While Louisiana is known around the world for jazz music and the blues, lately the country music scene has become another major drumbeat of life in the Pelican State.
Nestled next door to Texas, and just down the Mississippi from Tennessee, it only makes sense that Louisiana’s gone a little more country lately. Especially when you consider the genre itself has exploded in popularity in recent years. Turns out that while we were all locked-down in 2020, country music streaming numbers ballooned by 16%.
But who is the most popular country music singer in Louisiana?
To find out, LouisianaBets.com took a break from Louisiana sports betting news and looked at Billboard.com’s Top 50 Country Artists of 2022. Then to localize this list of names to Louisiana, we went over to Google Trends to determine the in-state search engine interest for each artist over the past 12 months (June 2022-June 2023). Here are the results.
Louisiana's Top 5 Country Singers
Why Louisiana Loves These Country Music Stars
It’ll be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to country music over the past three years to see that Morgan Wallen is Louisiana’s most popular country singer.
However, Wallen’s career was nearly halted in 2021 when a video of him shouting a racial slur was released by TMZ. The incident led to the Tennessee-born country star getting suspended from his label, and his music removed from airwaves and streaming services. After a sizeable donation to the Black Music Action Coalition and a public apology, Wallen began to rehab his reputation.
Clearly, country music fans were quick to forgive — ultra-quick, in fact; Wallen’s record sales actually went up following the incident. Now he’s back with the biggest record of the year so far. “One Thing at a Time” just recently wrapped up a 12-week run at the top of the Billboard 200 Album charts.
Next up, the second most popular country singer in Louisiana is the state’s own Lainey Wilson. Growing up in the small town of Baskin, LA., Lainey fell in love with country music as a little girl and spent her teen years writing songs and impersonating Hannah Montana at birthday parties and charity events.
After graduating high school, Lainey Wilson high-tailed it for Nashville, where she spent a decade grinding it out before she finally broke through with the single “Things a Man Oughta Know” in 2020. These days she can be found on tour supporting her latest release “Bell Bottom Country,” or on the hit CBS series “Yellowstone,” which she joined the cast of in Season 5.
Tied for third on our list is the gravelly-voiced country crooner Chris Stapleton, and a relative newcomer on the scene, Zach Bryan. Whereas Stapleton has been a major part of the country music scene for most of the past two decades — as a performer and a songwriter for the likes of Kenny Chesney, George Strait, and more — Zach Bryan has had a more unconventional path to success.
His career began in earnest after he posted a video of himself singing his original song “Heading South” to YouTube. The emotional performance, captured on his iPhone, went viral. Now he’s on a cross-country tour supporting his first major studio record, “American Heartbreak.”
The fifth and final country music star we’re spotlighting is Luke Combs. An everyman in a fishing shirt, Combs is just as comfortable singing about hangovers as he is about heartbreaks. His latest album, “Gettin’ Old” — a companion record to last year’s “Growin’ Up” — was released early this year.
Author
Jeff Parker is an entertainment writer for LouisianaBets.com. A writer for film, television and the internet, Jeff is a life long movie buff, with a Masters Degree in Popular Culture. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he works full time as documentary filmmaker and producer.
