McGraw, 58, held back tears as he stepped up to the podium during the live-streamed announcement.
“This is gonna be hard. Wow,” he said. “Thank you all for being here. Anybody that knows me knows I’m a crier. I mean, I cry at bad commercials. …I came to Nashville on a Greyhound bus from Louisiana on May 9, 1989. I arrived around 1 in the morning.” McGraw took his suitcase and his guitar to a bar called the Hall of Fame Lounge, he recalled. He arrived in time for last call, and quickly became friends with a couple of songwriters sitting at the bar. as the sun began to emerge hours later, the group learned that country legend Keith Whitley, a 2022 Hall of Fame inductee, had died. He was 34. McGraw hailed Whitley “one of my heroes, and one of the main reasons that I got on that bus to start with. That night, country music suffered a terrible loss, but I gained some new friends and I found a community that loved country music as much as I do.”
The Louisiana-born country superstar found his home and found his wife on his journey from the Hall of Fame Lounge to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Now, McGraw will be “surrounded by all of these legends and a lot of my friends,” and it’s “impossible for me to believe.”
