The Class of 2025 will be inducted later this year in Nashville
The Country Music Association gathered at the prestigious Rotunda at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to reveal the 2025 inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame – Tony Brown, June Carter Cash and Kenny Chesney. Brown will be inducted in the Non-Performer category, which is awarded every third year in rotation with the Songwriter and Recording and/or Touring Musician categories. Cash will be inducted into the Veterans Era Artist category and Chesney will be inducted in the Modern Era Artist category.
Country Music Hall of Fame member Vince Gill hosted the press conference to announce the news, which was also streamed live on CMA’s YouTube channel.
“This year’s inductees embody the relentless drive and dedication that defines country music,” says Sarah Trahern, CMA Chief Executive Officer. “Kenny, June and Tony have each left a lasting imprint on the genre, shaping its history with their contributions. From a young age, each of them was immersed in music, and their lifelong commitment has led to this very moment. Their achievements speak to the passion and dedication that have defined their extraordinary careers, and the impact of their work will continue to inspire future generations. There’s something incredibly special about being able to surprise each inductee or their family with this recognition – it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of my job, knowing how deeply their careers have touched the lives of so many, including myself. It is with great pride that we honor these three remarkable individuals and celebrate the lasting legacy they have created within our format.”
“All three of the new inductees have left indelible impacts on the genre and firmly established themselves as unforgettable contributors to country music,” says Kyle Young, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Chief Executive Officer. “North Carolina native Tony Brown is a trailblazing record producer and executive who has helped shape the sound of modern Country since the 1980s, supervising many best-selling records while also ushering in outsider talents to the genre. Virginia-born June Carter Cash was a vibrant torchbearer of her family’s enduring country music legacy who forged her own distinctive path during her more than 60-year career as a beloved singer, comedienne and songwriter. And Kenny Chesney, from Tennessee, has maintained one of the biggest hitmaking careers in Country Music since 2000, with more than 50 Top 10 hits, 16 platinum albums, and is a regular top touring act who continues to delight audiences. Fittingly, they will now forever be enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame with their illustrious peers who shaped our art form.”
“When you’re producing No. 1 records, you feel like you know what you’re doing,” says Brown. “But being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame — especially for someone as idealistic as me —makes it feel like you’ve truly made an impact. And that has always been my goal.”
“June Carter Cash represents the whole cloth of country music, it’s breadth and heritage,” says the Cash family. “And June’s place in country music is undeniable. From the 1940s, across the decades and into the current century, her voice has been heard across the country and throughout much of the world, both with Mother Maybelle Carter, sisters Helen and Anita, and on her own, as well as with her duet partners, including her beloved Johnny Cash, with whom she told stories and inspired musicians both past, present, and future. She was a loving wife and mother, an actress, singer, songwriter, comedienne and a truly gifted performer whose persona was never exactly what was expected but was always and totally June. She profoundly respected, and was respected for, her craft, and that endures to this day. We, the Carter and Cash families, are most grateful and proud that the County Music Association has given June this well-deserved honor for her undeniable contribution to the fabric of country music and American culture.”
“You don’t dare dream of being in the Country Music Hall of Fame, alongside legends including George Jones, Willie Nelson, Alabama, even Dean Dillon,” says Chesney. “I’ve been lucky enough to get to call them my friends, and that was plenty. But hearing the news I’d been voted into the Hall, I can honestly say beyond my wildest dreams, it’s an honor that defies words. I am humbled, grateful, honored…as much for all the songwriters, musicians, artists and people who’ve helped me build my career; they have truly inspired me every single day.”
Non-Performer Category – Tony Brown
“I never wanted to be famous,” Tony Brown wrote in his 2018 book “Elvis, Strait, to Jesus: An Iconic Producer’s Journey with Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Country, and Gospel Music,” “I just wanted to be noticed.”
Within the country music industry, he became both — a musician, producer and record label executive that the Los Angeles Times Magazine once anointed “The Kingmaker of Country Music.” He has produced more than 100 chart-topping country hits and has worked with dozens of artists. His parallel paths prompted Rodney Crowell to say, “It would take five of everybody else in the music business to equal one of Tony Brown.”
Born December 11, 1946, in Greensboro, NC, Brown grew up in a strict, religious household, the youngest of four children born to a man who left his job at a dairy to become a Baptist evangelist after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. As a member of The Brown Family Singers, he sang harmony with his two brothers and a sister, later switching to piano. At 13, he caught the bug for performing from the audience response to his playing at the annual Southern Gospel Music Festival in Benson, NC.
Eventually, he joined the Oak Ridge Boys’ backing band, The Mighty Oaks Band. That same year, the Gospel Music Association named him the Best Gospel Instrumentalist. Brown soon found himself in Elvis Presley’s orbit as a member of Voice, described as Presley’s “on call” house band, available for the late nights when the King wanted to sing gospel songs. From there, he went to the Sweet Inspirations and then to Presley’s TCB Band, succeeding Glen D. Hardin. Brown played piano for Presley’s final concert in Indianapolis on June 26, 1977.
In the months after Presley’s death, Brown joined Emmylou Harris’ renowned Hot Band, replacing Hardin once again. During the 1970s and 1980s, he appeared on her albums Blue Kentucky Girl, Light of the Stable, Evangeline and White Shoes.
Around the same time, he joined Free Flight Records, a Nashville-based pop label under the RCA Records umbrella, as a staff producer, moving to RCA’s Nashville division when Free Flight folded after less than a year. RCA was the top label in town, a status Brown helped solidify when he signed Alabama.
Brown also joined former Hot Band alum Rodney Crowell’s backing band The Cherry Bombs, which featured other Hot Band members as well as Vince Gill, whom Brown had convinced to move to Nashville. When Brown returned to RCA, he signed Gill to the label.
Brown began producing more, as well, having his first hit with Steve Wariner’s 1983 Top 5 single, “Midnight Fire,” which he produced with Norro Wilson.
In March 1984, he jumped from RCA to MCA Nashville, helping make it Nashville’s No. 1 label during country’s boom years of the 1990s and eventually rising to President of the division. Brown developed a reputation for signing and producing not only commercially successful acts but also adventurous, influential ones.
“He gravitated to artist types that were most often unique and cutting edge, but at the same time he was very much a purist and a traditionalist,” said Ronnie Dunn of Brooks & Dunn, for whom Brown produced the 2006 CMA Single of the Year, “Believe.” “He didn’t try to dictate to the people that he worked with how to do what they did; he challenged them to be all that they could be.”
In 1986, he produced Steve Earle’s seminal Guitar Town, which Brown has said defined his start as a promising producer. He fulfilled that promise when he co-produced Rodney Crowell’s 1988 release Diamonds & Dirt, the first country album to yield five No. 1 singles.
Brown brought Gill to MCA, where he had his biggest hits. He also signed other future Country Music Hall of Fame members Patty Loveless and Marty Stuart. He produced even more, working with Wynonna Judd on her first three solo albums and developing long-lasting production relationships with Reba McEntire and George Strait. He was a pioneering force in what would become known as Americana, either signing or producing the likes of Joe Ely, Shooter Jennings, Lyle Lovett, The Mavericks, and Allison Moorer. After leaving MCA, he founded Universal South with former Arista Records Nashville chief Tim DuBois in 2002.
Brown is a six-time Grammy winner, a Gospel Music Hall of Fame member and a North Carolina Music Hall of Fame member. In 2004, he received Leadership Music’s inaugural Dale Franklin Leadership Award, which honors exemplary leadership in the music community, and the Academy of Country Music’s Icon Award in 2024. The Americana Music Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. Over the course of his career, he has amassed more than 100 No. 1 singles and seen record sales exceed 100 million units.
Strait, who has recorded 20 albums with Brown as his producer, has said, “Tony Brown is going to leave a big footprint in the music world when he decides to step away.” That day has yet to come, but there’s no doubt people will notice the impact he has made as he steps into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Veterans Era Artist Category – June Carter Cash
If country music really is a family, June Carter Cash was its matriarch for decades. She earned her standing in the country community not only because of her talent but also because of the way she brought together musicians from across generations, encouraging them and bringing out the best in people as if they were her own family.
She was more than that, of course. There was always more to June Carter. The middle daughter of Ezra and Maybelle Carter, Valerie June was born in Maces Springs, VA, on June 23, 1929. Her mother was five months pregnant with June when she recorded “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” with A.P. and Sara Carter. Collectively, her mother, aunt and uncle were known as the Carter Family, a trio whose music laid much of the foundation for commercial Country Music.
She entered the family business as a child. By age ten, she had learned to play autoharp and had begun appearing on the Carters’ radio broadcasts, first on stations at the Texas-Mexico border, then at WBT-AM in Charlotte, NC, and on to WRNL-AM and WRVA-AM in Richmond, VA. She performed with her mother and sisters Helen and Anita, developing her comedic chops with characters like Aunt Polly Carter and learning to do anything for a laugh. “I think I tried to be funny when I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” she said.
The family act appeared as regulars on several radio shows — Richmond’s “Old Dominion Barn Dance,” Knoxville’s “Tennessee Barn Dance,” and the “Ozark Mountain Jubilee” in Springfield, MO, before settling at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1950.
In 1952, June married Opry star Carl Smith. Their four-year marriage produced a daughter, Carlene, who eventually had a successful music career of her own.
After her split from Smith, June and Carlene moved to New York in 1956. She fell into the creative Greenwich Village scene, befriending director Elia Kazan, whom she had met at the Opry, and studying with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre. She began to land acting roles, including episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “The Adventures of Jim Bowie,” while also flying home on weekends to appear on the Opry.
She returned to Nashville when she married Edwin “Rip” Nix, a local businessman and sportsman, in 1957. Their daughter, Rosie, was born the following year. June and Nix divorced in 1966.
During the early 1960s, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters began touring in support of Johnny Cash, whom June had met backstage at the Ryman Auditorium a few years before. The attraction between the two entertainers was undeniable. June wrote a song about her feelings for Johnny. When Johnny heard “Ring of Fire,” he added mariachi horns and transformed it into a signature hit that topped the country charts for seven weeks in 1963. They soon began recording duets together, releasing Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash and June Carter in 1967. A song from that album, “Jackson,” won them a Grammy.
June married Johnny on March 1, 1968, in Franklin, KY.
Most of the spotlight during the couple’s 35-year marriage fell on Johnny, though they won a second Grammy together for their 1970 single “If I Were a Carpenter.” Son John Carter Cash was born on March 3, 1970, while that record was climbing the charts. June also placed a single called “A Good Man” inside the Billboard Country Top 30 in 1971.
Behind the scenes, June played an invaluable role in the country music community as she turned the Cash home in Hendersonville, TN, into a creative hub and welcomed established and aspiring musicians and songwriters. She nurtured her “babies,” who included Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Larry Gatlin. She inspired and assisted countless others.
While June may have chosen a supporting role as her primary one during those years — she often referred to herself as Aaron to Johnny’s Moses — she also found ways to satisfy her creative spirit. She appeared in the 1997 film The Apostle opposite Robert Duvall, who, like June, had studied with Sandy Meisner in New York. In 1999 at age 70, she released Press On, her first album in 25 years. It won the Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy in 2000. June won two more Grammys for her follow-up album, Wildwood Flower, in 2004, though those awards came posthumously.
June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, at age 73.
Two years later, Reese Witherspoon portrayed June in the film Walk the Line and won a Best Actress Oscar for the role.
In 2024, June, the critically acclaimed documentary telling the story of her life, was released on Paramount+ and was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Music Film category.
In 1997’s “Cash: The Autobiography,” Johnny Cash said that June Carter was the greatest woman he ever knew. Only his mother, he said, came close. He also called her “one of the most neglected artists in country music. Sadly, I think her contributions to Country Music will go underrecognized simply because she’s my wife; it certainly has been up to now.” That was, he wrote, his only regret about marrying her.
Now, those contributions have finally been properly recognized as she joins so many members of her family and her friends in the unbroken circle of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Modern Era Artist Category – Kenny Chesney
Kenny Chesney put his car on I-40 heading west on the day the Gulf War started. The young man from East Tennessee was chasing a dream he couldn’t truly know the magnitude of – only that he wanted to write songs and touch people the way George Jones, Conway Twitty and Alabama, as well as Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, had touched him.
The recent East Tennessee State graduate, who’d gone to Russia with the school’s Bluegrass Band alongside future members of Alison Krauss’ Union Station, had already made a few trips to Music City, meeting with publishers, producers and even a couple record company people. He’d play the Turf on a decidedly different Lower Broadway, get a publishing deal at iconic Acuff Rose a year later and be signed to a record deal with legendary Southern rock label Capricorn by no less than founder Phil Walden. In My Wildest Dreams was released in 1994, with “Whatever It Takes” not making much of a dent, but Chesney’s self-penned “The Tin Man” showed a strong creative voice.
It wasn’t until manager Dale Morris took Chesney to RCA’s Joe Galante, himself now a Country Music Hall of Fame member, that things began to fall into place. Heart-forward, decidedly country, “Fall in Love,” his first BNA single, cracked the Top 10, while 1997’s “She’s Got It All” became his first No. 1.
By 2000, Chesney had a triple platinum Greatest Hits that included “How Forever Feels,” “I Lost It,” “That’s Why I’m Here,” “Don’t Happen Twice” and “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” Headlining small arenas, he experienced explosive growth on George Strait’s Country Music Festival stadium tours in 1999 and 2000, which fired his desire to create a sound all his own.
With 2002’s “Young,” the guitar-forward coming of age joyride, Chesney came into his own. Pulling the rock influences he loved through the bluegrass and country he was born to; a sound that reflected his generation was born. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s all-genre Top 200 Albums chart and forged a new country aesthetic – as America asked, “Who the hell is Kenny Chesney?”
Hit singles, awards and blown-out switchboards and ticket sites followed in rapid order. By the time 2004’s When The Sun Goes Down also debuted at No. 1 on the Top 200 Albums chart, Chesney had sold-out the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, the first artist to play there since the Jacksons. Between the thoughtful balladry of “There Goes My Life,” the driving “I Go Back,” the tropical title track duet with Uncle Kracker and the punched up “Keg In The Closet,” the album suggested a thrilling kind of country for young people with a thirst for life.
Beyond winning four Country Music Association and four Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year awards, the soft-spoken songwriter and rising superstar began taking country to places one wouldn’t expect. Selling out NFL stadiums in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and more, his duets brought Dave Matthews, the Wailers, Grace Potter, Willie Nelson and Mac McAnally to the top of country radio charts – on his way to being the only country artist on Billboard’s Top 10 Touring Acts of the Last 25 Years for the last 16 years.
His love of the ocean, always an undertow in his commercial records, inspired a series of singer-songwriter projects that also debuted at No. 1 on the Top 200 Albums chart. Be As You Are (Songs from an Old Blue Chair) spoke to the musical force’s soul, while Lucky Old Sun, Life on a Rock and Songs for the Saints celebrated different aspects of the people and places Chesney inhabited beyond the spotlight. They also yielded “Get Along,” “Pirate Flag,” “Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven” and “Spread The Love.”
Restless and creatively driven, 20 years after his debut, Chesney delivered “American Kids” from his “The Big Revival” – and once again, changed the game. Rhythmically forward, it pressed the energy even higher for the man the Wall Street Journal crowned “The King of the Road” and Variety deemed “Country Music’s only true long-term stadium act.”
That energy permeates Cosmic Hallelujah, Here And Now and Born, his latest. He has continued pushing the envelope, collaborating across genres with Ziggy Marley, Mindy Smith, P!nk, David Lee Murphy, Kelsea Ballerini and good friend Jimmy Buffett, whom he helped induct into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
And his fans, named No Shoes Nation, are equally voracious.
Whether creating No Shoes Radio to keep the music flowing, “Boys of Fall,” the definitive high school football song that inspired an ESPN documentary, an unprecedented three nights at Gillette Stadium in August of 2024, or taking No Shoes Nation to a whole new dimension as the first country artist at Sphere in Las Vegas, the high-impact performer is always looking for ways to enrich the people whose own lives are reflected in his albums.
Like “HEART*LIFE*MUSIC,” his first book due this fall, Chesney created a world based on his heart, pulled through his life and infused his music with all the things he valued. Giving everything he had, he delivered the kind of truth that became the sound of coming of age across the nation in the 21st century.
And if there’s anybody in country music who puts all of his heart and his life into his music, it’s Kenny Chesney. That’s the mindset that got him to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
