Country Music Singer Gets Engaged Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry

Ruston Kelly is engaged to Tia Cubelic.

The singer-songwriter, 37, announced Wednesday that he had popped the question to his girlfriend of a year backstage before performing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 24.

“Backstage at the @opry last month me and my best bud became best buds who are getting MARRIED,” Kelly wrote on Instagram alongside photos of the special moment and a video from the concert in which he broke the news to the audience.

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“The most important thing I think that happened to me right after that was meeting my now-partner, and I would say that she’s my girlfriend but she’s not because I just proposed to her backstage,” Kelly said in the video as the crowd cheered at the news. “Her family’s here, my family’s here. And right under a picture of Johnny Cash, I had to pop the question.”

Kelly is currently touring his new album Pale, Through the Window, which features Cubelic’s background vocals and her playing violin on the track “House in the Country.”

Kelly and Cubelic met while on vacation in South Carolina in June 2024, with the duo learning they lived just minutes apart in Nashville, according to PEOPLE.

Before meeting Cubelic, Kelly told the outlet in September, “I wondered, ‘Am I the problem in relationships?’ I’ve certainly done my best to maintain relationships that just seemed to not work out at the end of the day.”

The musician, who was previously married to Kacey Musgraves from 2017 to 2020, continued, “Especially post-divorce and all of that, my lens for what being with someone [should look like] just didn’t quite exist anymore. I certainly didn’t want to get myself in a situation where I got hurt or I hurt someone else.”

When it comes to life with Cubelic, however, “I know that life is not going to be perfect and there’s going to be weaves in and weaves out and difficulties here and there. But I think being able to write from the perspective of knowing who I am and knowing who I belong to will actually deepen that impulse of, when it is time to write about the rain clouds, there will be even more substance and a root to it. I know that life is life and I think I’m excited to look through everything through this lens.”