Maren Morris was backstage doing press at the CMA Awards on Wednesday night when the Entertainer of the Year award was announced at the end of the night, so she didn’t know that Eric Church had been named this year’s winner until a few minutes later. In a tweet on Friday, Morris shared her reaction to the news, which she heard from Church himself.
“A funny CMA moment (excuse my profanity),” she wrote. “I was doing press when they announced EOTY so I didn’t know who won until I saw @ericchurch come to the press carpet with an award. I asked ‘Wait. Did you just win Entertainer?’ He said with a sly grin, ‘Yep.’ I said ‘F—ing. Finally.’”
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Church’s win was his first for Entertainer of the Year, which he had been nominated for three times prior to his winning year. In the virtual press room after the show, he noted that it was “hard” for him to accept the award this year because of the losses so many people have experienced.
“If you look at the CMA, whatever award show you want to say, there’s not really been winners this year,” Church told PopCulture.com and other media. “Nobody’s played, nobody’s done the things that we normally do. It’s been a year, to me, of losses. It’s been a year of managing those losses. So it was really hard for me to accept this award, which I have wanted forever, not for me, but for the people that work so hard and they push those carts up and down ramps and they stay up all night long. Not me or the band, but the guys that put us on stage.”
Morris was also a big winner at this year’s CMAs, taking home trophies for Female Vocalist of the Year, Song of the Year and Single of the Year for “The Bones.”
In a tweet referencing her own wins, the 30-year-old wrote that she was still “coming down from the other night.” “I am still in awe,” she shared. “Thank you to my friends and family, my fans, and my Nashville peers for this honor.”
In an additional message, Morris admitted that she “still can get hurt when people claim I’m ‘not country’ but when I stood there accepting @cma Song of the Year, I realized it is much harder to forge your own path & sound than attempt to be a knock off of someone who’s already pioneered the genre. Thank you for accepting me.”
