Carter Faith was on an airplane when the news caught up with her in September. The 26-year-old from Davidson, N.C., had earned her first CMA Awards nomination, for New Artist of the Year.
“Currently crying on a plane rn!!!” she posted on Instagram, as Country Now reported. Then she handed the credit to home. She wrote that “because my parents gave me the space to follow my dream, I eventually got the guts to try.” She added, “So this is not just for me it’s for them too.”
She is up against Avery Anna, Emily Ann Roberts, Tucker Wetmore and Stephen Wilson Jr. The 60th CMA Awards air Nov. 18 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, with Lainey Wilson as host.
For most of her childhood, music in Carter’s family came out of a car speaker. Her grandfather drove the kids around with his tapes playing. “He would drive us to preschool or to McDonald’s or whatever and let us climb in the front seat and play cassettes in his car,” she told PBS Charlotte’s “Carolina Impact” this spring. He loved Jim Croce and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Her dad ran a quiz from the driver’s seat. “What band is this? What’s the lead singer’s name? What song is this?” she remembered. He was a big Eric Church fan, and Carter sang along from the back. “I also learned to sing by singing harmonies in the car,” she said on Amazon Music’s “Country Heat Weekly” last year, as Whiskey Riff reported.
Still, nobody at home sang for an audience. “None of my family was musical,” Carter told The Nash News in 2021. “We all just loved listening to amazing music and seeing concerts.”
She was a shy kid on top of that. Her parents, she told PBS, “my whole life had to convince me to get on stage and sing.” So when she decided in 2018 that she wanted to move to Nashville, they were ready. She enrolled in a songwriting program at Belmont University.
PBS Charlotte went back to Davidson for this profile. Carter talks about her grandfather’s tapes and her dad’s car quizzes early in the piece.
Carter talks about growing up in Davidson
Her dad once chased a dream of his own. On Bobby Bones’ podcast, The BobbyCast, Carter said he played baseball growing up, and a baseball scholarship got him out of his small town and into college. Looking back, she said, “he was a dreamer.”
Baseball turned up in her story early, too. In 2018, the year she finished high school, Carter sang the national anthem before an Orioles game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Her mom grew up nearby in Bowie, Md.
Carter sings the national anthem at Camden Yards in 2018
On that same BobbyCast visit, Bobby asked her the question she had already answered once for The Nash News. “Was anybody musical in your family?”
This time Carter had more to tell. “My dad’s mom was musical,” she said. “She was a cruise ship singer.”
So her grandmother on her dad’s side had sung for passengers out on the water, and Carter grew up never knowing it. “It was never something I knew though until like trying to know who’s musical in my family,” she said.
The family has another musician now as well. Her younger brother, Griffin Jones, makes music under the name Grifdorf.
Carter’s debut album, “Cherry Valley,” came out Oct. 3, 2025. This year it earned an Album of the Year nomination at the ACM Awards. Here she is singing one of its songs on the ACM stage.
Carter sings “If I Had Never Lost My Mind” at the ACM Awards
The PBS crew also filmed Carter at one of her own shows this year, a long way from the shy girl who had to be talked onto a stage. At one point she stopped to tell the crowd, “Y’all, my family is here.”