Jake Owen on the Red Carpet on Wednesday, Nov. 7 for "The 41st Annual CMA Awards" in Nashville. Photographer: Jim Hagans / CMA.
May 14, 2008 — Jake Owen planned to take his mom to the Country Music Association Awards last November, but it wasn’t meant to be. In a rather fitting turn of events, he now gets to escort her just one week after Mother’s Day to the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas.
Why the delay? His mother, Mitzi, suffered a heart attack last November the night before the CMA ceremony. She spent the next five days in the hospital, and the whole ordeal was a huge disappointment — not just because of the physical setback, but also because she was unable to help celebrate Jake’s career progress.
"I always told her that if I ever got to walk down one of the red carpets, that I wanted her to be my date," Jake told The Tennessean. "She was so excited, and she had been working out and lost all this weight, and she’d been sending me pictures of her in her dress."
So this Sunday’s awards have a lot of meaning for Jake. Not only is he up for Top New Male Vocalist, but he’ll be making memories with someone who’s obviously proud of his accomplishments.
"We’re going to make an event out of it," he noted. "I really want to win, but if I don’t, we can say we were out in Las Vegas, and I was nominated for an award and we got to spend this awesome time together. These days, I don’t get to do that enough."
Jake’s competition for Top New Male is Luke Bryan and Jack Ingram.
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