“That parking lot became a home,” Lainey Wilson said this summer. “More than that, it became a place where I learned who I was as an artist.”
Those words ran in a June RFD-TV report from her hometown of Baskin, Louisiana. The Northeast Louisiana Music Trail had just unveiled a marker there for the man who owned that parking lot. It stands right beside the trail’s 2024 marker for Lainey.
On Nov. 18, Lainey hosts the 60th CMA Awards on ABC for the third year in a row. She is also up for three awards, including Entertainer of the Year.
Baskin is a farm town of about 170 people. Lainey left it for Nashville in August 2011 at age 19 and brought a camper trailer along. “It was a Flagstaff, it was like a 20-foot bumper pull,” she said on fellow country singer ERNEST’s podcast, “Just Being ERNEST,” in 2021. “I lived in it the first three years I was here and finished college in it.”
It wasn’t fancy. Taste of Country reported in 2017 that rain on the roof sounded like hail, but the heat worked and the studio owner gave her free water and electricity. She stuck it out.
That owner was Jerry Cupit, a songwriter and producer who also grew up in Baskin. In Nashville he worked with stars like George Jones and Tim McGraw, and he co-wrote “Jukebox Junkie,” a hit for Ken Mellons. In 2011, he was the only person Lainey knew in town. “So he was really my only contact that I knew,” she told ERNEST.
Jerry also became her teacher. “He is the one who taught me how to write a song,” she told Robin Roberts for the 2024 ABC News special “Lainey Wilson: Bell Bottom Country.” He pushed her to get specific. “Are you writing about a blue truck? How fast does the blue truck go?” she remembered him asking. “I think about that every time I sit down to write a song.”
Good Morning America shared a short look back at those camper years in 2022, ahead of that year’s CMA Awards.
Lainey remembers life in her camper
So why would a busy Nashville producer give a 19-year-old free parking for three years? The answer goes back to the late 1970s, and to Lainey’s grandfather.
When Jerry was a young man getting ready to chase music, Lainey’s Papaw helped him go. “My grandfather on my daddy’s side gave him a few hundred dollars to move to Nashville and get started,” Lainey told Robin Roberts. “That was back in the late ’70s.”
Jerry never forgot it. “Years later, in 2011, he remembered what my Papaw did for him and he returned the favor,” she said, “by letting me live in his studio parking lot for free.”
She told ERNEST the same story three years earlier. “My daddy’s daddy has always loved music,” she said, and he “just wanted to support it any way he could.”
Lainey’s grandmother, Madge Wilson, put Jerry’s place in the family simply in the RFD-TV report. “He was just her second daddy,” she said.
The two wrote hundreds of songs together, according to Lainey’s marker. Her first album came out on his Cupit label in 2014. Jerry passed away that same year, long before her big break with “Things a Man Oughta Know” in 2020.
Louisiana TV host Tammi Arender covered the day Baskin honored him this year. Ken Mellons came to town and sang “Jukebox Junkie” at the unveiling.
Baskin honors Jerry Cupit with a music trail marker
The two markers stand side by side among corn fields that Lainey’s dad still farms.
In a post about her old friend, Lainey wrote, “I carry a little piece of him with me every time I write.” The CMA Awards air Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC.