Randy Houser

Randy Houser, born Shawn Randolph Houser in Lake, Mississippi, in 1975, grew up around music: his father performed at local venues, and Houser taught himself guitar, fronting his own band by age ten. While attending East Central Community College in Decatur, Mississippi, he formed a band called 10 lb. Biscuit.

Houser moved to Nashville and worked as a songwriter before establishing himself as a recording artist, co-writing Trace Adkins' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" as well as Justin Moore's "Back That Thing Up" and Jessie James's "My Cowboy." His own early hit, "Boots On," came from his 2008 debut album, Anything Goes, after he signed to Universal South Records and performed the title track on Late Show with David Letterman.

That album earned him two 2009 CMA nominations, for New Artist of the Year and Music Video of the Year. He moved to Broken Bow Records' Stoney Creek imprint in 2012 and reached number one with the title track of How Country Feels, followed by "Runnin' Outta Moonlight." Houser is known chiefly for his voice, a heavy, gravel-edged baritone with considerable range, which also carried "Goodnight Kiss," his first number one as a songwriter, and "Like a Cowboy," a top five hit later nominated for the CMA's Song of the Year.

His catalogue mixes mainstream country production with more traditional, soul-inflected material, and his live sets tend to favour the vocal-driven end of that spectrum. He has since surpassed a billion streams, and in late 2023 took on-screen roles in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Dennis Quaid's The Hill.