“It’s a small world after all, it’s a small world after all…”
That’s all I have playing through my head after hearing Diplo casually drop a fact about his childhood when asked about his country music Mount Rushmore. Over the Stagecoach weekend, the hit dance music maker, Diplo, was under his countryfied persona (and his legal name), Thomas Wesley, was asked in an interview what his country music Mount Rushmore would be.
This is a regularly asked question; Tracy Lawrence even has his answer tattooed on his arm.
Diplo’s response was well-respected. Naming George Strait, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Alan Jackson as the four men he’d chisel into the side of the Black Hills of South Dakota. But at the end of his answer, Diplo had to give a nod to the women who pioneered the genre and added a bonus name to his Mount Rushmore, giving it to Reba McEntire.
However, his reasoning for naming Reba might shock some.
“I’m gonna have to add one more, Reba McEntire. Got to add her in there because I used to deliver Chinese food to her house in Hendersonville. I love her.”
I’m sorry… come again?
Yes, folks, you heard that right. Talk about a small-world connection. Thomas Wesley was actually born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but he spent a lot of time in Miami as a kid (where he found his love for production), but he graduated high school in Hendersonville, Tennessee, right outside of Nashville.
While Diplo doesn’t advertise this connection to the “Fancy” singer often, in 2023, before he played Wildhorse Saloon, now the home of Luke Combs’ Category 10 bar in Nashville, Tennessee, he shared the fact on his social media.
“Don’t know if I told you this, but I used to deliver Chinese food to Reba McEntire when I was I was in high school in Nashville. It was my first job. I chugged around in a VW bus like Scooby Doo. It broke down a lot, and I learned a little Chinese from waiting for the fried rice to get made.
If you told me 20 years later I’d play the biggest honky tonk in Music City, I would have said… you must have had too much msg on your kung pao chicken.”
Reba, however, is not the only artist Diplo used to deliver to. On a 2023 episode of Watch What Happens Live!, he mentioned that Billy Ray Cyrus was also on his Kung Pao chicken drop-off route.
“I did deliver also to Billy Ray Cyrus. He also lived in Hendersonville. It was the only Chinese restaurant in that little suburb of Nashville.”
In this interview clip, Diplo clarified that Reba was already a superstar when delivering food to her house, so she never answered the door, and he’s never met Reba. In a 2012 tweet, he also said that Reba didn’t tip well, but sounds like she might not be the one making the orders:
Since Diplo has collaborated with country music stars like Koe Wetzel, Sierra Ferrell, and Paul Cauthen, maybe Reba will hop on a track one day. I’m not a very superstitious person, but delivering food to two country music icons seems like a subtle foreshadowing of Diplo’s success in the country music space now.
This story further proves that you never know who you’ll see in Nashville or encounter in the towns surrounding the country music capital.
