Halloween is here! The spooky holiday turns even the most successful artists into kids again. We rounded up some of country music’s biggest artists’ traditions, fondest memories, favorite ways to celebrate and more.
Luke Bryan:
“My tradition for Halloween is Caroline picks the outfit,” Bryan revealed. “I never know what I’m wearing. So that day, I’ll talk to the neighbors ‘cause I have a tractor back there, and I’ll go get my tractor and get a big long trailer, and then I’ll run down to…a couple miles from the farm, we’ve got a big hay farmer that keeps hay, and you run in there and pay him for his hay bales. And I’ll load the hay up and get the hayride ready and we’ll take all the kids behind the tractor and have a fun Halloween with all that.”
Darius Rucker:
“My favorite costume was easy, and I bet, from the time I was six to the time I was 13, of those seven years, I went as a football player because you’re coming from football practice to go out and trick-or-treat,” he said with a laugh. “So, instead of putting on some other costume, just put your pads back on and go as a football player. So, most years I went as a football player. And I don’t dress much anymore, but my favorite costume I ever had was [my son] Jack dressed up as Darth Vader and I was Luke Skywalker. I guess he was six and he was walking along telling everybody I’m his father. It was very funny. It was very funny.”
Thomas Rhett:
“We go really hard on holidays,” Rhett, who had the same costume idea this year as Dan + Shay‘s Shay Mooney this year, previously said. “If you were to come to our house today, you would see Halloween decorations inside and you would see a ton of Christmas lights already put up outside. So, we kind of get ready for multiple holidays at the same time. We’ve been watching Hocus Pocus and Halloweentown, and carving pumpkins and baking pumpkin seeds, and already got all the girls’ costumes ready to go. And so, we definitely love Halloween.”
.@ShayMooney, we were on the same wavelength pic.twitter.com/VvIv707DrD
— Thomas Rhett (@ThomasRhett) October 30, 2023
Old Dominion’s Matt Ramsey:
“I mostly didn’t dress up,” Ramsey said. “I mean I did when I was really little, and the only real costume I remember was like a hunchback guy. I was jealous of my brother’s Headless Horseman costume. They have costumes for that now that make you look headless, but back then they didn’t. It was a little annoying because you had to lead him everywhere. He committed to the bit! He had a vest that he just zipped up and it went up over his head, and he carried around a pumpkin and he couldn’t see a thing. He trick-or-treated the whole time blind, and I was jealous.”
Reba McEntire:
“The way we used to celebrate it when we were kids – we were out in the country; our nearest neighbor was a couple of miles away from us, so we’d get dressed up and put on lipstick or whatever we could,” McEntire remembered. “We didn’t have Halloween costumes, and we’d walk down in the dark to Mr. and Mrs. Winslet’s house, and she’d feed us cookies and milk and then we’d walk back up in the dark. But Alice, Susie and I weren’t attentive enough to realize that Pake wasn’t with us in the group, and Pake would get up on the road going to the house and crawl up in a tree and scare the crap out of us. So, that was my Halloween memories right there.”
Tim McGraw:
“Well, we did a few things when the kids were growing up,” McGraw said. “I was Captain Jack one year and I had a full-on — a friend of mine from LA who does costuming for movies sent me a whole Captain Jack get-up. So, I had the authentic sort of looking Captain Jack. And then one year we were George and Martha Washington, Faith and I. And the kids were all sort of colonial-dressed little girls.”
Dierks Bentley:
“Oh, when I was a kid, I was all into fireworks,” Bentley said. “Growing up in Arizona, we couldn’t get them, so we’d have them shipped in illegally. I still remember the name of the guy we’d call. His name was Joe, and he’d bring in, ship them in a package with no writing on them. We were all about M-80s in the mailboxes and bottle rocket wars. To me, as a kid, Halloween was fireworks, blowing up stuff around home.”
Brothers Osborne:
“With our dad every year, we would go looking for pumpkins, and we would all get our own pumpkin to carve, and he would buy the biggest pumpkin that they had,” John Osborne recalled. “It was huge. I mean, it was way too big for any one person, but he would love carving. He’s kind of an artsy guy. He was a great drawer and stuff, and he would carve the most terrifying, vicious-looking, scary pumpkin you’d ever seen in your life, and it would be massive. It would be like on a 50-pound pumpkin or something.”
Jordan Davis:
“I can remember being really big into Power Rangers,” Davis remembered. I always liked the Red Ranger. I remember being Red Ranger one Halloween. I remember me and my brother being big into the Ninja Turtles. I was Donatello one year, which I think was the purple turtle. I think. Though, my favorite Halloween was, I was in college and I went as Luigi from Mario and Luigi. I actually grew a legit mustache and dyed it jet black, and ran into an ex-girlfriend at the costume shop and completely forgot I had the mustache on.
“So, when I saw her, she was like, ‘So, you’re going with a mustache nowadays, huh?’ he continued. “I remember being like, ‘I swear this is part of my Halloween costume.’ When I dyed my mustache, my top lip was black for a week. Like I really did dye it jet black.”