When the Kennedy Center Honors are presented at Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C. on Dec. 7, a country artist will be in the honors class for the second year in a row. Barbara Mandrell is being honored this year. George Strait was an honoree last year. This will mark the first time in the history of the Kennedy Center Honors that country artists have been recognized in back-to-back years.
Over the years, Mandrell has worked with several of the country artists who have received Kennedy Center Honors previously. George Jones, who received the honor in 2008, sang a guest vocal on Mandrell’s 1981 anthem “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.”
The Kennedy Center Honors program was slow to recognize country – as it was a lot of popular music forms. The first country artist to be honored was Roy Acuff in 1991, in its 14th class of honorees.
The Kennedy Center Honors were first presented in 1978. The inaugural class consisted of contralto Marian Anderson, dancer-actor-singer Fred Astaire, choreographer George Balanchine, composer Richard Rodgers and pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
While the focus in the early years was on fine arts — heavy on classical and opera — over the decades, it has broadened to also include more popular forms of music. In 1987, B.B. King became the first blues artist to be inducted. Other performers who were the first in their genres to be honored were Acuff for country in 1991, Aretha Franklin for R&B in 1994, Pete Seeger for folk in 1994, Bob Dylan for rock in 1997, Gloria Estefan for Latin music in 2017 and LL Cool J for rap in 2017.
Here’s a complete list of country artists who have received Kennedy Center Honors. We show the year the artist received the honor, the year they were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and their total of CMA Awards. For the ones who have passed on, we show the year of their deaths.
