Chris Stapleton’s wife, Morgane, knew what he wanted from his first solo album. “He said, ‘I would like to make a record that would make my dad proud,'” she told Billboard in 2025. “And that’s the root. I think he’s been chasing that ever since.”
That record was “Traveller,” and it turned the Kentucky songwriter into a star. Eleven years later, he is up for Entertainer of the Year at the CMA Awards on Nov. 18, one of his four nominations this year.
His friends saw it coming long before the awards did. This week Luke Bryan told Billboard that Nashville’s songwriters were “praying that the world would learn about Chris Stapleton the artist, not just a songwriter.”
His dad was Herbert Stapleton Jr. The family lived in Staffordsville, just outside Paintsville in eastern Kentucky, the same coal country Loretta Lynn came from. “My dad was a coal miner. He worked long hours his whole life,” Chris told Cowboys & Indians. “I think about him every day.”
Herbert also filled the house with music. “My dad listened to all the great country too,” Chris told Billboard, naming Waylon, Willie and Merle Haggard.
And he was a praying man. “My dad was a very straight arrow, prayed-at-every-meal kind of guy,” Chris told Taste of Country in 2015.
One holiday at his parents’ house, around 2005, Herbert skipped grace. Chris could not remember him ever doing that before. Later, Chris was waiting on Morgane, then his girlfriend, to get ready at her apartment. “She said, ‘Well, why don’t you just write a song?'” he recalled. He wrote “Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore” in about 10 minutes.
Chris told the story to Willie Geist on NBC’s Sunday TODAY, with Morgane right beside him.
Chris tells Sunday TODAY how he wrote the song in 10 minutes
The song sat on a shelf for years. In October 2013, Herbert passed away. “That really set me off,” Chris said. Morgane bought him an old Jeep, and on a long drive across the country he wrote the song “Traveller.” He also went back to the one he had written in 10 minutes. “It got weight after my father passed away,” he said. “It felt like time to record it.”
The band cut it in the summer of 2014 at a Tennessee studio called The Castle. Drummer Derek Mixon had lost his own dad about a year before. “‘Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore’ might have been a first take because I don’t think any of us could get through it more than once,” Mixon told Billboard.
In February 2015, a few months before the album came out, Chris played the Ryman Auditorium for a crowd of radio programmers and DJs in town for the Country Radio Seminar. He dedicated the song to his dad. Before he sang, he set something on a stool beside him. He didn’t look out at the audience, NPR reported. He stared down at the stool.
It was a big chunk of coal.
NPR’s Jewly Hight later saw it on a coffee table at his home and asked if she could pick it up. “It’s heavy,” Chris told her. “That sat on my dad’s desk for years. That was the first piece of coal he ever mined.”
The room at the Ryman stood up for him that day. Rolling Stone wrote that it was the first of several standing ovations at the show. That November, “Traveller” won Album of the Year at the CMA Awards, and Chris also took home Male Vocalist and New Artist of the Year. After the show, Rare Country asked him about the man behind it all.
Chris is asked what role his dad played, on CMA night 2015
On Nov. 18, Chris goes back to the CMA stage with a shot at the biggest award of the night. Morgane heard the difference back then. “Chris can crank out songs,” she told NPR in 2015. “And then you have songs like on ‘Traveller’ that he’s written, and it’s almost like he can’t not connect with them.”