, a small town in eastern Oklahoma, and they still live there today.
They didn’t even move houses.
“So they still live where I grew up, in the house I grew up in,” Carrie said in a SiriusXM interview, as quoted by Showbiz Cheat Sheet.
Fame didn’t change them, either. Her parents have never wanted her spending money on them, even after she became famous. A lot of grown kids know that feeling. You finally have a little something to give back, and Mom and Dad wave it away.
So what do you do when your dad actually wants something? In this SiriusXM clip, Carrie talks about how her parents deal with having a famous daughter, and it’s a sweet look at the family behind the star.
Carrie on how her mom and dad handle her fame
Carrie remembered the time her dad had his eye on something. It wasn’t a fancy car or a fishing boat.
“I remember one Christmas there was this generator my dad wanted for welding or something…” she said.
A welding generator. That was the dream gift.
Carrie saw her chance. “I was like, ‘I’ll get it for him,'” she said. She told the price, too: “It was $400.”
And then came the funny part.
“I got in trouble.”
Her dad wasn’t mad. Carrie tells it as a joke on herself, and he was just being the same proud, humble man who raised her. In her telling, his words were: “She doesn’t need to be spending her money on me.”
You can almost hear every dad in America saying the same thing.
Carrie’s answer to her parents is the one plenty of us have tried. “Oh my gosh, let me do anything, please.”
We don’t know what happened to the generator after that. But it’s easy to see where Carrie gets her down-to-earth side. A girl from a small Oklahoma town grew up to be a star, and her dad still didn’t want her making a fuss over him.
There is one perk of her fame that her parents do enjoy. They love going to award shows with her, and her mom especially gets a kick out of it.
“She’s so cute, and she just loves being there and seeing everybody,” Carrie said of her mom.
The CMA Awards are coming up next Wednesday, Nov. 18, and gift-shopping season is just getting started. If you’ve got a parent who won’t let you spend a dime on them, you’ll probably hear a little of your own family in the way Carrie tells this one.