Midweek Notes - August 12 2026

Country music has its share of good eggs, about whom nary a bad word is said. There’s 88-year-old Bill Anderson, soon-to-be-70 Vince Gill, the great sideman and bandleader Marty Stuart, bearded songwriter Jamey Johnson and Shucked co-writers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. To this list can be added Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show and the man to whose kids Secor is godfather, Charlie Worsham.

I missed Worsham’s 2013 album Rubberband, because I had not yet attuned myself to contemporary commercial country music. I later became hooked on the opening tracks Could It Be and, especially, Want Me Too, which were both supremely melodic. The latter had a chorus which compared his heart to “a stone on the water…couldn’t fall any harder” but the heart he had found had “a lock” on it and was unwilling to bend to his own.

In 2017, shortly after I saw him delight Country2Country with his earworm about sitting on a lawn chair, Worsham put out The Beginning of Things, an album which was flawless yet underappreciated because it zigged pop when country was zagging in a hip-hop direction. There was no way a virtuoso mandolin player and guitarist was going to put on a ball cap and jeans, so Worsham became a cult artist and session player extraordinaire. His catalogue also includes the pandemic-era EP Sugarcane, whose big tune was Fist Through This Town, a killer heartbreaker.

Over the last decade, Worsham from Mississippi has become an honorary Brit, much like Ashley McBryde from Arkansas and Carly Pearce from Kentucky. After supporting Ward Thomas on their 2022 tour, he played his own show in the tiny Slaughtered Lamb venue before he flew out of London. I had a short chat with him without going overboard as a fan and admirer, asking him when his friend Dierks Bentley was going to come over to the UK. ‘We’re working on it,’ I was told, and there he was in 2025, with Worsham on guitar beside him and celebrated by Bentley as the busiest man in country music. Here he is on a double decker bus! There he is at Buckingham Palace! And here he is on the O2 Arena stage.

Mark Hagen, producer of the Radio 2 Country Show, was at that Slaughtered Lamb show. Had Darius Rucker not been living in London this year, making him a perfect choice to replace Bob Harris, Worsham would surely have been considered as the programme’s new permanent host. He sounds country, lives a country life and was the surprise winner of the 2024 CMA Award for Musician of the Year, beating fellow guitarists Tom Bukovac and Rob McNelley, as well as Paul Franklin, who lost out for a 32^nd time before winning in 2025. The longest-running practical joke in Nashville had finally enjoyed a punchline, almost four decades after Franklin was first nominated for the prize.

Instead of becoming the biggest artist of his generation, however, Charlie Worsham became a sort of Paul Franklin figure, hiding in plain sight. He put his own music on the back burner and became a first-call session cat. His playing can be heard on songs by Carrie Underwood, Eric Church, Kacey Musgraves, Hailey Whitters and Elle King. Most notably and audibly, he plucks the mandolin in the second verse of America’s biggest song, Choosin’ Texas, on which he also plays acoustic guitar.

Sadly, because the world is unjust, many fewer people will hear his new album than will hear Langley’s. Released independently last Friday (August 7), it boasts the mouthful of a title Once Upon a Second Time Around and features a handful of famous guests. The well-connected Worsham once again drafts in friends of the calibre of the ones who joined him on his 2023 EP Compadres, on which Kip Moore, Elle King and Bentley all popped up. Lainey Wilson was also on the EP and returns on the album, contributing vocals on They Never Do, a melancholy melody she never cut but which she wrote with her regular co-writers Jason Nix and Dallas Wilson. Stephen Wilson Jr., meanwhile, adds his baritone to Worsham’s tenor on Years Go By, a song the pair co-wrote and which has a brilliant rhyme of “kicker/ticker”.

I reviewed the album for Country Music People so you can pick up a copy or subscribe online via cmpcountry.com to read more (hint: it is worth your time). I also spoke to Worsham for a chat to be published in the September issue, where he became highly emotional twice. The first time came when he recalled the moment he won the CMA Musician of the Year, with all of his friends whooping and hollering, and the second was remembering how Franklin took the prize so that his father could share in his success, which came at the 33^rd attempt.

Rock’n’roll opener Powers That Be and Wrap My Porch Around were both released in anticipation of the album. Both songs were written with Jaren Johnston, frontman of The Cadillac Three and the record’s producer. Worsham has been very generous to outside writers on Once Upon a Second Time Around. His good friend John Osborne co-wrote Grass, while the acoustic ballads Family Man and Good Hurt were stuck on a shelf by Music Row A-Listers including Matt Rogers and Jon Nite.

Luke Combs lieutenant Drew Parker co-wrote Whiskeysippi, a song that could only be sung by a fella from that state; Worsham wrote Ever Mine on Combs’ The Way I Am album, which ought to be a nice little earner when, with luck, Combs and Alison Krauss perform it on TV at an awards show to promote the softer side of the album. Combs had previously joined Worsham on a re-recording of his old song How I Learned To Pray, which featured on Rubberband a decade previously.

Wrap My Porch Around appears in two versions, the second with the bluegrass legends The Travelin’ McCourys which was recorded in Gill’s home studio. Worsham wrote Blue Collar and a Purple Heart, one of the standout tracks on his new album, by himself, with a little help from a Vince Gill guitar lick. The song, which may become his career song, is a tribute to a couple whom we discover are his own grandparents. The title track, meanwhile, tells the story of another couple who, after their respective divorces, get it right the “second time around”. Brad Paisley could have made this song work in his heyday in the 2000s, and Worsham is more or less a modern equivalent of the guy from West Virginia, not just because he sings ’em, writes ’em and plays ’em.

He is also the latest emissary from Nashville to help export country around the world, and in his role as interviewer he has just spoken to Gill (who sings ’em, writes ’em and plays ’em, and is also a scratch golfer) for a ninth time for his 50 Years From Home series, which is approaching the end of a year-long set of 12 EPs with 72 new songs. Learn more about it here. https://countrywol.substack.com/p/sunday-hymn-sheet-may-31-2026

I spoke to Worsham just before Gill began his summer residency at the Ryman Auditorium. When I wrote up my interview, I suggested that the guitarist might well be asked to join the Grand Ole Opry in between its submission and publication. Aptly, on the day Once Upon a Second Time Around came out, Vince Gill stopped the show just after Worsham was given the spotlight to perform Wrap My Porch Around, a song with “Grand Ole Opry on the radio” in its chorus.

Unbeknownst to Worsham, Gill extended an invitation to him to become Opry member 238. The career sideman was in shock and in tears, but also in performance mode given that he still had to complete the show, playing auxiliary guitar beside Jedd Hughes, another career sideman and first-call session player. Goodness knows how many messages he got last weekend when he was invited to be an Opry member, but I imagine he will still be replying to them this week.

This works for Worsham, who will be coping with jetlag after a flight to the UK, where the prospective Opry member will promote his new album on the main stage of the Country Calling festival just before Parmalee headline on Saturday night (August 15). When I told my friend Daniel Dunlevy that he was not playing London this time out, he was delighted that he was instead visiting the tiny FortyFive Vinyl café in York on Thursday (August 13).

Daniel studied in the city 20 years ago and he invited me along to see Dierks Bentley, with Worsham by his side, at the O2 Arena for Country2Country 2025. I asked Daniel to try Worsham’s new album, although I was apprehensive because he had found little to enjoy in Cody Johnson’s recent release. Fortunately, he thought it a ‘step up from his other work. Really hearing the more bluegrass/Appalachian vibes. Well-crafted songs, very much a guitarist’s album. Lyrics a lot better than I remember. Makes me think this is what a Brothers Osborne album could sound like if TJ had a tenor voice.’

Daniel had no idea that Worsham used to be a member of rock’n’roll band KingBilly, whose lead guitar player was John Osborne. You, and Daniel, can learn more about Charlie in his two-hour chat with Stephen Hogan, recorded in March, available with a click or a swipe below.