Plenty of grandpas have a story they tell at every family dinner. Kacey Musgraves’ grandpa has a better one than most.
Kacey is the Texas singer up for Female Vocalist of the Year at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov 18, on ABC. She’s one of five women in the category. She also has a song on “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping” album, which comes out Friday, Nov 13.
But this story starts with a Christmas present.
Willie Nelson, the country music legend, hosts poker games of his own. A few years before 2021, Kacey came up with a gift idea for her grandpa that no store could match. She has said she gave him money for Christmas to use as his buy-in for one of Willie’s games.
So Grandpa got his seat at the table. Kacey was there to watch.
And her grandpa beat Willie Nelson at poker.
That put Kacey in a funny spot. She adores Willie, her “fantasy grandpa,” as she jokingly calls him. She told Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” that she honestly didn’t know which side to take. “I was like, ‘Do I root for my grandpa or my fantasy grandpa over here? Like, I don’t know.'”
She has nothing but warm words for Willie. “I love him because he’s just this great equalizer,” she said. She tells the poker story herself in her 2021 Colbert interview, in the part where Colbert asks her about Willie, so skip ahead to that section if you’re short on time.
Kacey tells Stephen Colbert about the poker game
That night made her grandpa a hometown legend. As Kacey put it, “But it was incredible, and then my grandpa went back home to Texas” and he “was the talk of the town after that.”
Years later, he got a whole new kind of spotlight.
In 2025 Kacey went back to Lost Highway Records, the label that first signed her in 2011. Her first release there was a cover of “Lost Highway,” an old country classic. The singer-songwriter Leon Payne recorded it in 1948, and country great Hank Williams made it famous in 1949.
Her grandpa, who was 88 when he recorded it, happened to be in town. “He was visiting Nashville and I wanted his voice on this, so we convinced him to get in the vocal booth,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
He recorded the radio-style DJ introduction that opens the song. So the first voice you hear on Kacey’s “Lost Highway” belongs to her grandpa.
For Kacey, it meant a lot. “He was always one of the biggest champions of my singing and learning traditional country music,” she said.
Listen closely to the first few seconds of the track. That’s Grandpa.
Kacey’s “Lost Highway,” with her grandpa’s voice at the start
“It’s hard to put into words just how beautiful that is for me. I’ll have that forever, you know?” Kacey said.
The track has another small treasure in it, too. Kacey plays a rattlesnake tail she bought at a Texas junk shop as a shaker on the song. Early folk musicians kept rattlesnake tails in their guitars for luck.
A fan channel also posted behind-the-scenes footage from the making of “Lost Highway,” for anyone who wants a closer look at how the record came together.
Behind the scenes of Kacey’s “Lost Highway”
The CMA Awards are on Nov 18. Until then, play the opening of “Lost Highway” one more time and listen for the Texas grandpa who once beat Willie Nelson at poker.