When Morgan Wallen was announced as one of the five musicians headlining this year’s British Summer Time (BST) shows in Hyde Park, alongside household names such as Stevie Nicks, Robbie Williams, and Shania Twain, more than a couple of Brits asked themselves the same question: who?
The answer: Wallen is America’s biggest, if most controversial, country music star. Moustachioed, mulleted, and rarely seen without a backward cap, the 31-year-old Tennessean makes phenomenally popular songs about whiskey, women, and muddy jeans. His 2021 breakout “7 Summers” laid the template for more hits to come: a lovesick country track about a “boy from East Tennessee” with a soft-rock groove piped in directly from the 1970s. It’s music made to be blasted out the stereo of a pickup truck with the windows all the way down.
Wallen was first introduced to US audiences when he auditioned for The Voice in 2014; he was 20 at the time and working as a landscaper in his hometown of Knoxville. He made decent progress in the competition as part of judge Adam Levine’s team, only to be eliminated during the play-offs. In the years since, though, his balmy brand of bro-country has earned him six Grammy nods and catapulted him to heights shared by fellow country superstars Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, Florida Georgia Line, and Jason Aldean.
In 2023, “Last Night,” Wallen’s irresistibly catchy ode to boozy evenings and bad break-ups, went to No. 1 on the Billboard 100 – where it stayed for 16 weeks, the second-longest run for any solo artist in the chart’s history. His most recent album, One Thing At A Time, debuted at No. 1 in the US – with all 36 of its tracks entering the Hot 100 in the week of release. Five of them eventually landed in the top 10 at once.
What is perhaps most telling of Wallen’s influence, though, is the fact his 2021 record Dangerous: The Double Album achieved astounding success, despite its release being interrupted by the sort of controversy most artists would never recover from. Because if you don’t know Wallen by his hits, you may know him for his scandals. His rise has been marked – some might say bolstered – by a string of controversies, bookended by two arrests. The first was in 2020, when Wallen was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct at a Nashville bar. (He apologized and the bar’s owner, Kid Rock of the Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, declined to press charges.)
Months later, in October, deep into lockdown and just one week before he was set to make his debut on Saturday Night Live, videos surfaced of Wallen partying and kissing women in Alabama – where a statewide mask and social distancing mandate was in effect. “My actions this past weekend were pretty short-sighted and they have obviously affected my long-term goals and my dreams,” he said, after his SNL appearance was canceled. Two months later, he returned to the show in a skit poking fun at his breaching of COVID rules with Jason Bateman and Bowen Yang. All, it seemed, was forgiven.
The most explosive of these scandals, however, unfolded in February 2021 when Wallen was captured on video by his neighbor drunkenly shouting the n-word at friends outside his Tennessee home. The footage emerged not only in the immediate wake of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests but also amid the release of that aforementioned album, Dangerous.
Almost immediately, Wallen’s music was pulled from country-radio playlists and award shows. He was put on “indefinite hiatus” by his label and disqualified from the Grammys. He released a brief, self-filmed apology video explaining his actions as the result of “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender.” Hitting the brakes on his music career, he retreated from the spotlight.
Backlash to the video at the time was swift – but proved to be short-lived. Commercially, the scandal didn’t leave a scratch. If anything, it could be argued that the video of Wallen and his subsequent shunning by the media helped to bolster sales with a fanbase who decried cancel culture. Dangerous finished 2021 as the third most streamed album in the US, behind Bad Bunny and Harry Styles but ahead of Taylor Swift, tying a record set by Whitney Houston. It outpaced releases from Adele and Drake to become that year’s most commercially successful album.
Beyond the apology video that Wallen released in the immediate aftermath, there were vague promises to “do better” and talk of charitable donations. (Wallen said he donated $500,000 to Black charities, but the amount that has reached said organizations has been challenged.) There was also a collaboration with the Illinois rapper Lil Durk in the form of their hit song “Broadway Girls.” Lil Durk also took it upon himself to defend Wallen. “He ain’t no racist – that’s my boy,” he had told TMZ.
Less than a year after the incident, Wallen was invited to perform at Grand Ole Opry – Nashville’s foremost venue
for country music. The decision to host him was widely criticized, with fellow country star Jason Isbell writing that by doing so, the hallowed venue had “broken the hearts of a legion of aspiring Black country artists.” For people like Isbell, the industry’s continued support of Wallen is proof that perhaps country music hasn’t progressed as much as the success of recent boundary-pushing country albums by Black artists like Lil Nas X and Beyoncé might suggest.
To add insult to injury, Wallen was perceived by his detractors as not taking his actions seriously enough. Asked in a TV interview following the scandal whether he believed country music had a race problem, the musician shrugged somewhat nonchalantly: “It would seem that way, yeah. I haven’t really sat and thought about it.” He didn’t probe much further than that.
At least from appearances, Wallen doesn’t hate where his various scandals have landed him in the musical landscape. At a concert in Kentucky in December last year, ahead of his arrival on stage, the speakers blasted out Eminem’s brattish, bombastic 2002 hit “Without Me,” which includes the lyrics, “We need a little controversy/ ’Cause it feels so empty without me.”
And although he rarely says anything overtly partisan, his concerts are known to get political. During the pandemic, despite the Delta variant running rampant in the US, there was scarcely a mask in sight at Wallen’s show in Kentucky, with the concert itself becoming a sort of protest in and of itself. In a similar vein, Wallen certainly doesn’t protest when the crowd at his concerts bursts into an anti-Joe Biden chant, something they are wont to do.
Morgan Wallen’s ability to weather storms of controversy and still emerge as a leading figure in country music speaks volumes about his connection with his audience and the shifting dynamics of the music industry. As he headlines BST, it will be interesting to see how British audiences respond to this complex figure from across the Atlantic.
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