Luke Combs heads into CMA week with a fresh No. 1. His song “Rethink Some Things” reached the top of the MusicRow radio chart, MusicRow reported on Nov. 6. Next Wednesday, Nov. 18, he is up for three CMA Awards, including Entertainer of the Year, a prize he already won in 2021 and 2022.
The North Carolina native and his wife, Nicole, married in 2020 and have three young sons, Tex, Beau and Chet.
For a man who now plays to huge crowds with a guitar on his shoulder, his start with the instrument was awfully slow. Last December, his mom was going through old family pictures and found a few from Christmas morning in 1999. Luke shared them on Instagram. “This was Christmas 1999, I was 9 years old and my parents had just given me my first guitar,” he wrote. The photos show a little boy in a recliner, wearing plaid pajama pants and a visor, trying to figure the thing out.
Then he added the honest part. “Crazy how life changes because for many years after these photos were taken I had no interest at all in that guitar.”
Singing was another story. He sang in school musicals and in his church choir. In an October 2025 interview with country star Clint Black, for Black’s show “Talking in Circles,” Luke said singing made him happy. “Girls thought it was cool, which didn’t happen a lot for me,” he joked.
The guitar, on the other hand, felt like his parents’ idea. As a kid, he said, his thinking went like this: “My parents want me to do this so I’m not doing it because it’s not cool.”
He went off to Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. “I was in college, and college was coming to an end,” he told Black. “I was like man, what am I gonna do?” And he still had a guitar sitting in the closet.
That is when his mom stepped in. “My mom came out, and she was like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re sitting around sulking,'” Luke said.
Then she pulled out her secret weapon. “You know Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, they didn’t start playing guitar until they were 21.”
Luke happened to be 21 himself, and his answer came fast. “And I was 21, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m way better than those guys.'”
He still isn’t sure his mom had her facts straight. “I don’t even know if that is true or not,” he admitted.
It worked anyway. “So I started playing,” he said. He taught himself, and he told Black he “spent all summer playing on my porch.” Within about a year he was writing his own songs. He played his first show at the Parthenon Cafe in Boone.
Luke tells Clint Black about his mom’s pep talk
Their full sit-down covers his early days before Nashville.
It wasn’t the first time he told the story. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2023, he remembered his mom putting it this way: “Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, they didn’t even learn to play guitar till they were 21 years old.”
Luke tells Joe Rogan the same story in 2023
The part about his mom starts about three and a half minutes in.
This past summer, on his Pawn Shop Guitar Tour, Tim McGraw gave a guitar to a young fan named Finn, who brought up Luke on stage. Tim asked the boy if he would promise to learn to play if Luke asked him. Finn said yes. “And thank you to Luke Combs for getting this guy to play this guitar,” Tim told the crowd, according to Country Now.
Luke sings “Rethink Some Things,” his new No. 1
Here is the official studio video, with Luke at the mic.
Tim is set to perform at the CMA Awards next Wednesday night on ABC, the same night Luke finds out if he is Entertainer of the Year again. Maybe somebody will finally ask Tim if Luke’s mom had it right.