Why Chris Stapleton Does Not Keep Any of His Awards at Home (Exclusive)

Chris Stapleton is revealing why he doesn’t keep any of his awards at his house. For starters, the hitmaker’s about as humble as they come. And secondly, those awards don’t really belong to him.

Speaking to ET’s Rachel Smith on the red carpet at the 2023 Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, Tennessee, the “Tennessee Whiskey” singer shared where he stores the coveted hardware. On Wednesday night, Stapleton scored his second straight Male Vocalist of the Year Award. He’s won that category five times now.

The Lexington, Kentucky, native (who now resides in Nashville) has hauled a ton of other major awards, including eight GRAMMYs, five Billboard Music Awards and a whopping 15 CMA Awards. That’s a lot of hardware, no doubt, and as big as his house might be, he’s not one to have a shrine for himself.

“I don’t keep any of those things at home,” he tells ET. “I take them out on the road a lot for people to see, like in the VIP section, because I feel like they belong to the fans. Then some of them we have at our office. But no, I don’t have a shrine to myself sitting around at the house.”

Stapleton scoring back-to-back Male Vocalist of the Year awards is impressive considering he was up against stiff competition this year that included Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Cody Johnson and Morgan Wallen. Stapleton recently dropped “It Takes a Woman,” an homage to his wife, Morgane Stapleton. While the song’s existed barely a month in the public domain, it’s a track he co-wrote (alongside Ronnie Bowman and Jerry Salley) nearly a decade ago.

Asked why it took so long to get the track out to the public, Morgane, who shares five children with the country star, said it was all about timing.

“You just gotta pick your moment. This is the right time for this one,” she said. “He’s got a big stack of songs, so it’s fun to sift through them, and they don’t always all fit. And this was a good fit, this go around for this one.”

And her initial reaction when she first heard the track off of his new Higher album (out Friday)?

“Tears and just, I think, it sort of speaks to our partnership which I very much enjoy getting to be his partner,” Morgane said. “And it felt sort of like a testimony to that, for me.”

When asked how she encourages him to be a better musician, father and husband, Stapleton simply said, “You don’t have a show long enough for that.”

The 2023 CMA Awards, hosted by Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning, aired live on Wednesday, Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. The 57th annual awards show is now available to stream on Hulu.

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