“There’s seven prisons in Huntsville’s greater area and in my family you either go to prison or you work for the prison.”
Cody Johnson said that in a 2014 interview with Bud Light Texas. In his family, it was simply the truth.
These days the Texas singer is chasing the biggest prize in country music. On Nov. 18, he is up for Entertainer of the Year at the 60th CMA Awards, live on ABC from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. He has four nominations in all, including Male Vocalist of the Year and two for his song “The Fall.”
Cody grew up just outside Huntsville. “I was around the prison system my entire life because my dad worked there for 32 years,” he told Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2021. His dad also played music at church, and he taught Cody his first guitar chords.
When Cody turned 18, he went to work for the prison too. “I started there when I was 18, just because that’s what my dad did,” he said.
He worked intake first and called it “an eye-opening experience.” Later he moved to maximum security, and then he rode horses as a field boss.
In 2017, he told Harry Connick Jr. on his talk show “Harry” why the job made sense. “It had benefits, it was a state paycheck,” he said, as Parade reported. He added that “it’ll make you grow up fast.”
Harry’s show posted a short clip of that conversation.
Cody tells Harry Connick Jr. about his prison job
Music kept pulling at him. Cody rode bulls from age 15 until he was 19, and he was playing bar gigs around Texas with his band. The shows kept coming, and his day job started to feel the strain.
That’s when the warden he worked for pulled him aside. Cody shared what the man told him with Cowboys & Indians.
“You need to quit this job and go play music,” the warden said. “You’re already playing so many gigs that you’re having trouble showing up for work on time.”
Then he added a promise. “Prison will always be here,” he told Cody.
Cody told the story again on The Bobby Bones Show in 2022, Parade reported. He admitted he had been holding himself back. “That was kind of my ceiling. That’s where I kept myself, and I just never was happy,” he said. As he remembered it, the warden put it plainly: “There’s always going to be people in prison, and there will always be room for a job here.”
So Cody walked away, and his wife, Brandi, walked with him. “When I quit the prison, she quit going to college and took two jobs so that we could go out and play music,” he told Cowboys & Indians. On Bobby’s show, he summed up what came next: “We went full force.”
The Bobby Bones Show posted a long sit-down where Cody talks about his early career and the job he had before music.
Cody talks with Bobby Bones about the job he had before music
Cody spent years building a following in Texas on his own label before signing with a major Nashville label in 2019. In 2024, his album “Leather” won Album of the Year at the CMA Awards.
This year, “The Fall” is up for both Single and Music Video of the Year.
Cody’s CMA-nominated video for “The Fall”
The prison never fully left his life. Cody told Taste of Country Nights, in an interview the outlet shared in January, that former inmates from his prison days have reached out to him since he became a star. “Generally, we’ll just have a beer and be like, ‘Man, this is awkward,'” he said. His advice to each of them takes two words: “Stay out.”
On Nov. 18, the former field boss from Huntsville will be sitting in Bridgestone Arena, waiting to hear whether his name gets called for the biggest award of the night.