In November 2026, two weeks before the 60th CMA Awards, Sammy Kershaw learned that the Country Music Association had turned down his request to walk the red carpet. The show was being built around a salute to ’90s country, the decade Kershaw spent on the radio with “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful,” “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” “Cadillac Style” and “Third Rate Romance.” He has been a lifetime member of the association since 1992.
A few minutes on the carpet
What Kershaw asked for was small. He wanted a few minutes on the carpet with his wife, Mendy, before the show at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. He wrote that they had done it together before. Getty Images arrival photos show Kershaw at the 50th CMA Awards in November 2016, ten years before this one.
The couple seldom make it to industry nights. Kershaw still tours, and the dates usually collide with the big Nashville events. This year he planned around it. He adjusted his touring schedule and booked flights and a hotel for the two of them. Mendy, he said, had been looking forward to a special evening celebrating country music together.
According to Kershaw, the answer did not come for months. He wrote that they had been strung along and had expected to attend. Then, about two weeks before the November 18 broadcast, the request was denied.
What he wrote
On Thursday, November 5, Kershaw posted about it on his official Facebook page, which has more than 840,000 followers. He opened by saying the news really hurt him and that he was pretty sad about it.
He then laid out his case. He pointed to more than 50 years in the business, millions of records and singles sold and streamed, more than two dozen Billboard charted hits, his CMA Horizon Award nomination, the lifetime membership the CMA presented to him in 1992, and the CMA Fest show he had been asked to play without pay. He said he believed there should be room to recognize artists who spent their lives helping the organization succeed.
It’s extremely hurtful, embarrassing and very disappointing.
He also wrote that he was not the only successful country entertainer kept off the carpet. Then he closed with a darker line: the next time he attends the CMAs, he suggested, it may be as the subject of a tribute after he is gone, if he is lucky. He signed it simply, “Sam.”
The record he was pointing to
Kershaw’s list was not padding. The CMA’s own awards database shows one nomination for him, the 1993 Horizon Award, the category now called New Artist of the Year. He was up against Trisha Yearwood, John Michael Montgomery, Tracy Lawrence and Mark Chesnutt, and Chesnutt won.
The road to that nomination was long. Kershaw grew up in Kaplan, Louisiana, lost his father at 11, and was playing honky-tonks and roadhouses at night while barely a teenager. Before he had a record deal, he opened shows for Ray Price, Merle Haggard and George Jones. In 1988, trying to save his marriage, he walked away from music and took a full-time job supervising store remodeling for Walmart. A songwriter friend, Barry Jackson, talked him into sending a demo to Mercury Records, and he signed in 1990.
By the middle of the decade he had platinum albums, a duet with George Jones, and a run of hits that has aged well. Writers who track the genre now name him as one of the reasons ’90s country has come back into favor.
Riley Green’s answer
Thousands of fans commented on the post. Among them was Riley Green, the Alabama singer who won three CMA Awards in 2025.
If you haven’t earned the right to be there, then nobody has.
Green added that it was disappointing, to say the least. The comment carried history. In February 2022, Green posted his own version of Kershaw’s “Yard Sale,” a 1992 single that reached No. 17, filmed sitting inside a farmhouse with an acoustic guitar on his lap. He shared it days before he and Kershaw played the same show in Southaven, Mississippi. Green has long called himself a ’90s country fan at heart.
Why the timing stung
The 60th CMA Awards are meant as an anniversary. CMA chief executive Sarah Trahern has promised a show unlike any other, with the ’90s era at its center, and Louisiana native Lainey Wilson returning as host. Brooks & Dunn, another ’90s act, are set to receive the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award.
The CMA has not publicly addressed Kershaw’s post. Country Now noted that the red carpet has specific eligibility requirements for artists who want access. Saving Country Music argued that the space problem could be solved with a longer carpet window or a second line, and pointed out that the CMAs have far fewer nominees than shows like the Grammys, which run several carpets.
For Kershaw, the request had been a few minutes on the carpet beside his wife. The 60th CMA Awards air live on ABC on Wednesday, November 18, 2026, from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.