Kacey Musgraves' 10 Year Grind to Grammy Success

Long before the Grammys, the magazine covers, and the crossover glory, Kacey Musgraves was an eight-year-old girl in Golden, Texas, yodeling and writing songs. That detail alone tells you everything about who she is. This was never a manufactured pop star. This was someone who simply could not help making music.

Born prematurely and raised with the support of artistic parents and a grandmother who encouraged her creative instincts, Musgraves performed as part of the duo Texas Two Bits and even took the stage at the 2002 Winter Olympics before most kids her age had figured out what they wanted to be when they grew up. By the time she graduated from Mineola High School, she had already logged more stage time than most adults.

The road to Nashville, however, was not exactly a red carpet. In 2007, she finished seventh on the televised singing competition Nashville Star. Seventh. Not exactly a fairy tale ending, but Musgraves was not the type to go home and give up. She packed up and moved to Nashville anyway, spent years honing her craft, and kept writing songs that were a little too honest and a little too clever for the mainstream to know what to do with at first.

That changed in 2012 when she signed with Mercury Nashville and released "Merry Go 'Round," a quietly devastating song about small-town life that felt like nothing else on country radio. Her debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, followed in 2013 and won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album. The industry had been put on notice.

Still, the biggest moment was yet to come. In 2018, she released Golden Hour, a sun-drenched, genre-bending record that swept the 2019 Grammys with four wins, including Album of the Year. It was a mainstream coronation that had been roughly a decade in the making.

She was not finished. In 2024, her album Deeper Well made her the only artist in history to win a Grammy in every country category. That is a record that will take some beating.

From yodeling in Golden, Texas, to making Grammy history, Kacey Musgraves has never really followed anyone else's timeline. She has just followed the music, and eventually the music led exactly where it was always supposed to go.