Image Credit :- John Shearer/Getty Images
Like every year, on this Sunday hottest country music artists gathered to celebrate their annual CMT awards. The highlights of the night include a heartfelt duet, a surprise cameo, and another emotional return of a country artist to the stage, making the evening exquisitely wholesome. Yet, there were plenty of incidents where political boundaries have been breached showcasing some audacious statements by country music stars.
Kelsea Ballerini opened the show with a moving tribute to the victims of last week’s Nashville shooting at the Covenant School in Tennessee. Ballerini said, “On March 27, 2023, three 9-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs — along with Dr. Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, and Mike Hill, walked into the Covenant School and didn’t walk out.” Adding more, “the community of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone stretches from coast to coast.”
After that Ballerini shared her own experience with campus gun violence. As she has witnessed her classmate die from the shooting at her high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. She went on saying, “I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment, because, on Aug. 21, 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria,”
“Tonight’s broadcast is dedicated to the ever-growing list of family’s friends, survivors, witnesses, and responders whose lives continue to forever be changed by gun violence. I pray deeply that the closeness and the community that we feel through the next few hours of music can soon turn into action — like, real action — that moves us forward together to create change for the safety of our kids and our loved ones,” she concluded.
Later in the evening, she performed her 2022 single “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)”. Along with her “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Manila Luzon, Kennedy Davenport, Jan Sport, and Olivia Lux also performed at the award function.
On the other hand, Grammy-winning country star Kacey Musgraves, alongside Dolly Parton, Mickey Guyton, and Shania Twain took the Equal Play Award. In her acceptance speech, Twain said, “I believe in all-inclusive country music. We’re family. This is a genre of music with a rich history that raised and nurtured my own songwriting and performance and recording career from childhood.”
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