Kenny Chesney went from playing in stadiums as a Gibbs High School student athlete to playing stadiums as a country superstar. And he’s one of the greatest musicians ever to do it.
He has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, earned 23 No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, won four Country Music Association entertainer of the year awards and is one of music industry’s top-grossing touring artists of all time.
Only a few have reached the heights Chesney has over the course of his 30-year career, and it’s forever earned him a spot next to other icons. Chesney will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 19.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Knoxville, the “Cradle of Country Music,” produced the first country superstar of the 21st century. But it does feel extra special when considering how Knoxville’s country connections are often overshadowed by Bristol’s place in recording history and Nashville’s glamour.
Knoxville’s overshadowed country roots
By the time Chesney was a teen in Knoxville in the 1980s, there weren’t many local venues or live radio stations nurturing young country artists, according to Knoxville historian Jack Neely and veteran music reporter Wayne Bledsoe.
It wasn’t until Chesney started attending East Tennessee State University in Johnson City that he picked up a guitar and began honing his craft. Neely even called him “an outlier in the Knoxville country-music story” because, for previous generations, Knoxville was where careers started – it was the cradle.
“Knoxville was one of those places that fed the Grand Ole Opry for years,” Bledsoe explained. “Pretty much nearly everybody that went on to the Opry and became a big star came through Knoxville.”
When Knoxville’s Roy Acuff began playing the fiddle, experimenting with vocal techniques and performing around town with his band in the mid-1930s, local live radio stations helped spread the new sound. WNOX and WIVK, the city’s first single-genre station, helped launch artists in the emerging music genre, according to Knoxville History Project’s music guide.
The “Mid-Day Merry-Go Round” variety show (WNOX) and Cass Walker’s “Farm and Home Hour” (WROL and WIVK) were among the most influential radio broadcasts from Knoxville. Acuff, Chet Atkins, Homer and Jethro, Carl Smith, Carl Butler and Flatt and Scruggs are just a few of the musicians who were featured early on.
“It was the beginning of an era when musicians from other parts of the country would come to Knoxville just to perform on an influential radio station,” the Knoxville Music Guide notes.
A young Dolly Parton was just finding her voice on Cas Walker’s show as live radio in Knoxville started to dwindle in the late 1950s and Nashville’s recording industry began to boom.
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How rock rolled out country
The gradual shift from country and bluegrass allowed a new wave of music to sweep over Knoxville and across the country: rock ’n’ roll.
The Everly Brothers began to experiment with their style, Chilhowee Park’s Jacob Building hosted Black rock pioneers like Fats Domino and Little Richard, and Knoxville’s localized rock scene thrived for decades.
“We no longer have the kind of venues, like live performance radio stations of the 1930s-’50s, or scenes like Buddy’s Barbecue in Bearden was (around)1975-80, that nurtured new talent and sometimes led toward stardom in country music,” Neely said.
While Chesney was teaching himself to play the guitar and joining a bluegrass band at ETSU, college rock acts like the JudyBats, the V-Roys and Superdrag found a following at clubs and bars near the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Some of the bands signed with major record labels and found moderate success, but country stars rarely broke through from Knoxville at the time.
“Country music was looked on at that period as being older people music. It was not the hip thing,” Bledsoe explained.
Bledsoe saw blips of country music returning to Knoxville in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, but the issue of limited performance spaces for country-oriented talent persisted.
And then Garth Brooks happened.
“Garth Brooks hits and it changes country music forever,” Bledsoe said. “Suddenly it became, for a little while anyway, the most popular music in the country.”
Chesney was about to hop on the wave of a modern country music era.
Kenny Chesney calculated superstar success
Chesney released his first album in 1994, with his first top 10 single coming the following year. In 1997 he scored his first No. 1 single, “She’s Got It All.” Bledsoe traveled with Chesney across the country on tour that year, reporting from the road.
“He was always working. … And that’s one of the things that I really took from going on tour with him,” Bledsoe recalled to Knox News. “He was going to make it. He was determined to make it.”
Chesney was up in the wee hours of the morning planning his long-term career goals and working on new music. Then he’d be up at 7 a.m., Bledsoe said, doing interviews with radio stations and on conference calls with radio programmers, and put on a show that night.
“He told me he wanted to be at the top of the heap,” Bledsoe said, adding that Chesney was calculated in how he released songs and crafted his image.
“I think he likes a wider variety of music than he makes. He’s a more talented songwriter, probably, than he gives himself credit for,” Bledsoe said. “But he’s a commercial animal. He knows what’s commercial, he knows what’s going to sell and he found his niche. And man, when he found it, he dove in headfirst.”
That strategy paid off in record numbers. Chesney went from restaurant gigs and honky-tonks to filling stadiums nationwide.
He was a bona fide star by 2002 when his “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” album became his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart. The success led to the first headlining stadium concert of his career, which was at Neyland Stadium in 2003, a rare venue for music artists.
Over the course of 32 years and 20 albums, Chesney has become one of the greatest selling country artists of all time, and he’s one of the highest-grossing touring artists ever.
His tours have grossed over $1 billion, according to Billboard and Pollstar, with nearly 18 million tickets sold. That puts him up there with Billy Joel, Paul McCartney and the Eagles, and on the same list as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and the Rolling Stones.
Chesney has received 12 total Country Music Association Awards, 11 Academy of Country Music Awards, six Grammy nominations and 32 No. 1 songs across various Billboard charts. He was even the first country artist to performat the Las Vegas Sphere. And yes, the performance featured Vols spirit.
“I’ll tell you, he absolutely deserves to be in the Country Music Hall of Fame. I don’t think anybody has worked their asses off as much as Kenny has,” Bledsoe said.
Is Kenny Chesney the first modern country star from Knoxville?
Chesney’s superstar status was something Knoxville hadn’t seen from a native since the days of live radio and Dolly Parton. But can Knoxville really claim him in the same way as country stars from the “cradle” era?
“He’s seemed plenty Knoxville enough,” Neely surmised. “It’s just music historians who are likely to raise a question about him, since he didn’t arrive where he is by way of a supportive music community in Knoxville, or local influences, as is the case with stars of previous generations. Johnson City has a right to claim that important part of his career, and for that matter so does Nashville.