There are a few things Chris Stapleton can't live without. From his grandma's chair and a vintage Jazzmaster electric guitar to his Jeep and late father's knife collection, here are the country music star's essentials.Director: Chris SmithDirector of Photography: Chris ConderEditor: Paul IsaksonCreative Producer: Arielle NeblettLine Producer: Jen SantosProduction Manager: James PipitoneTalent Booker: Dana MathewsCamera Operator: Ian CresswellGaffer: Steve EvansAudio Engineer: Phil TurnerProduction Assistant: Carson ConderPost Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch; Rachael KnightPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAssistant Editor: Lauren Worona
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Hey GQ, I'm Chris Stapleton and these are my essentials.
00:02 (upbeat music)
00:05 All right, for this essential, first let me go get it.
00:10 This chair was the chair that was in my breakfast area
00:18 growing up, there were four of them originally
00:20 and they were kind of a yellow vinyl when I was a kid.
00:22 My mother kind of recovered this one
00:24 in the late 80s I think,
00:25 and it's kind of traveled around with me,
00:28 kind of went to college with me or various
00:30 living situations with me, but it's always been with me.
00:32 It's been my guitar chair that I kind of sit around
00:35 and play guitar in.
00:35 Every time I go make a record, the chair comes with me.
00:37 And right now I get to sit in the chair
00:39 for a different reason, but that's the story of the chair.
00:42 This is a 1964 Jazzmaster.
00:45 This was the first nice old guitar I ever got
00:47 and it was a gift from my wife.
00:49 When I received it, it looked very mint.
00:53 I kept it that way for a while
00:55 and then I started feeling bad.
00:57 It's a tool to me and it's meant to be used
00:59 and so I've used it over the years
01:01 and it's certainly in the room for everything
01:03 that I've ever recorded,
01:05 even if it's not played on everything I've ever recorded.
01:07 It's played on a lot of things that I've recorded.
01:09 You can see over the years it turned very not mint
01:12 just from use, but that's okay.
01:13 This is all honestware.
01:14 It's been a good tool and it's served me well.
01:17 Generally I'm not playing an electric guitar
01:19 in a writing setting unless I'm there
01:23 in a studio with the whole band.
01:24 The guitar that I would choose to sit in a room with
01:26 is about to come in.
01:27 (laughs)
01:29 (guitar music)
01:32 This is a 1950 something Gibson LG2.
01:43 It has a replaced neck on it and replaced tuners
01:47 and everybody probably used it as a canoe paddle.
01:49 There's like mud in it and so many repaired cracks
01:52 that you probably can't count them.
01:54 I bought this guitar very early in my songwriting career
01:57 and most songs that I've written have been on this guitar.
02:02 These are the foundations of most of the music
02:05 that I've made in my songwriting and record making career.
02:08 I paid about $380 for this guitar.
02:11 It took about $900 to make it work correctly,
02:13 but it's earned its keep beyond that.
02:15 I don't know all the stories that made it look like this,
02:17 but it's certainly been with me for a lot of good ones.
02:20 I have a friend of mine who talks about playing guitar
02:22 in the way that you have to kind of
02:23 throw your whole body into it.
02:24 When you're in the moment of singing or playing,
02:27 if you're not putting all of yourself into it,
02:30 then you're not gonna get that.
02:31 But I try to do that at all times,
02:33 but certainly there's moments where you know,
02:36 all right, this is not the one,
02:37 we're just working this out that you're not doing that.
02:38 But when it's go time, whether it's a live show
02:41 or recording something, yeah, you just go there.
02:45 If you didn't get there all the way,
02:46 that wasn't the one, you know?
02:48 The Jeep that we're gonna take a look at
02:50 is a 1979 Jeep Cherokee that my wife purchased for me
02:54 after my dad passed away.
02:56 She caught me looking at it online,
02:57 said, "Hey, let's get out of here."
02:58 We flew to Phoenix, Arizona and drove it back to Nashville.
03:01 It was all original at the time
03:03 and had like 77,000 miles on it.
03:06 And I warned her that we would not make it all the way.
03:08 And we did, we did lose an alternator along the way,
03:11 but since it made its way back home,
03:13 she kind of regifted it to me in a way
03:16 that she kind of hooked it up for some guys
03:18 at Hendrick Racing to kind of redo the whole thing.
03:20 So it's as modern as it can be mechanically
03:22 and every nut, bolt and screw on it
03:24 is either refurbished or new.
03:26 So it's a thing that I can get inside
03:28 and once again, have lots of great memories.
03:30 It's special to me in a way that I could never get rid of it
03:33 and hopefully never wreck in it.
03:35 In this Jeep, I wrote the song "Traveler."
03:38 My wife was asleep in the passenger seat.
03:40 I was driving and the sun was coming up over the horizon.
03:43 I wrote the song while I was driving.
03:45 We wound up stopping in Gallup, New Mexico that night
03:47 and I had to take the guitar inside
03:49 and figure out how to play it.
03:50 So that was how that song got written
03:53 and ultimately wound up being the title track
03:56 of debut album.
03:58 So the Jeep has significance in that way.
04:02 If you're a chef or a knife collector,
04:05 you know what this is.
04:05 It's a knife roll.
04:06 This one belonged to my dad.
04:08 And where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky,
04:11 knives would be given as a sign of respect.
04:14 They were things that one man would give to another man.
04:16 So my dad, when he passed away, there were quite a few knives.
04:19 I didn't really collect knives or anything like that
04:21 previous to that,
04:22 but I had inherited some from my grandfather
04:24 and these are from my dad, a lot of them from my dad.
04:25 This one in particular right now was his
04:28 and I hold them and I think of them.
04:30 They're from various times, periods of time,
04:32 a lot of case knives.
04:33 Remember from the 40s up to the 60s, 70s.
04:36 You hold on to them.
04:37 You know, this one was my grandfather's.
04:40 He was a knife collector, but my dad was not necessarily.
04:43 And I think about them a lot.
04:44 I think when I open these things up and touch them,
04:47 I can feel connected to them in a way
04:49 that maybe I'm not otherwise.
04:51 So it kind of got me when they passed away.
04:53 I kind of turned into, I would pick up knives.
04:55 And as I was thinking about doing this,
04:58 I was thinking about the sign of respecting
04:59 and I really started getting in my own head about it,
05:01 thinking about, well, when I buy a knife,
05:03 am I trying to buy self-respect?
05:04 I don't really know.
05:05 Maybe that's what I'm doing.
05:07 I don't know.
05:08 But I do it to feel connected to my father
05:11 and my mother's father who had all these knives.
05:16 This is my grandfather's flag.
05:18 He was a soldier in World War II.
05:19 He was buried and this was the flag that was on his coffin
05:22 and they handed it over to the family at the end.
05:24 I have been given the honor of getting to keep this with me
05:27 and always kind of remember the things that he had to do
05:30 so we get to do the things that we get to do.
05:32 I keep this in my office.
05:33 This stays in my office.
05:34 And if I'm in my office writing,
05:37 it's sitting right there by the wall
05:38 and it's always in the room.
05:40 He was a man with a 10th grade education
05:42 that wound up engineering
05:43 for a multinational coal corporation.
05:45 He was a testament to hard work
05:47 and was very, very particular in the things that he did.
05:51 So all those things inform some of what I do, I'm sure.
05:54 This is a hat.
05:56 My hat that I've worn for a long, long time.
06:00 I had a different one years ago that was similar.
06:03 My wife gave it away to a fan at a club one night.
06:06 She's like, "You can get another one, right?"
06:07 And I was like, "Well, no, not really.
06:08 "They don't make that anymore."
06:09 So I had to hunt for something similar.
06:12 This one's better.
06:13 There was a reason I gave that one away.
06:14 I always kind of loved crazy hats
06:16 and the guys that wore them.
06:18 The company that makes these hats
06:19 is a company called Charlie One Horse.
06:21 And this was made in the late '70s, early '80s.
06:23 And I found it new old stock and I've worn it nearly out.
06:26 There's not a band in it anymore.
06:28 This one's on its last legs, really.
06:30 So hopefully my career will last longer than this hat will
06:33 because it's very, very fragile at this point.
06:35 But the guys and the ladies in the crew
06:37 have dubbed it Precious.
06:39 So it has a name.
06:40 It's a hat with a name, mainly because it's fragile.
06:42 So that's the hat.
06:44 Keeps the lights out of your eyes.
06:45 Once again, it's utilitarian, but it's also decorative.
06:48 It's been with me on everything that I've done.
06:50 And when people think of what I do,
06:52 I think they think of this hat
06:53 probably as much as they think of me.
06:55 My great-grandmother made this blanket.
06:57 She gave it to my dad when he went away to college.
07:00 It sat around in chairs in my house growing up.
07:02 If it was a cold night, this was what you pulled out.
07:05 I don't know when it would have been made, maybe the '60s.
07:06 But these were all pieces of material
07:08 that my great-grandmother had saved from mending things.
07:11 It got worn to the point where the edges of it
07:13 were kind of worn off,
07:15 and my mother actually kind of repaired some of it.
07:18 So it has that kind of touch to it, too.
07:20 If I was running out of a burning building,
07:21 it's the thing that I would grab in my house, you know?
07:24 So if I want a blanket, this is the one I want.
07:26 This is a pair of boots made for me,
07:29 custom by the Lucchese Company.
07:32 I was on a radio tour in El Paso
07:34 before Traveler came out or anything like that.
07:37 Lucchese makes really, really nice boots.
07:38 They take you up to this kind of Willy Wonka room
07:40 when you do the factory tour, and they're like,
07:42 "Hey, we'd like to make you a pair of boots.
07:44 Pick out anything you want."
07:45 I think they were surprised when I was like,
07:46 "Okay, I just want this kind of very plain pair of boots."
07:49 They have much more expensive versions of things.
07:51 I'm like, "No, I want something I'm gonna wear every day."
07:53 And that's what I did with these for the longest time.
07:55 These were my everyday boot, and I wore these everywhere.
07:59 I did everything in these boots.
08:00 I love things that have genuine wear on them as well.
08:03 And so there's a lot of that.
08:04 I look at these boots and I think about things
08:06 that we've done.
08:07 A lot of those things happened in these boots.
08:08 They're special to me in that way.
08:10 I always have a Filson jacket running around
08:12 with me somewhere.
08:13 It's this kind of wax-cott material.
08:15 It's just kind of all-purpose.
08:17 If it's raining, if it's windy, or you just need a jacket,
08:19 it works out for that.
08:20 So it's tough.
08:21 You can abuse it, toss it around.
08:23 If a buddy of mine was in a band with it,
08:24 you should say things like,
08:26 "You can get your work done in it."
08:27 I don't know, it's just a nice utilitarian item,
08:29 and I have a lot of respect for things that work.
08:31 And this is a thing that works.
08:33 My personal style is absolutely, completely utilitarian.
08:36 I want it just to function as a garment.
08:39 It was a Filson jacket that I wore
08:40 on the singing of the national anthem for the Super Bowl.
08:43 So it works in that setting as well.
08:45 Thank you for taking the time to watch my essentials.
08:49 And I hope maybe you learned something about me
08:51 that you didn't know.
08:52 Or if you didn't, thanks for joining us anyway.
08:55 (upbeat music)