Three Country Stars Who Almost Walked Away Before Everything Changed

Every country music career has a moment where quitting made more sense than continuing. A near-empty bar. A rejection letter. A bank account with nothing left in it. These three artists all hit that wall and somehow found a reason to stay one more day. What happened after that is the stuff of legend.

Luke Combs: His Last $200 Changed Everything

Luke Combs dropped out of Appalachian State University with just 21 hours left toward his degree, moved to Nashville, and spent his early years playing dive bars along Lower Broadway while working odd jobs to survive. Labels passed. The Voice told him he was too boring for television. He kept going anyway, funding his own EPs and selling them out of the back of his car.

Then came the moment that almost did not happen at all. Combs had saved up enough money for what he thought would be a six-song recording session, but miscalculated the cost. He called his producer and said, "Hey man, I only have $200 left." The producer told him that was enough to master exactly one song. Combs chose "Hurricane." It sold 10,000 copies in its first week. He used that money to master the rest of the songs. He quit both of his day jobs and never looked back.

"I didn't even know what a tour manager was, but I was the tour manager, booking agent, all that stuff for almost two years without knowing it," he said. Today he holds the record for the most consecutive number ones to start a career in country music history. Twenty-one straight. All from a man who almost could not afford to release his first one. Check out his full story in our video biography.

Lainey Wilson: Ten Years in a Camper Trailer

Lainey Wilson moved to Nashville at nineteen years old, loaded up a camper trailer her father bought her, and parked it outside a recording studio where she lived for three years through the Tennessee winters. She wrote thousands of songs. She auditioned for American Idol seven times and The Voice multiple times without ever making it through. She watched her contemporaries get deals while she kept grinding.

"I should have had moments where I should have packed it up and went home," she told the Associated Press. "I've been in Nashville for years and I believe 'Things a Man Oughta Know' went number one, like, ten years and a day after being there."

Ten years and a day. The math on that is staggering. A decade of frozen camper winters, rejection, and keeping the faith on nothing more than stubbornness and a deep belief that the songs were good enough. "I had always heard that Nashville was a ten-year town," she said. She proved it true to the exact day. 

Since that number one she has won CMA Entertainer of the Year, a Grammy for Best Country Album, and multiple ACM Awards. She also had a portion of Louisiana Highway 15 named after her. The camper is long gone. Watch our video biography for much more about Lainey.

Chris Stapleton: The Ghost Writer Who Almost Never Became a Star

Chris Stapleton spent fifteen years writing hits for other people, including "Crash and Burn" for Thomas Rhett and "You Don't Know What You're Missing" for George Strait, all while his own recording career refused to gain traction. He fronted the bluegrass band the SteelDrivers for two years, earning Grammy nominations but not the solo breakthrough he needed. He then formed a Southern rock band called the Jompson Brothers. They made one album in 2010 and toured as an opening act for Zac Brown Band before the project fizzled.

In 2013, he signed with Mercury Nashville and released a solo single that went nowhere. The label scrapped the accompanying album entirely. At thirty-seven years old, with a wife, children, and fifteen years of near-misses behind him, most people would have called it a career.

Morgane would not let him. She handpicked the majority of the songs for what would become his debut album Traveller from over a thousand published tunes in his catalog, curating the most emotionally raw and honest material he had ever written. The album was recorded almost entirely live at Nashville's historic RCA Studio A. At the 2015 CMA Awards, Stapleton performed "Tennessee Whiskey" with Justin Timberlake, and the performance stopped the country music world cold. Traveller became the top-selling country album of 2016, won Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Best Country Solo Performance, and turned Nashville's best-kept secret into one of the most celebrated artists of his generation.

He was thirty-seven years old when it finally happened. Morgane had picked the songs. Fifteen years of writing for everyone else had sharpened every instinct he had. The timing, it turned out, was exactly right. Get his full story on our website.

Three artists. Three walls that looked like dead ends. Three reasons to stay one more day.