Mitchell Tenpenny’s Dual No. 1 Country Hits in 2022 Uphold a Family Legacy Started by the Matriarch of Music Row
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The most famous “family tradition” in country music would have to be the intergenerational legacy of the Hank Williams clan.
Right now, though, there’s another scion of Nashville royalty making good as a third-generation success: singer-songwriter Mitchell Tenpenny, who made modern chart history by managed to have two different No.
1 country airplay hits within the last month. But the rhetorical questions made famous by Hank Jr. — “Why do you drink? Why do you roll smoke?” — don’t apply in this case, as Tenpenny’s forebears in the business are a pair of strong but morally upstanding women: his grandmother, the late Donna Hilley, who capped a 31-year career at Sony/ATV Music Publishing by serving as CEO from 1994-2005, and his mother, Debbie Tenpenny, who currently works at Sony Music Publishing.
So instead of carrying on a hellraising family tradition, Tenpenny has written an autobiographical song titled “Mama Raised the Hell Out of Me.” (With apologies to Merle Haggard, not all mamas have to settle for just trying.) “That’s true,” says Debbie Tenpenny, responding to the song’s description of keeping her son on the straight and narrow. “The only thing is, they said, ‘She’s five-foot-five / Full of grace, full of pride.’ I’m five-seven-and-a-half, but it just didn’t rhyme.” Mitchell Tenpenny says rounding up didn’t seem like the better option. “I could have given her five-nine, but I thnk that might’ve been too much,” he says The business part of the family extends beyond these three.
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