Kelsea Ballerini honors Nashville shooting victims, dances with 'Drag Race' queens; Shania Twain champions 'all-inclusive country music' at 2023 CMT Awards
Country superstar Kelsea Ballerini experienced a night of tragedy and triumph Sunday, when she hosted the 2023 CMT Music Awards in Austin, Texas — cold-opening the show with a tribute to the victims of last week’s shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School and sharing her own personal experience with campus gun violence, then in a much lighter but still impactful moment enlisting several RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni for a presumed protest against Tennessee’s new law criminalizing drag revues.
“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,” a choked-up Ballerini, who co-hosted this year’s CMT Awards with Kane Brown, said at the start of the show. “The community of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone stretches from coast to coast. 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.”
Listen to this exquisite statement at #CMTMusicAwards tonight by @KelseaBallerini, a fellow Nashvillian 🎸who used her platform beautifully 😭
pic.twitter.com/39CIzgwQ1s— Dr. Joy Henningsen (@JoyHenningsenMD) April 3, 2023
Last year in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Ballerini opened up about the cafeteria shooting she witnessed at Knoxville’s Central High School, which “forced [her] into therapy” as a teenager, saying, “I still suffer from PTSD [from the shooting]. Like, I'm a performer and I'm onstage a lot, so I have to be told if there's pyro around or else it's, like, not a good day for me.” McDonald’s murder inspired Ballerini’s poem, “His Name Was Ryan,” included in her confessional 2021 poetry book Feel Your Way Through — a writing experience that she said helped her process her trauma.
In a decidedly more celebratory moment at Sunday's CMTs, later in the broadcast Ballerini was joined by four Drag Race fan favorites — Season 3’s Manila Luzon, Season 7’s Kennedy Davenport, Season 12’s Jan, and Season 13’s Olivia Lux — for a fun, campy, picket-fenced performance of her recent hit single “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” complete with the queens dressed in retro desperate-housewives eleganza. After the CMTs ceremony, Ballerini tweeted, “If you go down, I’m going down too 🏳️🌈 // Thank you to these iconic queens… for celebrating love, self-expression, and performance.”
if you go down, i’m going down too 🏳️🌈 // thank you to these iconic queens and @manilaluzon@kennedyddoftx@janjanjan@TheOliviaLux and @CMT for celebrating love, self expression, and performance.
📸 John Shearer @GettyImagespic.twitter.com/jZ3JTVI3ny— Kelsea Ballerini (@KelseaBallerini) April 3, 2023
Ballerini wasn’t the only country diva making a political statement at Sunday’s ceremony. While accepting CMT’s special Equal Play Award, which recognizes artists that advocate for diversity in country music, Shania Twain used her time at the podium to demand that the country music industry “close the gap and provide an equal workspace for all talent.”
Twain, whose award was presented by Texas's own Megan Thee Stallion, promised to “continue to champion the many outstanding country artists that are not currently played… streamed, toured, or awarded at the level they deserve,” declaring: “I believe in an all-inclusive country music. This is a genre of music with a rich history that raised and nurtured my own songwriting and performance and recording career from childhood. Currently, the industry standard does a real disservice to this. … My hope is this opportunity and spotlight impresses you much, and lights up the careers of these very talented people on their journey. I will continue to do my best as a trailblazer. Together, let's ensure all our fellow artists get equal play regardless of gender, age, or race.” Twain also gave a shout-out to several rising country artists that will be joining her on tour this year, including Mickey Guyton and Breland, who are Black, and Lily Rose, one of the few openly gay country artists signed to a major label in Nashville.
The 2023 CMT Music Awards took place Sunday, April 2 at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas. Among the evening’s other performance highlights were Wynonna Judd and Ashley McBryde dueting on a countrified cover of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Alanis Morissette, Ingrid Andress, Lainey Wilson, Madeline Edwards, and Morgan Wade teaming for Morissette’s “You Oughta Know”; Darius Rucker and the Black Crowes doing “She Talks to Angels”; Gwen Stefani and Carly Pearce keeping the nostalgia going on a remake of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl”; Gary Clark Jr. paying tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan; and a show-closing all-star tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd, introduced by Peter Frampton and featuring Paul Rodgers, Cody Johnson, Billy Gibbons, Slash, Warren Haynes, Chuck Leavell, LeAnn Rimes, and Wynonna Judd.
For a full list of this year's CMT Music Awards winners, click here.
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