The 2023 People’s Choice Country Award for Collaboration Song went to Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson, for their “Save Me” duet. Jelly Roll wasn’t in attendance, but Wilson, who already won the trophy for Female Artist of the Year, accepted the award on his behalf.

“Man, I wish he was here. I really wish he was here,” Wilson said. “I have gotten to know Jelly over the last few years. Actually, back in 2013 I believe, he was doing a music video with Uncle Kracker, and they were paying folks about a hundred dollars to go be extras in the music video, and I was a drunk girl passed out on the ground. I never got my hundred dollars, but I just wanna say, Jelly is one of the purest souls I have gotten to know.

“And I think it is so cool that he has fans who love him for him,” she added. “And he makes people feel like they can be true to themselves and their stories, and that right there is special, so this is for Jelly Roll.”

When Jelly Roll asked Wilson to join him on “Save Me,” she had already had hit collaborations with both  Cole Swindell and HARDY. Still the song showcased a side of Wilson that nobody had seen, until their powerful duet was released.

“The obvious is Lainey is one of my best friends in the music business,” Jelly Roll told CMT. “Lainey, Ernest, everybody knows my little squad … These are the people I talked to pretty religiously. And, I think it was special that I was the guy that got to show the world that side of Lainey.”

“Save Me” appears on Jelly Roll’s Whitsitt Chapel album, one of 13 songs that showcase his journey from prisons to headlining his own massive tour.

“I wrote these songs for anybody that’s dealing with the duality of life … It’s always about that somewhere between being right and wrong, because I think that’s the exact place I live in,” Jelly Roll said when the record was released. “I know my heart’s pure. I know my spirit’s right. I also know that I make really politically incorrect jokes. And party sometimes, and I’m a little silly and outrageous. But I also know that my heart is to be a man of service and to help people. So I write for those kinds of people, the struggling poet of the broken man. Always trying to be the voice for the voiceless.”

Jelly Roll is currently headlining his Backroad Baptism Tour. Find music and tour dates at JellyRoll615.com.