It was a chilly and snowy morning in North Carolina, and a teenage Luke Combs woke up early for a performance with the church choir he was singing in, long before he became a country superstar. When he arrived at the performance venue, he realized that the calendar had been wrong, and frankly, he could have slept in.

He wasn’t happy.

So he jumped into his Subaru Outback that his parents had bought him just four months earlier and headed home.

And that’s when near disaster struck.

“I was literally about to turn on my road and I hit a patch of ice,” Combs recalled to Taste of Country during a recent interview. “I totaled the car and my dad was so pissed.”

And while Combs once fumed over his father’s aggravation over the situation, he has come to realize that his parents weren’t as upset about the accident as they were upset that they had saved money for so long to buy him that car, and now it was gone.

“My parents did not make a ton of money,” says Combs, who recently snagged a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. "The car was like $5,000 but that was a lot of money back then. I mean, it wasn’t easy for them to buy their kid a car when they didn’t have a ton of money."

Eventually, Combs would save up to buy himself another car which was not nearly as nice as the one his parents had bought for him previously. And yes, the whole situation has ended up being a life lesson that has stuck with me throughout his life.

“My parents have been nothing but supportive my entire life,” he says. “I am so lucky to have that. They are great people.

"I’m an only child so there is no other kid. There was no other kid to be a doctor or something like that," he laughs. "I mean, it's cool to be able to have your parents be proud of you now."


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