A decade after Charlie Worsham signed his Warner Music Nashville recording contract, he finally accepted his first major award on Wednesday night (Aug. 24).
As a studio musician.
Worsham’s three Warner collections — 2013 album Rubberband, 2017 album Beginning of Things and 2021 EP Sugarcane — have won him critical acclaim for their boundless creativity, honest songwriting and deft playing.
But the award — acoustic guitar player of the year, a title that became official during the ACM Honors at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — focuses more on his work as a supporting musician on recordings by Dierks Bentley, Eric Church and Carrie Underwood, among others. He fought back tears when he was surprised with the award’s announcement at the Grand Ole Opry earlier this year, and the fact that it’s not about him being front stage isn’t the slightest bit of a disappointment.
“I would go for runs up and down Music Row,” he says, recalling his earliest days in Nashville as a member of the band KingBilly, which included John Osborne, now one-half of Brothers Osborne. “We lived a block off Music Row, and I would daydream about which building I was going to own and where I was going to hang my gold records, and I would practice my acceptance speech in my head on that run. And after a few years in Nashville, we broke up as a band, and I was kind of starting over, and I went from thinking it was just a given that I would get an award one day to thinking, ‘Man, I don’t know if I’m ever going to get one of these.’
“To finally receive one 16 years into living in this town was actually a much sweeter moment than I ever could have dreamed it would be.”
It hasn’t been easy. He has documented the emotional difficulties of trying to find a place as an artist in Nashville’s crowded commercial music industry in his music — “Fist in This Town” is particularly telling — but his frustrations don’t generally appear in his interactions.
“He’s one of those guys that everybody’s been rooting for forever,” says producer Jon Randall (Bentley, Parker McCollum). “You love to see him get credit for his talent.”
Worsham grew up in Grenada, Miss., a small town in a larger triangle of significant music communities: Clarksdale (Robert Johnson, Sam Cooke), Tupelo (Elvis Presley) and Meridian (Jimmie Rodgers). Worsham’s talent became evident at an early age, cultivated in part by his father, a banker who played in clubs on the weekends and was a voracious reader of liner notes. His mother was a school teacher, and she diligently drove Charlie 75 minutes each way to Starkville on Wednesday nights to aid his musical education, grading papers in the next room while he took banjo lessons from Larry Wallace, a veteran of Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys.
Young Worsham won national banjo contests, received an official commendation from the state legislature in Jackson while he was still in high school and felt assured about his future.
“Up until I officially threw my hat in the ring in Nashville, I did experience a situation in which the harder I worked, the more success would come, the more results you would get,” he says. “There’s sort of a ratio there that you could trust. And that isn’t the way the world works.”
In Nashville, KingBilly made waves — the group had its own reality show for a bit on GAC — and it wasn’t all that long after the band’s breakup that Worsham landed the Warner solo contract. His recordings generally apply his compelling guy-next-door voice to melodic songs that run a gamut of styles, matching smart lyrical twists against the quirkiness of life’s cycles. While the music is justly well regarded, his hard work hasn’t yielded the expected results.
“I think it was just something I had to experience,” he says with a shrug.
Warner has stayed with him, and he’s currently working toward his next project with co-producer Jaren Johnston, front man for The Cadillac Three.
In the meantime, the support work provides steady confirmation of Worsham’s abilities. He has played on projects by Luke Combs, Riley Green and Jackson Dean, and spent a year in a side job as a de facto member of Old Crow Medicine Show. Plus, there was that time when he played acoustic guitar behind Don Henley and Vince Gill on “Sacrifice” for the tribute album Restoration: Reimagining the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The band also included guitar icon Robben Ford.
“You get back in your car and you’re driving home, you start going, ‘Wait, I was just at Vince Gill’s house with an Eagle and Robben Ford playing music,’” he says. “That happened. Like, ‘Did that really just happen?’”
In his way, Worsham is traveling a course that’s similar to Gill, Marty Stuart, Peter Frampton and Glen Campbell, pursuing a career as an artist while backing his fellow musicians when it fits the schedule. He’s currently touring with Bentley, a move that underscores how important the musician role is in Worsham’s artistic arc.
“What makes any great musician really is restraint,” Bentley suggests. “Anybody can go out there and just … noodle, noodle, noodle onstage and play a billion notes. Charlie knows when not to play. He knows how to stand back and accompany somebody else.”
The ACM honor is, quite possibly, just another step — albeit a rewarding one — on an uncertain road for Worsham, whose future as an artist is very much tied to his expression as a musician.
“All my favorite people had long, complicated journeys,” he says. “The gift of it, for me, is threefold. No. 1, I get to play more music, which is always the goal. No. 2, if I had had massive success out of the gate, I never would have had all these experiences in the studio with other artists — so many of my relationships with other artists began through session work. And No. 3, if the artist thing had just taken off from the get-go, I would not have had the same opportunity to gain that wisdom over these years. And more importantly, maybe, than the wisdom, the gratitude.”
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