WireImage<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBentley mourned James\u2019 death on Thursday night, describing the Missouri-born songwriter as \u201ca total legend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRest in peace pal,\u201d Bentley said. Total stud. Fellow aviator. One of the best singer-songwriters in our town\u2026.total legend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bentley credited James for fine-tuning his concept of the song, which was written in the aftermath of the country superstar\u2019s dad\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u201cI brought a couple of roughy sketched verse ideas of I Hold On to Brett after my dad died and he just did his thing. The chorus is all him. When I sing that song live, I\u2019m always thinking of my dad, but I also think about that day we wrote it. He just got it, just lit into it. It was one of the first times we wrote and I decided to drop the most meaningful and necessary idea of a song I had on him, because I felt like God was telling me to do so. Our friendship and that song changed my life.\u00a0Prayers for his family,\u201d Bentley said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grammy Award-winning country music songwriter Brett James, best known for writing Carrie Underwood\u2019s \u201cJesus Take the Wheel,\u201d was killed in a plane crash in North Carolina on Thursday. James, 57, was one of three people aboard a single-engine Cirrus SR22T that had departed from John C. Tune Airport in Nashville before it crashed into an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2033626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[22846,323287,21741,42346,21800,363849],"class_list":["post-2033625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-country-music","tag-dierks-bentley","tag-entertainment","tag-grammy-awards","tag-music","tag-songwriters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Country-music-songwriter-Brett-James-among-3-dead-in-North.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2033625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2033626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2033625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2033625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2033625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}