When you think authenticity in country music, the first two things that come to mind are Garth Brooks and the CMA Awards, right?
Yeah I didn’t think so.
We’re just over a week away from the 2024 CMA Awards, and so far the only real conversation I’ve seen about the awards has been the debate over whether Beyonce should have been nominated for her country-inspired album Cowboy Carter.
It really goes to show you how irrelevant the awards shows are these days. They’re no longer for the fans and are instead just a chance for labels and artists to pat themselves on the back. It’s all about industry politics: Labels promising to vote for this artist for this category in exchange for votes for their artist in this category, insiders doing their best to put their thumb on the future of country music while deserving artists and fan-favorites get left out, and the result is an increasingly-irrelevant show that the average fan doesn’t care about anymore.
But nevertheless, here we are coming up on yet another edition of “Country Music’s Biggest Night,” so why not take a look back at some of the wildest moments in the awards show’s history?
One of those moments that really sums up what the CMA Awards has become happened back in 2017, when Garth Brooks won Entertainer of the Year for the sixth time (he’s since won it once more before deciding to take his name out of consideration) and delivered a performance of his then-current single, “Ask Me How I Know.”
Well, sort of.
Viewers quickly noticed that something seemed off about the performance, and after the show Garth admitted that he had been lip-syncing, blaming it on being sick and in the middle of a 12-show run in 10 days:
“We did a game-time call on whether we did sing the track or lip-sync it, and decided to lip-sync because the voice is just not there and you want to represent country music the best you can.”
Fans quickly took to Twitter to blast Garth for lip-syncing, especially on a night when he was crowned “Entertainer of the Year.” But it wasn’t just fans who were upset that he didn’t perform live.
During an interview with Rolling Stone, Eric Church had some harsh words for Garth:
“We don’t use machines. We use instruments.
So the winner of the biggest category of the night lip-synced in the biggest moment on the show?
F*ck that! And I didn’t like his excuse at all.”
Chief has never been one to hold back.
He also called lip-syncing a “red line” that he’ll never cross with his own performances:
“It is and always will be a red line. It’s fabricated. I don’t want young artists thinking it’s OK, because it’s not.”
That’s why fans love Eric Church. You always know exactly where he stands.
It wasn’t the last time Church called out Garth either. After being was robbed of Entertainer of the Year during the 2019 CMA Awards, he took another not-so-subtle shot at Garth during a show the following week during a performance of Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” changing the lyrics to “I know Garth didn’t do it this way.”
The controversy was apparently too much for Garth, because the next year he announced that he was taking himself out of the running for Entertainer of the Year – and it just so happened to be the year that Church finally took home the award.
And the fact that he was willing to step up, speak up for the fans, and call out one of the biggest artists in the genre for lip-syncing just proves why he deserved it so damn much.
