SEAN STEMALY

When your first recordings are made in the cab of a Case IH 9370 tractor, there’s really only one way for you to sound – and that suits Big Loud Records talent Sean Stemaly just fine. Now planting the seeds of Country stardom with the vivid, open-prairie romance of “Last Night All Day,” he’s equipped with baritone richer than river-bottom soil, and he knows how to use it.

“It’s easy to sing songs about Country life when you’ve lived so much of it,” says the heavy equipment operator-turned-artist. “That’s literally all I did with my life was hunt, fish, go to work, go home and sleep a couple of hours, get up and do it all again. … Now I want to touch base on all that and make sure it’s shown in my music.”

Stemaly’s already taken his diesel-fueled Country approach nationwide, touring with stars like Morgan Wallen, Chris Lane, LANCO, HARDY and Riley Green. But the story begins on a slice of heartland between the coal mines of Madisonville, Kentucky, and the river town of Evansville, Indiana. “It’s just Country and there’s a lot of down-home rednecks,” Stemaly says with pride. “It’s a good place to grow up.”

Working in the fields when he wasn’t on a construction site, Stemaly began posting videos of himself singing “tractor concerts” online to pass the time, then joined the vocal team of a megachurch to sing for 5,000 congregants every weekend. He caught the music bug, he admits, but soon shook it off as the seasons changed and work piled up. A whole year passed before a friend invited him to Nashville for a songwriting weekend.