Sturgill Simpson
- First Name
- John Sturgill
- Last Name
- Simpson
- Additional Name
- Sturgill Simpson
- Date of Birth
- June 8, 1978
- Place of Birth
- Jackson, Kentucky
- Notable Awards
- Americana Music Awards – Artist of the Year
Born in Jackson Kentucky on June 8, 1978, Sturgill Simpson is an American singer-songwriter and country singer. After a hardscrabble upbringing (“I was the first male in my mother’s family not to work the mines,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016), Simpson fell in love with country, soul and rock music as a kid before joining the Navy after graduation.
After drifting around in a series of bands (like Sunday Valley) and working as a railroad operations manager in Utah throughout his twenties, Simpson released his debut solo album, High Top Mountain, at age 35 in 2013. He released his breakthrough second LP, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music the very next year, in 2014, which earned the singer comparisons to Waylon Jennings, a Grammy nomination, and catapulted the singer into country music semi-stardom. In the years since, Simpson has refused to settle for any single sound or genre, traversing Sixties Soul (2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth), hard rock (2019’s Sound & Fury) and straight bluegrass (2020’s Cuttin’ Grass) all while performing very few shows and producing records by a handful of like minded singers like Tyler Childers and Brit Taylor. — Jonathan Bernstein