A country superstar shatters Willie Nelson’s long-standing record after more than a decade, signaling a major shift in the genre’s history. ML

While the term “icon” gets tossed around with some frequency these days, one musician who truly lives up to the term is legendary country star Willie Nelson. Considering how many countless hits the beloved “outlaw” has spawned over the years, it’s no surprise to hear that until very recently, Nelson held the record for most weeks spent on Billboard‘s Top Country Albums chart thanks to his 1978 album Stardust (a whopping 551 weeks).

But as American Songwriter reported, just a few days ago, another country superstar broke Nelson’s record: Chris Stapleton‘s 2015 album Traveller has now spent 552 weeks on the Top Country Albums chart. (By comparison, while other incredibly popular albums like Luke Bryan’s Crash My Party and Taylor Swift’s Fearless made it to the Top 10 on the chart, they didn’t last past the 400-week mark.)

And that’s not the only major accomplishment Stapleton has to celebrate this week, either. As Whiskey Riff reported, “Tennessee Whiskey” is once again on the Apple Music Top 100 songs of the year chart this year, a decade after it became one of the most popular songs of 2015.

While “Tennessee Whiskey” was originally written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove and later covered by David Allan Coe and later covered by George Jones, Stapleton’s cover of the tune — released on his debut album Traveller — helped propel the singer-songwriter to legendary status after he performed the tune with Justin Timberlake at the 2015 CMA Awards. It’s been certified 7x-platinum by the RIAA and was named Billboard’s Top Country Album of the Century earlier this year.

Of course, as longtime fans know, Stapleton was a country star even before Traveller came out, having written with such fellow country artists as Kenny Chesney, George Strait, Luke Bryan, and Vince Gill (as well as Sheryl Crow and Ed Sheeran).

Why Chris Stapleton decided to quit drinking

While Stapleton sings about whiskey, it seems he doesn’t drink it anymore. In a 2023 interview with iHeartCountry, the musician explained, “I didn’t have to go to rehab, but from a 45-year-old-man health perspective, a doctor’s gonna look at me and go, ‘Hey, man, probably cut out the drinking,’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, cool.’”

“I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost,” he continued. “When you’re younger, you feel like you have to do certain things in order to occupy some of these spaces, to make yourself feel like you’re legit. You want to feel things. You want to be able to write about things authentically. If somebody working a different kind of job drank themselves to death in the name of being better at that job, it wouldn’t make sense to anybody. We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he must have been the greatest electrician who ever lived.’”

Thankfully for Stapleton’s fans, he didn’t go the electrician route…and he’s apparently taking good care of himself.