“He’s the hardest-working person I know,” Lainey Wilson said of her dad, Brian, in a 2023 People story. This May, that Louisiana farmer walked her down the aisle. In less than two weeks, she’ll be running country music’s biggest night.
Lainey hosts the 60th CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov. 18, live on ABC from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. It’s her third year in a row as host, and she’s up for Entertainer of the Year and Female Vocalist of the Year.
Her wedding came first. On Sunday, May 10, she married Devlin “Duck” Hodges, a former NFL quarterback, at Ruskin Cave in Dickson, Tennessee. She arrived in a white horse-drawn carriage and walked down the aisle on her dad’s arm.
Brian is a fifth-generation farmer in Baskin, Louisiana, a farm town of about 170 people, where he grows corn, wheat and oats. On the Wilson place, the work came first. “He put us to work,” Lainey told People. “A lot of the time, if we wanted to spend time with him, we had to go out to the field and ride the tractor with him.”
There was music in that house as well. Lainey remembers her dad “sitting around the house and playing Hank Sr. ‘Hey Good Lookin'” when she was small, Holler reported in September. Her mama and her sister had a part in it, too. “Me, my mama and sister would make up dance routines, while my daddy was picking on the guitar,” she said.
So a dance with her daddy was always going to matter on her wedding day.
Lainey and Duck talked about the day with Extra on the ACM Awards red carpet in May. Seeing each other for the first time was the moment that stuck with her. “That was really special,” she said. “But just having our family and friends there, and it was a party.”
Lainey and Duck talk about their wedding day with Extra
The guests got their party. The song for the dance with Brian, though, was settled long before anyone booked a cave.
On Father’s Day in June, Lainey shared a video of that dance on Instagram. In it, she and her dad spin around the room while their guests watch. Under it, she explained the choice.
“I sang ‘Butterfly Kisses’ at my kindergarten graduation so of course it had to be my father daughter dance at the wedding,” she wrote. She signed off with “Happy Father’s Day, Deddy.”
“Butterfly Kisses” is the ballad Bob Carlisle wrote with Randy Thomas about a dad watching his daughter grow up. It came out in the spring of 1997 and went to No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart. Taste of Country says Lainey sang it at her kindergarten graduation the very next year, in 1998. In the Instagram clip, it’s reportedly Jeff Carson’s country version that plays.
Her mom remembers that day, too. Michelle Wilson, a schoolteacher, shows old childhood photo books near the start of Lainey’s Netflix documentary, “Keepin’ Country Cool.” “Lainey could sing,” she says. “She memorized the song ‘Butterfly Kisses’, and she sang that at her kindergarten graduation.”
The dance video itself is on Lainey’s Instagram. If you haven’t heard the song in a while, here is Bob Carlisle’s official video.
Bob Carlisle’s “Butterfly Kisses,” the song Lainey sang as a little girl
Michelle’s memories of young Lainey are part of that documentary, which came to Netflix in April. The official trailer gives you a feel for the film.
The official trailer for Lainey’s Netflix documentary
On Nov. 18, the kindergarten graduate from Baskin will walk out on the CMA stage as host for the third straight year. The show airs at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC and Disney+, and it streams on Hulu the next day. If the cameras find Brian in the crowd that night, you’ll know the song he and his girl share.