Dextrous of hand and sunny of disposition, Charlie Worsham, is a musician’s musician. In 2022 he was the Academy of Country Music’s Acoustic Guitar Player of the Year followed a year later by his nomination as the Country Music Association’s Musician of the Year. Nominated again in 2024, he duly won the award.
To be recognised with such accolades would bring huge prestige among his peers in the industry but unlike so many other stellar players, the 40-year-old from Mississippi is yet to become a familiar name in the UK. Worsham is equally at home playing banjo and guitar, to which he adds mandolin, dobro and fiddle. He made his début at The Grand Ole Opry aged 12, as a precociously gifted Junior National Banjo Champion and at the age of 14 was commended by the Mississippi Senate for his outstanding musical accomplishments.
After graduating from Grenada High School with straight A’s, he headed north to Boston and the esteemed Berklee College of Music. Studying under renowned professor of lyric writing Pat Pattison, mentor of artists like Gillian Welch and John Mayer, Worsham learned the essence of songwriting as well as developing his already advanced playing skills. His admiration for the art of a songwriter can be seen in the video he made to celebrate what would have been the 74th birthday of John Prine, in which appropriately he covered Prine’s ‘Waiting On A Song’.
A member of the band King Billy for several years, he turned solo and opened shows for Taylor Swift in 2011, later adding slots for Brad Paisley and Kenny Rogers to his credits. By 2013 he was sufficiently well-regarded within the industry to attract Vince Gill and Marty Stuart to appear alongside him on ‘Tools Of The Trade’, a track on his début album “Rubberband”. The song observes the life of a travelling musician in similar vein to Steve Earle’s 1986 ‘Guitar Town’.
At this stage the suits at Warner Bros were probably expecting global stardom to follow, something which Worsham himself drily referenced when he appeared at the 2025 Country 2 Country event in London. With endearing humility, he described his early dreams not from the main O2 stage but from a room in the hinterland of the venue, where I witnessed an astonishing afternoon set of songs taken from his two studio albums. The second of these is “Beginning of Things”, released in 2017, while other original songs were taken from the EP’s “Sugarcane” (2021) and “Compadres” (2023).
Worsham was also readying himself to appear on the main stage later in the day, not as a solo act but as lead guitarist for country superstar Dierks Bentley. This being my first time witnessing the playing and singing of Charlie Worsham, it quickly became apparent that this musician playing to a few dozen people was clearly a guitar genius. Besides those skills, he has an authentic and melodic singing voice and an obvious affection for the UK, having toured these shores many times.
His prowess as a guitarist and singer means he will always be in demand. He has toured with Old Crow Medicine Show and collaborated with them on his single ‘I Hope I’m Stoned (When Jesus Takes Me Home)’. Playing guitar with superstars in vast arenas no doubt brings its own rewards but before too much longer Charlie Worsham should be standing centre stage and not just 20 feet from stardom.
