The First CMA Awards Weren’t Even on TV: What Really Happened in Nashville on October 20, 1967

On the night of Friday, October 20, 1967, the people who ran country music gathered at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium to hand each other some awards. There were no network cameras in the aisles. No satellite trucks sat outside, and no one in Los Angeles or New York was waiting on a feed. The Country Music Association called the evening the “CMA Awards Banquet and Show,” and for most of America it simply didn’t happen, because most of America never saw it.

By the end of the night, Eddy Arnold had been named the first Entertainer of the Year. A former Ernest Tubb sideman named Jack Greene had gone home with three trophies. Loretta Lynn had become the first woman to win the CMA’s Female Vocalist award. And a trade group that had started nine years earlier with a couple hundred members and $1,200 in seed money had quietly built the event that would become country music’s biggest night.

Almost six decades later, the CMA Awards are a three-hour live broadcast from an arena downtown, watched by millions and dissected for days afterward. The 60th Annual CMA Awards are set for Wednesday, November 18, 2026, at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. To understand how the show got there, you have to go back to that first untelevised night, to the men and women who were in the room, and to the business problem that made a trade association think an awards show was worth the trouble.

October 20, 1967: The First CMA Awards Night Nobody Filmed

The building itself tells you something about Nashville in 1967. The Municipal Auditorium was only five years old, a round, domed arena on the north edge of downtown that had opened on October 7, 1962. It had cost the city about $5 million and was billed as the first public assembly hall in the Mid-South with air conditioning. It could seat roughly 9,700 in the round. For a town that still thought of itself as the home of the Ryman’s hard wooden pews, this was the modern Nashville.

That was the point. The CMA wasn’t holding its first awards at the Grand Ole Opry. It was holding them in a civic arena, as a banquet and show for the industry itself. The people at those tables were label executives, publishers, booking agents, disc jockeys and the artists who depended on all of them. The evening was, first and foremost, a trade function.

The CMA’s own history records that the show was co-hosted by Sonny James and Bobbie Gentry, and the pairing makes a kind of sense when you look at where each of them stood that autumn. James, the soft-spoken Alabamian known as the “Southern Gentleman,” was a Capitol Records star who’d crossed over to the pop charts a decade earlier with “Young Love.” In 1967 he was in the middle of a run of consecutive No. 1 country singles that would eventually reach sixteen straight. He was also a nominee himself that night, for both Entertainer and Male Vocalist of the Year.

Bobbie Gentry was the newest face in the building and, for a few months that year, one of the most famous. Born Roberta Lee Streeter near Woodland, in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, she had released “Ode to Billie Joe” on July 10, 1967. By late summer it had spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. That same fall, the song was up for both Single of the Year and Song of the Year at the CMA’s first awards. So one of the two people handing out the envelopes was waiting on an envelope of her own.

It’s easy to picture it: a Mississippi songwriter with a guitar-case full of pop-chart momentum on one side of the podium, a steady Nashville hitmaker on the other, and a room full of industry people who knew exactly what both of them meant for record sales. What’s harder to picture is how small the whole thing still was. There’s no famous footage from that night, because the show was not televised. The first CMA Awards exist today mostly as a list of names, a date, a venue and the memories of the people who were there.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
The Mississippi songwriter who co-hosted the first CMA Awards had written the most talked-about song of 1967, and she never did say what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/08/24/story-behind-ode-to-billie-joe-bobbie-gentry/

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Why the Country Music Association Was Founded in 1958

To understand why anyone bothered with an awards show, you have to go back nine years, to a moment when country music was genuinely worried about its future.

By 1958, rock and roll had knocked the country business sideways. Some of the same young performers who might have become country stars a few years earlier were now selling records to teenagers instead, and record sales for traditional country had slumped. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s entry on the CMA, written by historian John W. Rumble, ties the organization’s birth directly to that decline in record sales. On Music Row, the dismay was widespread.

The industry already had a loose organization, the Country Music Disc Jockeys Association, built around the disc jockeys who played the records. In 1958 that group dissolved, and something more ambitious took its place. By the CMA’s own account, the idea took shape in a small Miami hotel room, where a handful of music-industry pioneers decided the business needed a real trade association. It would be the first trade association formed to promote a single genre of music.

The founding cast reads like a who’s who of the business side of 1950s country. Connie B. Gay, a broadcaster and promoter based in the Washington, D.C., area, served as the CMA’s first president. Wesley Rose, head of Acuff-Rose Publications, became the first chairman of the board. Harry Stone served as the first executive director. The board that took shape in 1959 had nine directors and five officers.

The money was modest, to put it kindly. According to the CMA’s own history, the new association started with $1,200 handed over from the old disc jockeys’ association and a little over two hundred members paying $10 a year in dues. That was the whole war chest for an organization that intended to change how America thought about country music.

Connie B. Gay, Jo Walker and the Business of Being Taken Seriously

Connie B. Gay was an interesting choice for a first president, because his whole career had been an argument that country music could be a modern business. Starting in 1946 at WARL in Arlington, Virginia, he built a radio program called “Town and Country Time,” which he promoted as offering a little bit of town and an awful lot of country. He trademarked the name, syndicated the show widely, and moved it onto Washington television in the 1950s. Jimmy Dean and Patsy Cline both came up as regulars in his orbit.

Gay is often credited as one of the first to push the term “country music” in place of “hillbilly,” a word much of the industry had come to see as a sales liability. That instinct, that the label itself mattered, sat at the center of what the CMA would try to do. When the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 1980, it credited his role in transforming what was still called hillbilly music into a modern entertainment industry.

The person who actually ran the place, though, was Jo Walker. She was hired in 1958 as the CMA’s office manager and first paid employee, and she was frank in later years about how little she knew going in. The CMA’s own history puts her starting salary at $375 a month.

“I knew nothing about country music. I had never been to the Grand Ole Opry.”

— Jo Walker-Meador, recalling her 1958 hiring at the CMA, as reported by NPR

She learned fast. Walker, later Jo Walker-Meador, became executive director in 1962 and held the job until 1991. The Country Music Hall of Fame credits her with organizing an early CMA banquet in 1959 that grew into the annual awards program, and with leading the fundraising drive that built the Hall of Fame’s first museum. When she was inducted into the Hall herself in 1995, the organization she’d joined as a two-hundred-member startup had grown to thousands of members.

Years later, looking back on those early board meetings, she offered a line that says a lot about how Nashville worked. There were often controversies, she recalled, “But they always seemed to come out of those board meetings as friends. And that’s really been the success of the association.”

Selling Country Music to Radio and Advertisers

The CMA’s real work in those first years had nothing to do with trophies. It was about radio.

In 1961, a survey found only 81 full-time country radio stations in the United States. The CMA’s own account puts that number against roughly 3,500 American radio stations at the time. For an industry whose records lived or died on airplay, that was a crisis. If a station manager in Ohio or an ad buyer in New York thought of country as a rural novelty, then the records never reached the people most likely to buy them.

So the CMA went to work on the people who made those decisions. Rumble’s Tennessee Encyclopedia entry describes the approach plainly: targeted demographic research and marketing aimed at showing broadcasters and advertisers who the country audience actually was. The pitch, in effect, was that country fans weren’t a novelty. They were working adults with paychecks and car payments, and they were loyal to the stations that played their music.

It worked. By the end of the decade, more than 600 stations were programming country music full time. By 1995, the Hall of Fame notes, the number had grown to roughly 2,400. Every one of those stations needed records, personalities, events and stories to fill the air.

Nashville already had an annual ritual built around that relationship. Since the early 1950s, WSM had hosted a yearly gathering of country disc jockeys around the Grand Ole Opry’s birthday, a chance for artists and labels to thank the people who played their records. By most accounts it grew from roughly a hundred disc jockeys at the start to thousands of attendees by the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s it shifted to October, which the CMA had been promoting as Country Music Month. When the CMA finally staged its awards, it put them in that same October season, when much of the business was already in town.

Seen that way, the first CMA Awards weren’t a vanity project. They were a sales tool. An award gave a disc jockey something to announce, a label something to print on an album jacket, and a newspaper something to report. “Entertainer of the Year” sounded like something that belonged in the same conversation as the Grammys and the Emmys, and that was precisely the idea.

A Hall of Fame Before an Awards Show

Before the CMA ever handed out an award for the best record of the year, it had already built a way to honor the past.

The CMA created the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961. Its first three inductees were Jimmie Rodgers, Fred Rose and Hank Williams, and for years the honor existed mainly as plaques on display in Nashville’s War Memorial Building. The CMA wanted something more permanent, and it spent the better part of six years planning and raising money for a real museum.

That museum opened on April 1, 1967, on Music Row. So when the first CMA Awards were held that October, Nashville had just gotten its first building dedicated to country music’s history. The industry was, in the same year, looking backward and forward at once.

The 1967 Hall of Fame class captures that double vision. It included Red Foley, the smooth-voiced star who’d hosted the Opry’s Prince Albert Show beginning in 1946 and later ABC’s “Ozark Jubilee,” and whose “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” had topped the country chart for thirteen weeks. It included Jim Reeves, the velvet-voiced baritone behind “He’ll Have to Go,” who had died on July 31, 1964, when the plane he was piloting went down in a storm near Nashville.

It also included two people most casual fans never heard of, which is exactly why they mattered. J.L. Frank, who died in 1952, was the first major promoter and manager on the Nashville scene, the father-in-law of Pee Wee King, and a man who helped move acts like Gene Autry, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl and Eddy Arnold from small-town dates to bigger stages. And Steve Sholes was the RCA Victor executive who worked with Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow and Jim Reeves at the label, and who in 1955 signed Elvis Presley. He also served on the boards of both the CMA and the Country Music Foundation.

Consider what that means. The same year Eddy Arnold was named the first Entertainer of the Year, two of the four new Hall of Fame members were men who had helped build his career.

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How a few bronze plaques in a state museum became the institution that now guards country music’s memory on Nashville’s Music Row.
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Who Won at the First CMA Awards in 1967?

Here’s the full list of winners from the first CMA Awards, as recorded in the CMA’s archives and cross-checked against the standard reference listings for the 1967 ceremony:

• Entertainer of the Year: Eddy Arnold
• Male Vocalist of the Year: Jack Greene
• Female Vocalist of the Year: Loretta Lynn
• Vocal Group of the Year: The Stoneman Family
• Single of the Year: “There Goes My Everything,” Jack Greene
• Song of the Year: “There Goes My Everything,” written by Dallas Frazier
• Album of the Year: There Goes My Everything, Jack Greene
• Instrumental Group of the Year: The Buckaroos
• Instrumentalist of the Year: Chet Atkins
• Comedian of the Year: Don Bowman

Ten categories. No Vocal Duo award yet, which wouldn’t arrive until 1970. No award for new artists, which wouldn’t come until 1981. And a Comedian of the Year category, which tells you how central comedy still was to country shows, from the Opry stage to the package tours that crisscrossed the South.

The nominee lists are just as revealing as the winners. Entertainer of the Year came down to Eddy Arnold, Bill Anderson, Merle Haggard, Sonny James and Buck Owens. Female Vocalist pitted Loretta Lynn against Lynn Anderson, Connie Smith, Dottie West and a young Tammy Wynette. Album of the Year nominees included Ray Price’s Danny Boy and Merle Haggard’s I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.

Merle Haggard, in fact, received more nominations than anybody that first year, with four. He didn’t win a single one. Three years later he’d sweep the show, but in 1967 the Bakersfield newcomer went home empty-handed while a Tennessee man who’d been making records since the 1940s took the top prize.

Eddy Arnold, the First CMA Entertainer of the Year

If you wanted to explain what the CMA hoped country music could become, you couldn’t have picked a better first Entertainer of the Year than Eddy Arnold.

He came from a farming family in Chester County, near Henderson, Tennessee, and his early billing as the “Tennessee Plowboy” leaned hard on those roots. He joined Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys as a featured singer in 1940, went out on the Camel Caravan tour of military bases, and struck out on his own a few years later, singing on WSM and the Grand Ole Opry before leaving the Opry in 1948. His early manager was Tom Parker, the same man who’d later manage Elvis Presley.

By the 1960s, the Plowboy had become something else entirely. Arnold traded the steel guitar-driven records of his early career for orchestral arrangements and a smooth, uptown sound. “Make the World Go Away,” in 1965, became the signature record of that shift, and it crossed over to audiences that had never tuned in to a country station. In the arguments over the Nashville Sound, Arnold was the argument, for better or worse, depending on who you asked.

He was also a pioneer of television. He’d appeared on Milton Berle’s show in 1949 and hosted a string of his own programs in the 1950s, including “Eddy Arnold Time.” In a business trying to prove it could hold its own with mainstream entertainment, that polish counted for a great deal.

The Hall of Fame had already inducted him in 1966, at forty-eight, which made him one of the youngest inductees in its history. And 1967 was a busy year on the charts, with hits like “Lonely Again,” “Misty Blue,” “Turn the World Around” and “Here Comes Heaven.” Besides Entertainer, he was nominated that night for Male Vocalist and for Album of the Year with The Best of Eddy Arnold.

The choice made a statement. The CMA’s first Entertainer of the Year wasn’t a honky-tonker or a rebel. He was a polished crossover crooner who could sell albums to people who didn’t think of themselves as country fans and look perfectly at home on network television. That was the country music the CMA was selling to advertisers and radio stations.

What’s easy to forget is how little of the CMA’s hardware Arnold actually took home over his career. Entertainer of the Year in 1967 turned out to be the only CMA Award he ever won, despite multiple nominations. He’d been an elder statesman before the show existed, and the show moved on to younger stars quickly. But he was first, and nobody can take that away.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
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Jack Greene and “There Goes My Everything”

If Eddy Arnold was the CMA’s statement about the future, Jack Greene was the big story of the night itself.

Greene was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and he’d spent the early 1960s as a working member of Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. Starting in 1962, he played drums and guitar, sang, and served as master of ceremonies for Tubb’s shows. He was tall, with a deep voice, and the “Jolly Greene Giant” nickname followed him for the rest of his life.

The song that made him a solo star was written by Dallas Frazier. Greene’s recording of “There Goes My Everything,” produced by Owen Bradley for Decca, came out in October 1966. It went on to spend seven weeks at No. 1 on the country chart and twenty-one weeks on the chart overall. It was the kind of heartbreak ballad the Nashville Sound did best, restrained enough for adult ears and plain enough for a jukebox.

On October 20, 1967, Greene won Male Vocalist of the Year, Single of the Year and Album of the Year. Frazier took Song of the Year for the same song. That made “There Goes My Everything” the defining record of the first CMA Awards. Counting Frazier’s trophy, that one song accounted for four of the night’s ten awards.

There’s a lovely detail buried in the nominee lists, too. Among the nominees for Instrumental Group of the Year were the Texas Troubadours, Greene’s old band. The drummer who’d sat behind Ernest Tubb a few years earlier was now out front, beating Eddy Arnold, Merle Haggard, Sonny James and Buck Owens for Male Vocalist.

1967 was the year Greene joined the Grand Ole Opry as well, and he remained a member for decades. His final top-40 country hit came in 1980. He died in Nashville on March 14, 2013, at eighty-three. But for one night in 1967, he was the most decorated singer in country music.

The song kept traveling after that night. Engelbert Humperdinck took his version to No. 2 on the UK chart in 1967, and Elvis Presley’s 1971 recording went top ten on the country charts. Dallas Frazier’s song belonged to the whole world by then, but it had belonged to Jack Greene first.

Loretta Lynn and the First CMA Female Vocalist Award

The Female Vocalist race in 1967 was stacked. Lynn Anderson, Connie Smith, Dottie West and Tammy Wynette were all nominated, and any of them would have made history as the first woman to take the award. The winner was Loretta Lynn.

That year was a turning point for her. In February 1967, Decca released her album Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind), produced by Owen Bradley. The title song, which she wrote with Peggy Sue Wells, became her first No. 1 single. The album went on to become the first by a female country singer to be certified gold by the RIAA.

Think about what kind of song that was. “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin'” was a wife telling her husband, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t going to put up with his behavior. It was sharp, funny and completely unapologetic, and it came from a coal miner’s daughter from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, who had started out singing in small clubs in Washington state. Giving her the first Female Vocalist trophy was a sign that the CMA wasn’t going to be only about polish and strings.

In the first seven years of the award, only three women won it: Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Lynn Anderson. Lynn would win it three times, in 1967, 1972 and 1973. And in 1972, she became the first woman to win Entertainer of the Year, the award Eddy Arnold had taken home that first night.

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https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/02/25/loretta-lynn-the-voice-that-challenged-nashville/

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Watch on Classic Country TV: Loretta Lynn’s road from Butcher Hollow to the CMA’s biggest prize, in her own story.

The Stonemans, the Buckaroos, Don Bowman and Chet Atkins

The rest of the winners’ list reads like a cross-section of 1960s country, from the music’s deepest roots to its newest frontier.

The Vocal Group of the Year award went to the Stoneman Family, and it’s hard to think of a winner with a longer history in the business. Ernest “Pop” Stoneman had been one of the prominent recording artists of country music’s first commercial decade. In the summer of 1927, he helped Ralph Peer run the Bristol Sessions, the recordings that introduced the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to the world. Four decades later, his children made up most of the family band, and they beat out the Anita Kerr Singers, the Browns, Johnny Cash and June Carter, the Statler Brothers, and Tammy Wynette with David Houston.

The Instrumental Group award went to the Buckaroos, Buck Owens’s band out of Bakersfield, California. The lineup of Don Rich, Tom Brumley, Doyle Holly and Willie Cantu was the engine of the Bakersfield Sound, and their win over Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours and Porter Wagoner’s Wagon Masters was a sign that Nashville was paying attention to what was happening on the West Coast. They’d win again in 1968.

Chet Atkins won Instrumentalist of the Year, beating Roy Clark, Floyd Cramer, Pete Drake and Boots Randolph. That’s a list of players who defined the sound of Nashville records, and Atkins, who was also running RCA Victor’s Nashville operation, sat at the center of all of it. He’d win the award again in 1968 and 1969.

And then there was Don Bowman, the Comedian of the Year. Bowman, a disc jockey and comic singer, beat out Archie Campbell, Ben Colder, Homer and Jethro, and Minnie Pearl. His best-known record while he was at RCA was a novelty number called “Chit Akins, Make Me a Star,” a send-up of a hopeful singer begging a certain record executive for a break. On the same night, Bowman won his award and the real Chet Atkins won his. Country music has always known how to laugh at itself.

Bowman went on to a second career that touched millions of listeners. When “American Country Countdown” launched on October 6, 1973, he was its original host, and he stayed with the program until April 1978.

When Were the CMA Awards First Televised?

The first CMA Awards weren’t on television, but the second ones were, and that changed everything.

In 1968, the CMA moved the show to the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, and NBC came in to tape it. The ceremony was recorded in October and aired on NBC about a month later, in November 1968. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the King of the Cowboys and the Queen of the West, hosted.

The hosting choice tells you who the CMA was trying to reach. Rogers and Evans were familiar faces in living rooms all over America, far beyond country radio’s audience. Having them introduce the evening signaled that country music wasn’t some regional curiosity. It was national entertainment.

The winners that year fit the new national stage. Glen Campbell, a crossover star with a television future of his own, took Entertainer of the Year and Male Vocalist. Tammy Wynette won Female Vocalist. Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison won Album of the Year. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton took Vocal Group of the Year. And Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” a record that had become a pop-culture phenomenon, won Single of the Year.

The first CMA Awards had been a trade function where the business honored itself. By the second show, the CMA had figured out that the awards were most valuable as a way to show country music to people who didn’t already listen to it.

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How the CMA Awards Grew Into Country Music’s Biggest Night

Once the cameras arrived, the CMA Awards started producing the moments that made country music history.

In 1969, back at the Ryman on NBC, Johnny Cash won five awards, including Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist, Album of the Year for At San Quentin, Single of the Year for “A Boy Named Sue,” and Vocal Group with June Carter. In 1970, Merle Haggard, who’d gone home empty-handed in 1967 despite four nominations, won Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist, and both Album and Single of the Year for “Okie From Muskogee.” In 1971, Charley Pride won Entertainer of the Year and Male Vocalist, with Tennessee Ernie Ford hosting. In 1972, the show moved to CBS, where it stayed for more than three decades, and Loretta Lynn became the first woman to win Entertainer of the Year.

By then, the awards had become something no trade association in 1958 could have predicted. They were a stage where the industry’s arguments with itself played out in public, and nowhere was that clearer than in the mid-1970s.

In 1974, the show moved into the new Grand Ole Opry House, and Olivia Newton-John, an Australian-raised pop singer, won Female Vocalist of the Year over Loretta Lynn, Anne Murray, Dolly Parton and Tanya Tucker. Traditionalists were furious. A group of artists met at the home of George Jones and Tammy Wynette and formed the Association of Country Entertainers, with the goal of lobbying for traditional artists on the CMA board and more balance on country radio. The group didn’t last long, but the argument it represented never really went away.

The following year produced the most notorious moment in the show’s history. On October 13, 1975, Charlie Rich, the previous year’s Entertainer of the Year, opened the envelope for the 1975 winner, saw John Denver’s name, and set the envelope on fire with a cigarette lighter. Accounts later attributed his condition that night to a combination of pain medication and gin-and-tonics, and debate continues about whether it was a protest or just a bad night. Either way, the image stuck.

And in 1976, the CMA voters gave Album of the Year to Wanted! The Outlaws, the compilation of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser that had become the first country album certified platinum. Jennings and Nelson also won Vocal Duo and Single of the Year for “Good Hearted Woman.” The same institution that had crowned Eddy Arnold nine years earlier was now honoring the outlaws who’d rebelled against Nashville’s system.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
The record that won the CMA’s 1976 Album of the Year didn’t just make the outlaws famous. It rewrote the rules of how Nashville made money.
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From the Ryman to Bridgestone Arena: The CMA Awards Today

The show kept evolving through the decades that followed. Dolly Parton won Entertainer of the Year in 1978. The CMA added the Horizon Award for new artists in 1981, with Terri Gibbs as its first winner, and renamed it New Artist of the Year in 2007. The Opry House hosted the show from 1974 through 2004.

In 2005, for the only time in its history, the CMA Awards left Nashville, holding the ceremony at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The following year, the show came home to the downtown arena now known as Bridgestone Arena, and it moved to ABC, where it has aired ever since. With the exception of 2020, when COVID-19 precautions moved it to Music City Center, the arena has been the show’s permanent home.

Today there are twelve main categories, and the list has changed a good deal since 1967. Comedian of the Year is long gone. The instrumental categories have evolved into Musician of the Year. There are awards for Vocal Duo, Musical Event and Music Video, none of which existed that first night. Garth Brooks holds the record for Entertainer of the Year wins, with seven.

The 60th Annual CMA Awards will air live on Wednesday, November 18, 2026, from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, on ABC and Disney+, with streaming on Hulu the following day. Lainey Wilson returns as host for the third consecutive year. The nominations were announced on September 10, 2026, and voting on the final ballot closes on Tuesday, October 27. Ella Langley led the field with nine nominations, followed by Miranda Lambert with seven. The Entertainer of the Year nominees are Luke Combs, Cody Johnson, Ella Langley, Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson.

Two other storylines are worth knowing. Taylor Swift is nominated for Single of the Year for “I Knew It, I Knew You,” her first CMA nomination since 2022. And Brooks & Dunn will receive the 2026 CMA Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award during a special tribute on the November 18 broadcast.

This year’s show also carries a heavier weight. It’s the first CMA Awards since the death of Dolly Parton in August 2026, the woman who won the CMA’s Vocal Group award with Porter Wagoner in the show’s first televised year and went on to become one of its most decorated artists. Weeks before the main show, the CMA is producing a two-hour live tribute, “CMA Presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton,” airing Wednesday, October 21, on ABC from Belmont University’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Nashville. Disney+ carries it internationally, Hulu adds it the next day, and proceeds will go to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

The CMA now describes its awards as “the longest-running, annual music awards program on network television.” Announcing this year’s nominees, CMA CEO Sarah Trahern put it simply: “For six decades, the CMA Awards have celebrated excellence in Country Music.” That run of sixty years started in a round, air-conditioned arena on the north side of downtown, with no cameras in the room at all.

Why It Still Matters

The first CMA Awards matter because they show us a country music industry at the exact moment it decided to take itself seriously. In 1958, the business was frightened, underfunded and dismissed by much of the broadcasting world. By 1967, it had a trade association, a Hall of Fame, a new museum on Music Row, and an awards show. The trophies were almost beside the point. The real achievement was a business that had learned to tell its own story.

They also matter because of how fragile that first night turned out to be. Within a year of October 20, 1967, three of the people honored that season were gone. Steve Sholes died of a heart attack in April 1968, at fifty-seven, on his way to a recording session. Pop Stoneman, the Bristol Sessions veteran whose family won Vocal Group of the Year, died on June 14, 1968, at seventy-five. Red Foley died on September 19, 1968, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he had been performing on a Grand Ole Opry show. A pioneering generation was passing just as the industry built its first formal ways of remembering it.

That’s why lists like the one from 1967 deserve to be kept, read and retold. Jack Greene, Don Bowman, the Stonemans and the Buckaroos don’t come up much when people talk about the CMA Awards today. Their names are still on that first list, though, right next to Eddy Arnold and Loretta Lynn, and the first list is where every other year of the show begins.

When Lainey Wilson walks onto the stage at Bridgestone Arena on November 18, 2026, she’ll be standing at the end of a line that runs back through the Opry House and the Ryman to a banquet at the Municipal Auditorium that almost nobody outside Nashville saw. The show is bigger now than anyone in that Miami hotel room could have imagined. The idea at its heart is still the same one: country music is worth honoring, and its history is worth keeping.

At Classic Country TV, our goal is simple: keep the stories behind the songs alive, including the ones that happened on a night nobody filmed.

Gear Inspired by the Story

Vinyl Storage & Home Decor

MÖNKE Vinyl Record Wall Mount, Solid Wood Display Ledge
A simple solid-wood ledge that puts one LP face-out on the wall, the way record shops once propped up the newest Jack Greene or Loretta Lynn release by the register.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X398HXV?tag=classiccoun08-20

upsimples 12.5 x 12.5 Vinyl Record Frames, 4 Pack
Four frames sized for full 12-inch album jackets, for anyone who wants a wall of 1960s Decca and RCA Victor cover art to go with the story of the first CMA winners.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJT3HHNW?tag=classiccoun08-20

Bar & Whiskey Accessories

Libbey Heavy Base Rocks Glasses, Set of 4
Plain, weighted rocks glasses of the kind that sat on banquet tables when Nashville’s music business got dressed up for the evening.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006FQ0AXA?tag=classiccoun08-20

R.O.C.K.S. Whiskey Chilling Stones, Set of 6 with Hardwood Tray
Six granite stones in a wooden tray for keeping a slow pour cold through a long awards night in front of the television.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LJQ37FS?tag=classiccoun08-20

Books & Music History

The CMA Awards Vault by Deborah Evans Price
An illustrated history of the CMA Awards themselves, following country music’s biggest night from its early years to the modern arena show.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0794830838?tag=classiccoun08-20

PEOPLE 50 Years of the CMA Awards: Country Music’s Finest
PEOPLE’s commemorative look back at five decades of the CMA Awards, published for the show’s fiftieth anniversary in 2016.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1683304519?tag=classiccoun08-20

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From the CCTV Shop

Sources

Wikipedia — 1967 Country Music Association Awards — Date, venue and hosts of the first ceremony, with the full list of 1967 categories, nominees and winners, cited to the CMA Awards’ official records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Country_Music_Association_Awards

Country Music Association — “CMA Honors Its 60th Anniversary” — The CMA’s own history of its 1958 founding, its first dues and funding, the 1961 radio survey, the “CMA Awards Banquet and Show” of October 20, 1967, and the first televised show in 1968.
https://www.cmaworld.com/cma-honors-its-60th-anniversary/

Tennessee Encyclopedia — “Country Music Association” by John W. Rumble — The Tennessee Historical Society’s entry on the CMA’s origins in the dissolution of the Country Music Disc Jockeys Association, its radio campaign, the Hall of Fame and the first awards.
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/country-music-association/

NPR (via WUNC) — “One Of Music Row’s Most Influential Leaders, Jo Walker-Meador, Has Died At 93” — Obituary covering Walker-Meador’s 1958 hiring as the CMA’s first paid employee, her tenure as executive director, and her own recollections of those early years.
https://www.wunc.org/npr-music/2017-08-16/one-of-music-rows-most-influential-leaders-jo-walker-meador-has-died-at-93

American Songwriter — “Remember When Eddy Arnold Won the First-Ever CMA Award for Entertainer of the Year?” — Background on Eddy Arnold’s 1967 win, his other nominations that night, his hits that year, and the fact that it was his only CMA trophy.
https://americansongwriter.com/remember-when-eddy-arnold-won-the-first-ever-cma-award-for-entertainer-of-the-year/

CMA Awards — “CMA Announces Nominees For The 60th Annual CMA Awards” — Official announcement of the 2026 nominees, with the broadcast date, venue, host and network for the November 18, 2026, ceremony.
https://cmaawards.com/news/cma-announces-nominees-for-the-60th-annual-cma-awards/

Belmont University — Announcement of “CMA Presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton” — Details of the two-hour live tribute airing Wednesday, October 21, on ABC from Belmont’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, with Disney+ and Hulu availability and proceeds going to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2026/dolly-parton-tribute-belmont.html

CMA Awards — Brooks & Dunn to receive the 2026 CMA Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award — Official announcement that Brooks & Dunn will be honored during a special tribute on the November 18, 2026, broadcast.
https://cmaawards.com/news/legendary-country-music-duo-brooks-dunn-to-receive-the-2026-cma-willie-nelson-lifetime-achievement-award-at-the-60th-annual-cma-awards/

American Songwriter — Taylor Swift earns her first CMA Awards nomination in four years — Coverage of Swift’s Single of the Year nomination for “I Knew It, I Knew You” and her previous CMA nomination in 2022.
https://americansongwriter.com/i-havent-yeed-my-last-haw-taylor-swift-earns-her-first-cma-awards-nomination-in-four-years/

Frequently Asked Questions