The Country Music Hall of Fame has announced its inductees for 2023, with two of the genre’s most successful artists, Tanya Tucker and Patty Loveless, marking the first time since 2011 that two solo women have been inducted in one year. Songwriter Bob McDill rounds out this year’s inductees.
Tanya Tucker, who joins as the Veteran Era inductee, had already scored her first major hits when she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone at age 15. Her long-awaited inclusion as a Hall of Fame member finds her basking in the recent success of her Grammy-winning album While I’m Livin’, produced by Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings.
Kentucky native Patty Loveless joins in the Modern Era category, capping a career that has seen her hailed as one of country music’s most acclaimed traditionalists. Her string of platinum LPs includes the CMA-winning When Fallen Angels Fly, and her more recent Mountain Soul and its sequel paid homage to her bluegrass roots. She caused a sensation in November when she appeared at the 2022 CMA Awards to sing with fellow Kentuckian Chris Stapleton.
Texas-born Bob McDill has written some of country music’s biggest hits of the last 50 years. Those include Alabama’s “Song of the South,” Don Williams’ “Amanda,” and the Mel McDaniel hit, “Louisiana Saturday Night.”
The announcement was made by Hall of Fame legend Vince Gill from the museum’s Hall of Fame Rotunda in downtown Nashville. The ceremony was preceded by a moment of silence for Hall of Fame members including Loretta Lynn and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as longtime museum employees Peter Cooper and Liz Thiels.
The newly announced inductees bring the total membership of individuals and groups to 152. One member, Roy Rogers, is included twice, as a solo performer and member of cowboy singing group Sons of the Pioneers.
Conducted solely by the Country Music Association (CMA), the election of new Hall of Fame members is tasked by an anonymous panel of voters chosen by the CMA and honors significant contributions to the advancement of country music by individuals in both the creative and business communities. The first Hall of Fame members – musicians Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and songwriter-publisher Fred Rose – were inducted in 1961, six years before the opening of the original Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which was then located on historic Music Row. In 2000, the greatly expanded museum, archival facility and education center was opened in downtown Nashville. The bronze plaques commemorating membership are on public display in the museum’s Hall of Fame Rotunda.
The new class of inductees will be formally honored later this year at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Medallion Ceremony, held in the museum’s CMA Theater.
