Walker Hayes Says He Wanted To Break Sobriety & Start A Bar Fight Following The Death Of His Newborn Daughter In 2018: “Gonna Have To Pick Me Up From Jail”

The worst day of his life.

You might know Walker Hayes’ name from his massive song “Fancy Like,” which became a huge crossover hit in 2021 and subsequently took over pretty much every pop or country radio station… you may know it better as the “Applebee’s song,” if that helps.

While I can confidently say I’m not the biggest fan of Walker’s music, he is a great guy who values his faith and family, and his path to success certainly didn’t come easy. Hayes is the father of six, and he worked at Costco doing an overnight shift to help support his family while he was struggling as a songwriter. When we first launched the our Whiskey Riff Raff podcast many years ago, he actually wrote and recorded the intro song for free. The intro (and the hosts) have since changed, but he’s always been a friend of the “progrum,” as Pat McAfee would say.

He married his wife Laney in 2004, but in 2018, they went through a horrific tragedy when their seventh child, Oakleigh Klover Hayes, died shortly after birth on June 6th. Laney had to undergo emergency surgery to save her life due to complications during the birth, and it was a tragic turning point in Hayes’ life. At the time, Hayes had been sober since 2015.

He is very open about his Christian faith, and during a recent appearance on the K-Love Morning Show, he opened up about the incredibly difficult day his family buried their Oakleigh. Hayes was around two-and-a-half years sober, and he had already been through rehab and an incredibly hard time trying to break away from his alcoholism. This event was obviously very hard, and he admitted he had planned to break his sobriety and go back to his old ways because he couldn’t deal with the pain:

“I immediately came home from the cemetery and drove [to] downtown Franklin to just… self-destruct. I drove to a bar called 55 South, and I looked through the window and there were three guys at the bar. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna get a little buzz and I’m going to just mess with those guys. I’m just gonna get in a fight with those guys.'”

He added:

“It makes zero sense, and I wanted to start over and just explode.”

The only reason it didn’t happen is because Hayes had left his wallet at home, so he drove back to his house, and when he got home, he saw his wife through the window just sitting alone in the dark room.

He could see everything play out from what he was going to do, and he knew she would end up having to pick him up from jail the next day if he went back to the bar. Hayes realized he needed “redemption from myself” in that moment, not to go get involved in a drunken bar fight:

“I opened the Honda, and my wallet wasn’t in the door. So I drove back home, and when I looked through the window, my wife, sadly, was just sitting by herself, on the day she’s buried her daughter. My kids are I don’t know where, and she’s just in the dark. I could literally see what I was about to do. She’s gonna have to pick me up from jail the next day.

We were gonna have to start the rehab process all over, you know, and go back to square one. That was some sin in me that I just saw clearly, and thought, ‘I need a Savior. I need redemption from myself.'”

It’s an incredibly tragic, yet inspiring story, and I find it admirable that he’s so open about it and willing to expose things most people would never want anyone to know the full extent of. Losing a child is any parent’s worst nightmare, and I can’t even imagine how horrific this was for Walker and his wife, as well as the rest of their family. At the same time, his story is a powerful example of the healing power of the Gospel actively working in his life.

You can watch him talk about it here:

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Last year, Hayes released a project called Sober Thoughts, and during an appearance on the TODAY show last year, he opened up starting his sobriety journey at the age of 36, which had been a very long journey because he started drinking at age 13.

In speaking with Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager, he said it was around the time he had his sixth child, Everly:

“I was working a night job at Costco stocking produce and playing shows at night. Life was just wild, it was a lot on my body and I just woke up on a Saturday and I just knew if I did this one more day my body would be affected. Some organ — you know, look, I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor.

I just woke up and it felt like if I do it one more day I might die. I went one day to two, two days turned into a week…  A month turned into a year and then I just didn’t want to go backwards.”

Hayes said at the time that he has found “freedom from addiction,” and even though he’s felt like breaking at times, he has remained so ever since:

“I think most recovering alcoholics feel the same way, you know. Sobriety is so amazing that you’d love to pass it along. It’s a great option that we have in life and there is freedom from addiction.”

It’s really an inspiring story, and you can watch the full K-LOVE interview here:

The post Walker Hayes Says He Wanted To Break Sobriety & Start A Bar Fight Following The Death Of His Newborn Daughter In 2018: “Gonna Have To Pick Me Up From Jail” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.