Craig Morgan

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Monday Jun 7 7:00 PM on Grand Ole Opry
Wednesday Jun 9 1:00 PM on Fan Club Parties (Add'l cost may apply. Check w/ fan club.)
Friday Jun 11 5:15 PM on Riverfront Park Stage

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Craig Morgan

Craig Morgan (born July 17, 1965) is an American neotraditional country music singer. He is noted for writing homey lyrics that focus on traditional values and the simpler pleasures of life.

Morgan was born in Kingston Springs, Tennessee and grew up in rural Tennessee. He became an Emergency medical technician at age 18. A few years later, he joined the Army and was stationed in South Korea. He would later see combat as part of Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989. During his deployment in Korea, Morgan wrote a number of songs and won various military singing and songwriting contests. He is a vocal supporter of the US military, performing for service-personnel in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Upon his return home to Tennessee, he worked various jobs to support his family, including working as a construction worker, a security guard and a sheriff’s deputy. He would later land a job in Nashville singing demos for other songwriters and publishing companies.

The demos led to releasing his first album with Atlantic Records, the self-titled Craig Morgan in 2000. In 2003, Morgan signed with Broken Bow Records and released his second album, I Love It. It featured the single “Almost Home”, which broke into the Top 10 and earned Morgan a Songwriter Achievement Award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

In 2005, Morgan released his third album, My Kind of Livin’, which included the smash hit “That’s What I Love About Sunday.” A four-week number one hit in the early spring of 2005, it was the biggest country music song of that year according to Billboard. The album also included the #2 hit “Redneck Yacht Club”. Also included was “I Got You”, which Craig had originally penned for Keith Urban, but decided to cut himself instead. “Little Bit Of Life”, the lead-off single and title track of his fourth album, is currently climbing the charts.

His third and final album for Broken Bow, Little Bit of Life, was issued in 2006. Morgan and O'Donnell co-produced the album with Keith Stegall, a record producer known for his work with Alan Jackson, and Morgan co-wrote four of its eleven songs. The label shipped more than 200,000 copies of the album in its first week, and made special exclusive releases for retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart.

Its title track became his fourth Top Ten hit, peaking at #7, followed by the #11 "Tough" and the #10 "International Harvester," which was co-written by Shane Minor, Jeffrey Steele and Danny Myrick. Kevin Oliver of Country Standard Time commended the album's neotraditionalist sound and called Morgan "a classic country singer" but said that, beyond the title track and "Tough," "the traditional sound is mostly wasted." Billboard reviewer Deborah Evans Price gave "Tough" a positive review, praising Morgan's "strong, warm voice" and calling the song "yet another gem" from the album. A Greatest Hits package followed in February 2008, shortly before his departure from Broken Bow.

On September 18, 2008, Morgan was invited by John Conlee to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Morgan was formally inducted as Opry member by Conlee at the Grand Ole Opry House during the October 25, 2008 edition of the Opry. Although it had been first announced that Morgan would sign to Big Machine Records' sister label Valory Music Group, he instead signed to BNA Records, a division of Sony BMG Nashville. His first album for the label, That's Why, was released in October 2008. Its first single, "Love Remembers," reached a peak of #9 on the country charts in December 2008. After the second single, "God Must Really Love Me," peaked at #26. BNA re-issued the album in May 2009 with two new songs: "Bonfire" (co-written by former Lyric Street Records artist Kevin Denney) and "This Ain't Nothin'." The former was released that month as the album's third single, peaking at #4 in December 2009. In October 2009, the music video for "God Must Really Love Me" won Video of the Year from the Inspirational Country Music Awards. "This Ain't Nothin'" was sent to radio in January 2010 as the fourth single from That's Why.