Morgan Wallen's Latest CMA Awards Absence Cements Him as Country Music's Modern-Day Outlaw

Conspicuous by his absence.

To nobody's surprise, Morgan Wallen was nowhere to be seen at last night's CMA Awards ceremony in the heart of Nashville. The Sneedville megastar didn't attend last year, despite winning the biggest accolade of the night, Entertainer of the Year, and during a recent duet with Ella Langley, Wallen quipped, “It takes a lot more than an awards show to get me out to Broadway these days”.

Equally as predictable was Wallen's failure to pick up any awards during the ceremony, even though he was nominated for three. After dropping another record-breaking album, I'm the Problem, and a tour that featured stops at some of the largest venues in North America, Wallen has cemented his status as the biggest artist in modern country music - yet his awards haul remains strangely sparse.

Wallen has had a tumultuous relationship with awards shows ever since he first stormed onto the scene. That strained relationship snapped when the CMA blacklisted him following his racial slur incident in 2021. Then, when they welcomed him back in from the cold in 2023 for a double-performance, but didn't give him any awards, many interpreted this as another slight from the CMA membership.

This feeling was consolidated when Wallen cleaned house at the subsequent Billboard Music Awards - which is solely stats-driven - during which he took home 11 accolades in recognition of his smash hit, ‘Last Night’, and his opus, One Thing At A Time.

He pointedly commented in his acceptance speech, “You know, like [‘98 Braves’] says, you win some you lose some. And last award show I went to, we came home empty-handed - and this one, I don’t have enough hands for them all. So either way, I promise I’m gonna stay the same regardless if I come home with 10 or 0. I’m gonna give y’all my all every single night, every single time I go into the studio”.

Last year, of course, the CMA crowned Wallen the Entertainer of the Year for the first time ever - but he wasn't there to pick it up, and he's never really acknowledged the victory, aside from a cursory inclusion of the award in an Instagram carousel.

It feels like Wallen is simply done with all the back and forth, and it's likely we won't ever see him at the CMAs again. In all honesty, you can't really blame him, either.

He doesn't owe the governing body anything, and you can't help but feel he was only welcomed back because his success became too stratospheric to ignore any longer. If Wallen was enjoying a fairly average country career, with one No. 1 every couple of years, say, it feels like the CMA could've just kept shunning him.

As ERNEST so eloquently put it in the lead-up to last night's show when asked what Wallen thinks about his Entertainer of the Year chances, “He don't give a s***. Since when is Morgan giving a s***? Who's making more money doing this than Morgan Wallen? He don't give a f*** about this award. I wouldn't either if I was Morgan Wallen”.

And it's hard to see that changing - the CMA extended a belated olive branch last year by giving Wallen Entertainer of the Year, but it seemed the bridges had already been burned. After the embarrassment of not having the winner of their most prestigious accolade bother showing up to the event, a large portion of the CMA membership will surely have sour grapes and will consequently steer clear of Wallen.

It all feels somewhat reminiscent of the rebellious, middle-finger-up artists of old - Waylon Jennings throwing shade at the CMA during his 1975 acceptance speech, for instance, or Alan Jackson telling his drummer to play without sticks in a subtle protest against the ACM insisting he and his band use a backing track in 1994.

Although traditionalists would positively baulk at the idea of Wallen - who frequently incorporates trap-inspired 808s and rattling hi-hats into his music, and who admits he doesn't really listen to country - being the genre's modern-day “outlaw”, there's no question that he captures the same anti-establishment spirit of Waylon et al.

It's ironic, really, given the fact that Wallen is in many ways born of the Nashville establishment, with the ‘Last Night’ chart-topper the face of mainstream country.

But even so, his screw-you attitude towards awards shows and his refusal to play by Music City's rules undoubtedly enhances his bad-boy, rebel-without-a-cause persona.

Of course, Wallen is certainly not a subscriber to the “outlaw country” aesthetic musically. Instead, what we're talking about here is more the artists in today's landscape who are going to buck the trend, disrupt the norm and blaze their own trail, regardless of how many naysayers and haters they accumulate along the way.

Regardless of how you feel about Wallen, there's no question that he is country music's leading artist at the moment, and not having him at these major awards shows will continue to chip away at the credibility of these functions. The absence of Wallen - and Zach Bryan, for that matter - is starting to become deeply damaging.

With the ‘Love Somebody’ crooner showing no signs of slowing down on his path to world domination, the CMA will end up on the losing side of this stand-off. As a result, the organisation risks losing all validity as the “tastemakers” of the genre we love.

Lastly, this isn't to take anything away from this year's Entertainer of the Year, Lainey Wilson, who is a fantastic ambassador for country music and a worthy recipient of the accolade. If anything, by not having Wallen be a part of these awards shows, it just undermines the actual winners, because they'll always be subjected to online commentators claiming, “Well, they only won because Wallen isn't there”.

It's an entirely unnecessary source of fanbase division, especially given the fact that Wallen, Wilson, Combs and all the major country stars are good pals behind the scenes.

So why not make the CMAs the joyful celebration of the genre that it should be, and make a concerted effort to welcome every artist, so that it becomes less about who wins and who loses, and more about toasting another awesome year of country music.

For more on Morgan Wallen, see below: