Nashville is a town of unsung heroes — of both “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” and session musicians who can play circles around the more celebrated front people. It’s also a town that usually waits until it’s far too late to recognize any of them, if at all. The Mississippi-born Charlie Worsham is all of these things: performer, player, songwriter, ally, and beloved member of the community. And last Friday, Vince Gill announced that Worsham would be the newest inductee to the Grand Ole Opry.
It’s about damn time a Music City institution got something so right.
The Grand Ole Opry, since it began as the WSM Barn Dance in 1925, is a uniquely country music legacy. Different from a hall of fame, it honors living artists who can regularly perform in the weekly broadcast as part of their membership. Its other requirements for induction, however, are a bit murky. Sales, touring impact, radio airplay, and peer recognition all play a role, but there are no set benchmarks that a candidate must hit. The Opry sometimes takes far too long to induct an artist, or it jumps too soon for someone clocking ephemeral country radio hits while skipping over a more deserving but less flashy option, like, say, Elizabeth Cook, who has racked up more than 400 Opry appearances and has yet to become a member. (Jelly Roll was inducted in March.)
Worsham, though, is the kind of choice the Grand Ole Opry ought to be making all along, especially as it faces its next 100 years. Not yet a “legacy” act nor a country radio superstar, he sets an important precedent for the kind of talent that should be welcomed into the elite group, and for what true “success” can look like beyond only Number Ones.
Growing up in Grenada, Mississippi, Worsham was a banjo and guitar picking prodigy, who actually appeared on the Grand Ole Opry when he was only 12 years old, the same year he landed the title of Junior National Banjo Champion. He moved to Nashville in 2006, after four years at the Berklee College of Music, just a semester short of graduating. Soon he was opening for names like Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift, and formed a bluegrass-inspired band, KingBilly, playing alongside the Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne.
Eventually signed to Warner Nashville, Worsham was on track to be the town’s next big thing: he could play like Vince Gill and Brad Paisley, with a boyish charm, pop sensibility, and deep admiration for the classics of the genre. Rubberband, his 2013 debut album, was supposed to be his country radio breakthrough, but without any Number One hits, it failed to hit the markers assigned to a major, marketable country artist.
When radio success didn’t quite come, Worsham didn’t try to pander and craft songs he thought would work on the airwaves. Instead, he made a masterpiece, 2017’s Beginning of Things, a vulnerable, beautifully crafted album that showcased his musicianship and keen ability to cut right to the heart of human emotion (and balance it all with some humor, on tracks like “Lawn Chair Don’t Care”). It, too, was ignored by country radio, even though friends like Kip Moore told Rolling Stone that the lead single, “Cut Your Groove,” was “one of the favorite songs I have heard in the last five years.”
It all left Worsham disappointed and exhausted by the pursuit of breakthrough success. Still, he never stopped chasing the music. In the years that followed, he often put his solo work aside to back artists like Gill and Dierks Bently on the road, briefly also becoming a part of Old Crow Medicine Show. He’s played on albums recorded by and written for Eric Church, Ella Langley, Lainey Wilson, Luke Combs, Kacey Musgraves, and Bentley. He took home the ACM’s award for Acoustic Guitar Player of the Year, the CMA for Musician of the Year, and a CMA Touring Award for Touring Musician of the Year. Pick up a country album you love and, chances are, Worsham’s played a role in it.
Remarkably, he’s also unafraid to speak out about his beliefs, often adding his voice to conversations about inequality and social justice in country music and beyond. In 2020, he wrote a piece for Rolling Stone celebrating the change to the Mississippi State flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem — as with all of Worsham’s work, the essay celebrated the deep history of the place he loves while never glossing over the truth of its past.
Nashville’s love for Worsham, however — at least among those who don’t program country radio playlists — is clear. When he recorded his EP Compadres in 2023, Combs, Moore, and Wilson all signed up for duets. But it was his last as a major-label artist.
Last Friday, timed to his 20-year anniversary in Nashville, Worsham self-released his first full-length album in almost a decade, the excellent Once Upon a Second Time Around. In pure Worsham fashion, it incorporates notes of bluegrass, traditional country, and a Mississippi groove, with both deeply vulnerable, funny, and simply sweet odes to the Southern life that he cherishes. Radio likely won’t play it, but tracks like “Blue Collar and a Purple Heart” would fit just fine alongside “Choosin’ Texas” and the neo-trad revival that Worsham no doubt helped make happen in his own quiet way.
It was Gill, his champion and mentor, that surprised Worsham from the stage with the news of his Opry induction. “What I get to do tonight is fulfill a dream for someone, and this guy deserves this more than anyone I know,” Gill said. The Country Music Hall of Fame member was correct. In a 10-year town that sometimes turns into 20 or even a lifetime of broken dreams, it’s nice to see something so right for a change.
