Music

A Timeline of Country Music’s First Tweets

Celebrating Ten Years on Twitter
by 4/4/2018

Twitter can be weird, right? Or at least it seemed like it was when it first launched in 2006 with a tweet from Jack Dorsey, one of the company’s developers. At the time, people didn’t know quite what to make of it. But two years later, in May 2008, Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Jason Aldean and Dierks Bentley were some of the first country stars to sign up, sign on and start tweeting.

But it wasn’t until later that year when country artists realized they could use the microblogging brand to promote their music, their shows, their merch, their side hustles and more (We’re looking at you, Lady Antebellum and Luke Bryan.).

And it took even longer for the stars to find their Twitter voices. Some seemed uncertain with what to tweet. For instance, Jake Owen’s first tweet was a picture of his tour bus rug. The caption? “Rug.” There were tweets about food, too. So much food. Everything from chocolate cake to meatloaf.

Then Kenny Chesney logged on. And he was one of the first artists to inject some humor in his tweets. Kelsea Ballerini did, too, but she was only in high school when she tweeted for the first time. And when Carrie Underwood finally joined in 2012 with a simple “Hello Twitter world,” her fans responded with 987 retweets.

Garth Brooks was one of the last country stars to tweet for the first time in 2014. By then, hashtags were a thing, so his tweet was #GarthSelfie and his sign off was, “love, g.”

Since it’s been ten years since country first embraced Twitter, we put together a timeline of all those first tweets. And it goes like this:

Alison makes her living loving country music. She's based in Chicago, but she's always leaving her heart in Nashville.
@alisonbonaguro