Each year on February 14th, many people exchange cards, candy, gifts or flowers with their special someone. The day of romance we call Valentine’s Day is named for a Christian martyr and dates back to the 5th century.
Over 190 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine’s Day the second-most popular greeting-card-giving occasion.
We’ve got some thoughts and feelings and more about love, romance and marriage from several of your favorite country artists. A few are new and some have become our favorites over the years. Which country stars are romantic? Which ones have a good reason to celebrate the holiday that’s all about love?
Audio / Alan Jackson talks about his love for wife, Denise, over the years.
DownloadAJ (Valentine’s Day) OC: …continue to. :24
“We got a lot of history together now, and we’re happier than we’ve ever been. So, she’s still beautiful, and she’s always inspired songs. I mean, one of my early hits was a song called ‘I’d Love You All Over Again,’ I wrote for her for our 10th anniversary. I mean, there’s been a zillion songs that have pieces of our good days and bad days inspired, and they continue to.”
Audio / Billy Currington recalls his first real Valentine’s Day.
DownloadBilly Currington (Valentine’s Day memory) OC: …took off running. :21
“Yeah, I remember my first girlfriend. I was in first or second grade, but anyway, I remember it was Valentine’s Day and your mom going, ‘You’ve got to give your girlfriend something, and you’ve got to go give it to her.’ I’ll never forget — we got her a box of chocolates or whatever it was. I remember going down to her classroom and knocking on the door, getting her to come to the door. I remember handing it to her, and then I took off running.”
Audio / Carrie Underwood is all about the chocolate most couples give each other on Valentine’s Day.
DownloadCarrie Underwood (Valentine’s Day-chocolate) OC: …white chocolate. :14
“Chocolate’s every woman’s friend – in their time of need or in their time of happiness or in their time of sadness or madness, chocolate is my friend. Anything with caramel in it, ooooooooh. White chocolate’s good too. You can’t beat some good white chocolate.”
Audio / DIERKS BENTLEY SAYS THE MOST INTERESTING GIFT HE AND HIS WIFE CASSIDY HAVE GIVEN EACH OTHER WERE MIXTAPES OF SONGS.
DownloadDierks Bentley (Valentine’s Day-most interesting gift he’s given his wife) OC: …formulate yourself. 1:19
“When ‘What Was I Thinkin’’ was released in 2003, I didn’t know what my life would look like, and all of a sudden, I found myself out on the road full-time, just gone. So, the place where I was staying, I had some friends pack it up and move it into a storage facility…and in there I found some letters that she and I had written back and forth when we were dating. I was working at The Nashville Network and she was working out in San Francisco and found some letters I had written her and I’d gotten back and some stuff she’d sent me, including a CD of songs she’d been listening to, back when you made CD mixes and there’s like these three hearts on that CD. I just found that it was so meaningful for me those gifts you give each other before any money, before anything else was going on, just music, giving of mixtapes was so cool. She reminded me of a mixtape that I had sent her. I’d sent it to her via FedEx, because it was so important she get this as quickly as possible. This was sadly before, I guess we had internet back then, but you really couldn’t send songs over the internet. I think the most interesting thing I’ve given her and she’s given me was just mixtapes, because there’s nothing like music to put into words and the thoughts you have in your head that you can’t formulate yourself.”
Audio / Jon Pardi says he has learned a lot about love and about Valentine’s Day from his wife, Summer.
DownloadJon Pardi (Valentine’s Day – Summer) OC: …for you. (laughs) :35
“One thing Summer has taught me is that gifts are cool, diamonds, blah, blah, blah, but to take your time and clear your mind and write something about what she means to you on a card is probably the most least expensive and the biggest price you can give her is just to write and tell her how much you love her on a little card. That’s what she taught me for Valentine’s Day, so I just do that. It’s way cheaper. (laughs) And of course, I always say to her, ‘Babe, every day is Valentine’s Day for you.’” (laughs)
Audio / Jordan Davis talks about meeting his wife in New Orleans. They were both there attending separate weddings.
DownloadJordan Davis (meeting wife) OC: …here we are. :47
“My college roommate was getting married in New Orleans. My wife was in New Orleans for a totally separate wedding. Both wedding parties were staying at the same hotel, so we met, the first time, in the lobby of the hotel. I’m actually wearing a necklace that has the coordinates to that hotel. Then the next day, me and my brother walk into a bar in New Orleans, and her and her friends were sitting in the corner, and I was like, ‘Hey-that’s the girl from the lobby.’ She was actually dating somebody at the time. But we kind of exchanged numbers and stayed in contact, and about two months later, a month later, she came into town for CMA Music Fest and told me that she no longer had a boyfriend, and here we are.”
Audio / Jordan Davis talks about the Valentine's Day tradition he and his wife Kristen enjoy to this day.
DownloadJordan Davis (Valentine’s Day tradition) OC: …happy Valentine’s. (laughs) 1:04
“When it comes to Valentines, Kristen is way more romantic than I am. I’m not a very romantic guy. I have worked on it. I’ve tried to get a little bit better over the years. Kristen loves chocolate so she’s good for a big chocolate box, but here’s our thing about Valentine’s Day, and this is the God’s honest truth. We’ve been going to Olive Garden on Valentine’s Day since we met. We’ve continued that tradition. I think it started with her and a friend, they used to always go to Olive Garden on Valentine’s Day before they started dating, or before they got in a relationship. So, we have carried that out, so this year will be our, I believe our eighth Valentines in a row where we go in for endless salad and bread sticks. So, if its Valentine’s Day, and you’re at an Olive Garden, we could be next to each other. So, yeah, hope to see somebody out there at the table next to us just hammering on some breadsticks. So, happy Valentine’s.” (laughs)
Audio / Josh Turner says his wife would call him a romantic, but now that they have four children, it takes a bit of work to make time for each other.
DownloadJosh Turner (Romantic) OC: …long time to come. :26
“If you ask my wife Jennifer if I was a romantic, she would definitely say, ‘Yes,’ but she knows that sometimes my hectic schedule and our busy lifestyles can kind of interfere with the romantic side of things. But we do try to make efforts towards being together and having adult conversations and taking time away from the children and doing things that husbands and wives do, so we’ll definitely try to continue that for a long time to come.”
Audio / Keith Urban talks about the support he and his wife, Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman, give each other, which is especially important when two creative artists are married to each other.
DownloadKeith Urban (Nicole support) OC: …very important. :17
“I feel very blessed that I have the support of my family like I do. It’s a beautiful thing having two artists because we understand the passion and the responsibility of what we get to do. It’s very important.”
Audio / Kylie Morgan says her husband Jay Allen is the most romantic person she's ever met.
DownloadKylie Morgan (Valentine’s Day) OC: …I’ve ever had. :33
“Man, I will say my husband Jay Allen, who is also a country music artist if you guys haven’t heard of him, he is the most romantic person I’ve ever met in my entire life, truly. For Valentine’s Day, gosh, two years ago, I came home to the entire house being lit with tiny candles, a whole dinner made with my favorite bottle of wine, and this was even before he proposed. So, a lot of people thought that he was gonna pop the question that night, but he saved that for a later time. But it was the most magical Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Kimberly Schlapman says falling in love with her husband, Stephen Schlapman, came as a big surprise.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Kimberly falling in love) OC: …healed me. 1:20
Kimberly: “Well, I wasn’t planning on falling in love, at all. I didn’t want to…I wasn’t sure that I ever would. So, my husband now and I were just really good friends, and after my late husband died all my friends were calling me, all the time. Just checking up on me. He was just an old friends. We had known each other for about six years and he started calling me just like everybody else did. But, he started calling me more than everybody else did [laughs]. We had both been through similar losses, he hadn’t lost a mate but he had lost a close friend, so we kind of bonded over that. I grieved, kind of, at him a lot. He took my grief, I had a lot of grief left, and he just took it and listened and accepted it and was so understanding and let me talk about my late husband all the time. We still talk about him a lot, and he’s totally fine with it. He says that, that made me who he fell in love with and he never minds if I bring anything from the past up which is just really sweet. I was shocked, I remember when I first realized that I was having feelings. I just thought, OK, this is so weird. What is this? I haven’t felt this in a long, long, time. This is weird. But, eventually I allowed myself and it’s been the most beautiful gift of my life. It pulled me out of the deepest hole that I’ve ever been in and healed me.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook had a chemistry performing together, but it wasn’t until they each found themselves single…at the same time…that sparks flew romantically. The pair, who wed in 2006, have a son, Elijah.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Jimi & Karen fell in love) OC: (Kimberly) …to be together. :48
JIMI: “We were in the band a long time before there was ever anything which is interesting. I think there was always something underlying there that we were kind of trying to ignore. And then when the opportunity came, when all of us, ended up single kind of at the same time, a very strange turn of events for the band in a lot of different ways. And those feelings, you were able to come out with them finally. It was like, we’re single. Let’s get together. And, you know, she has a beautiful heart and she’s absolutely gorgeous and I just love her dearly.”
PHILLIP: “Get a room!” [laughs]
KIMBERLY: “They’re a perfect match. They really are. They were meant to be together.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Phillip Sweet was ready for love when he met Rebecca, his wife since 2007.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Phillip – reasons fell in love) OC: …real love. :17
“I think everything that I had gone through before had prepared me to be ready to see that there was genuine love there for me, and my Rebecca. So, it was just a great time, I wouldn’t have been ready before I met her…Now it’s just been a really great journey to heal through the past and to know real love.”
Audio / Luke Bryan talks about marrying Caroline, his college sweetheart.
DownloadLuke Bryan (married college sweetheart) OC: …married. :27
”I married my college sweetheart. We dated back in college and broke up for nearly six years, and while I was off doing my Nashville stuff and touring and writing songs, she was finishing getting her career kind of going. Man, we just kinda bumped into each other one night, and it was like bam, here we are married.”
Audio / Maddie & Tae’s Taylor Kerr talks about her husband, songwriter Josh Kerr. The pair are just about to celebrate their third anniversary as a married couple (they got married February 21st, 2020).
DownloadMaddie & Tae (Tae talking about husband Josh) OC: …that way, you know? :45
“From the moment I met Josh, he never shied away from sharing what’s on his heart. For me, sharing what’s on my heart is sometimes hard, but he always created the environment and dynamic of it’s totally normal to open up and let people to see that side of you. And so, the more we spent time together, the more I kind of adopted that mindset of like, ‘Okay, I can be vulnerable. I can take risks. I can put myself out there and maybe get rejected, but maybe it could be awesome.’ Our relationship is that to a T. I was skeptical at first and I was scared, and he was scared. And we both just, we went all in, and I felt so safe to go there with him and he’s always made me feel that way, you know?”