Just because someone is a country artist doesn’t make them exempt from legal troubles. In fact, several country artists faced major legal woes, and not only survived but came out stronger on the other side. We found four country artists who faced major legal trouble, emerging even better in the end.
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Morgan Wallen
Morgan Wallen seemed to be on a string of bad choices, which began when he uttered an inexcusable racial slur in 2021. Wallen, who later apologized for the incident, spent the next few years seemingly enjoying a bit of the bad-boy image he was portraying.
In 2024, Wallen was arrested after throwing a chair off the sixth-story roof in Eric Church’s bar. Wallen was charged with a misdemeanor, shoving him into the spotlight for the wrong reasons. But the legal trouble may be a blessing in disguise for Wallen. He later used a drawing of his time in court as the cover art for his latest I’m The Problem album cover art.
“I just wanted to just pay a little bit of homage to that,” Wallen tells Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s New Music Daily Radio. “And make people say, ‘Hey, is that what that is?’
“And I feel like we toed the line of it pretty well, and I think it looks cool,” he adds.
Jelly Roll
Jelly Roll spent a lot of time in and out of jail before getting his life together. Starting with being charged as a juvenile, Jelly Roll was still a teenager when he was arrested for armed robbery, a felony. Jelly Roll could have continued the cycle of staying in and out of jail, common for most people in his circumstances. But after the birth of his daughter, Bailee Ann, the Nashville native knew he wanted more for himself.
“It’s like a Damascus Road experience in the Bible,” Jelly Roll tells Joe Rogan. “I immediately was like, ‘I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to quit this s––. I gotta to figure it out.”
Sam Hunt
Sam Hunt was arrested and charged with a DUI in 2019 in Nashville. At the time, Hunt was found driving the wrong way on a street in Nashville in the early morning hours. He also had an open container of alcohol.
Hunt later addressed the arrest in a song called “Locked Up”, the title track of his 2024 EP.
“The night I got locked up, everything went wrong,” Hunt sings. “The night I got messed up, should’ve just stayed home / Picked up my phone, what can I say? / Well, I thought that you’d walk away but you stood by your man, Tammy Wynette.”
Joe Don Rooney
Like Hunt, Joe Don Rooney was also chargd with a DUI, his in 2021, after hitting a tree. Fortunately, Rooney survived the crash, using it as his inspiration to quit drinking.
“I was not a good father — I was not a good husband — and I was not a good bandmate to my business partners … I probably would’ve never taken responsibility for any of this if it hadn’t been for my car wreck on Sep 9, 2021,” Rooney later reveals on social media.
Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images
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