Chris Stapleton‘s hit single “White Horse,” won him two trophies, both Single of the Year and Song of the Year, at the 2024 CMA Awards. Stapleton wrote the song with Dan Wilson, from his latest Higher album, released last year.
“I owe my wife an apology,” Stapleton said when accepting the Song of the Year trophy, after he failed to acknowledge Morgane, who produced the song with her husband and Dave Cobb, when winning the Single of the Year. “That last award belonged to her too, but she didn’t want to come up here. It all happened so quick … All of my music, I owe a lot to her, so thank you to her for all of the support.”
Stapleton previously revealed that “White Horse” was originally written for a movie, more than a decade ago.
“’White Horse’ was a song that I wrote with my friend, Dan Wilson,” Stapleton said when the song was released. “We were out in Los Angeles, it was about I think probably late 2012, early 2013, and there was a movie called The Lone Ranger that was coming out. I walked in the room to write with Dan at his house, and he said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for songs for this Lone Ranger movie.’ I said, ‘Cool. Let’s write something. What do you know about it?’ He goes, ‘Well, we don’t really know anything.’ I was like, ‘Well, let’s just make a song that might sound like that.’
“And so, that’s kind of where that came from, and we got to talking about how it would be cool to have a kind of rock-driven-western-themed song,” he continues. “That’s where the song came from, and we kind of built it around a guitar riff, really.”
Stapleton once again spent part of the year opening for George Strait earlier this year, on Strait’s stadium tour. Strait is being honored at the 2024 CMA Awards with the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award. This was Stapleton’s second year opening for Strait, although he hopes it isn’t his last.
“He doesn’t play many shows, and we have so much fun,” Stapleton said on Country Countdown USA. “One thing we’ve been doing is we play ‘Pancho & Lefty’ together. To 17-year-old me it’s like, what kind of weird world are we living in? That was pretty cool. So I plan on doing them as long as he does them.”
It was backstage at the 2023 CMA Awards when Stapleton revealed that it was at least partly his idea for the King of Country Music to do more shows.
“I think I halfway talked him into working more, but I really enjoyed doing that,” Stapleton said last fall. “I think it’s a good show to come to because George has ten million number ones, and people can watch all that, and what a great thing to get to watch. I love to be the opener for that. I love to walk out on stage and sing a few with George.
“It’s just a really fun show with me, and Little Big Town is usually on those shows, and they’re all friends, and it’s fun,” he added. “And so, I want to keep doing that as much as we can, and I keep talking George into it, so it’s good.”
Find all of Stapleton’s music and upcoming shows at ChrisStapleton.com.