{"id":2211468,"date":"2025-12-25T00:17:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T00:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2211468"},"modified":"2025-12-25T00:17:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T00:17:12","slug":"clay-walker-brings-30-plus-years-of-country-hits-to-soaring-eagle-the-morning-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/clay-walker-brings-30-plus-years-of-country-hits-to-soaring-eagle-the-morning-sun\/","title":{"rendered":"Clay Walker brings 30-plus years of country hits to Soaring Eagle \u2013 The Morning Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Clay Walker\u2019s been putting out music since 1993, when his first single, \u201cWhat\u2019s It To You,\u201d hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.<\/p>\n<p>And while subsequent success has ebbed and flowed, Walker is as enthusiastic about his career now as he was back then.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMan, it\u2019s been fun,\u201d Walker, 56, says from Tennessee, where he splits time between there and his native Texas. \u201cThe fans have been good to me. The industry has been great to me \u2014 radio, media. I feel like I\u2019ve gotten a fair shake.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd I gotta say, I enjoy performing more now than I ever have. My career still feels like I haven\u2019t been out that long, which is crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Born Ernest Clayton Walker, Jr., in Beaumont, Texas and raised mostly in Vidor, music became Walker\u2019s focus early on. His grandfather was a guitarist and singer who played in the late Tex Ritter\u2019s band. Walker\u2019s father was also \u201ca great singer\u201d who gave his son his first guitar when he was nine and taught him to play. \u201cI grew up poor,\u201d he explains, \u201cso you really respected an instrument. You took great care of it. You knew it was special. The young Walker was also privy to family jam sessions while he was growing up, which further stoked his interest in making music himself.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was the ability to change the mood of everything that really attracted me to it,\u201d Walker says. \u201cWhen my dad or his siblings would break out a guitar, it just completely changed everything. You forgot about the struggles you were going through \u2014 unless you were singing about them, of course. It was just everything I needed at that young age.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"related left\"\/>The teenage Walker entered talent competitions and began playing around town; a local radio DJ even played one of his self-recorded songs on the air. He hit the road when he was 19, after graduating from high school and working at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant. \u201cI just started working on trying to get in front of more people and play in bigger places,\u201d Walker recalls. \u201cFinally my name got out there in the local area I\u2019m from and people started coming to see me perform, and then it kinda spread and Nashville came calling.\u201d\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>In 1992, record producer James Stroud discovered Walker and signed him to Giant Records, leading to \u201cWhat\u2019s It to You\u201d and the singer\u2019s self-titled debut, which hit No. 8 on the country charts and went platinum. Since then Walker has notched another eight Top 10 albums and 16 Top 10 singles. He was nominated for an American Music Award for Favorite Country New Artist in 1994, and in 2015 he was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n<p>Making all this more remarkable is that Walker, who has seven children from two marriages, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996, which led him to start the Band Against MS non-profit seven years later.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI struggle with the MS, and I continually look for anything and everything to make it better,\u201d he notes. \u201csome things work, some things don\u2019t. I\u2019m unabashedly a believer in God; I believe prayers actually work, and if you have that perspective you get a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Walker has seen country music change considerably during that time. And while he\u2019s not often mentioned alongside the likes of current hitmakers such as Morgan Wallen, ??, he\u2019s not bothered by that in the least.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think change is good, and it\u2019s inevitable,\u201d Walker says. \u201cI remember when the 90s country blew up; I don\u2019t think Merle Haggard or George Jones liked what country music was becoming then, but they didn\u2019t conform to it. And they certainly accepted all of us, the new artists and treated us great.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo now it\u2019s my turn to do the same thing. I don\u2019t lament that we\u2019ve changed or moved forward. I don\u2019t understand some of the sounds that I hear that are more digital or processed than organic musicianship, but it really is something that you either accept and embrace, or it just runs right over top of you. It\u2019s here, and it\u2019s not going away \u2014 and it\u2019s huge.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Walker does enjoy some of the younger artists \u2014 he singles out Ella Langley and Riley Green in particular as \u201cgreat artists that still embrace a lot of traditional sounds and write songs in that way.\u201d In the meantime he\u2019s still able to play headline shows for the audience he built with his success, and he\u2019s about six songs into what he plans to be his first new album since 2021\u2019s \u201cTexas to Tennessee, working with award-winning producer and songwriter Keith Stegall, whose credits include Alan Jackson, the Zac Brown Band and George Jones as well as previous projects for Walker.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur properties are directly across the street from each other, so that makes it easy,\u201d Walker notes with a laugh. \u201cIt\u2019s really a great thing to work with a producer who not only knows a great song and how to right a great song but also cares about the vocal more than anything else on a record. He wants to make sure it\u2019s your best performance and that you are actually telling the story.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"related left\"\/>\n<p>\u201cAnd as long as I\u2019ve been doing this \u2014 and I feel like I\u2019m a pro at it \u2014 he challenged me in the studio. He said to me, \u2018Everyone knows you sing great; would you stop singing and start telling the story?\u2019 And he was 100 percent right. So I know when we\u2019re finished with this, it\u2019s going to be something special.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Clay Walker and Confederate Railroad perform at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 27 at Soaring Eagles Casino &amp; Resort, 6800 Soaring Eagle Blvd., Mount Pleasant. 888-732-4537 or soaringeaglecasino.com.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_918851\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Clay Walker to perform at the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort. (Photo by Kirsten Balani)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.themorningsun.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Clay Walker\u2019s been putting out music since 1993, when his first single, \u201cWhat\u2019s It To You,\u201d hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. And while subsequent success has ebbed and flowed, Walker is as enthusiastic about his career now as he was back then. \u201cMan, it\u2019s been fun,\u201d Walker, 56, says from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2211469,"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":[25172],"tags":[22749,21741,308544,22764,21738,22482],"class_list":["post-2211468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-concert","tag-entertainment","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-things-to-do"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Clay-Walker-brings-30-plus-years-of-country-hits-to-Soaring.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211468","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=2211468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2211470,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211468\/revisions\/2211470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2211469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2211468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2211468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2211468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}