In 2021, everything would change once again for me when we took a band trip to Nashville, Tennessee. While we were there, I got the chance to attend the Grand Ole Opry for the very first time. As I sat in the back row and took in all the history and tradition of country music I realized that that was what I wanted to do. I had a new dream to sing country music and to one day play at the Grand Ole Opry.

It was also on this trip that I got connected to Billy Dawson. Billy was from Sunray, Texas and grew up in the Texas panhandle just like me, but now he lived in Nashville and worked as a songwriter and producer. We got connected through a friend of a friend and I began traveling to Nashville regularly to write music with Billy and other co-writers.

It was on these trips that we wrote my first 3 songs: “This Heart Belongs in Texas”, “Small Town Texas”, And “Lone Star”. I traveled back to Nashville in October of 2021 to record these songs and got my very first taste of what it was like to have my own original music.

In December of 2021, I met the love of my life at a private party my band was playing. Shae was living in DFW (6 hours away from me) and going to school, but had decided to drive home early for Christmas break that year and surprise her family. It was her aunt’s birthday party that we were hired to play. We met after the show when she complemented my guitar and that was enough for me to ask her out.

Shae and I started dating long-distance in January of 2022 and FaceTiming every night. I found out firsthand that though long-distance is really difficult, it’s possible with the right person. It was on one of my many long drives home from visiting Shae that I wrote “Leaving You” in my head and as soon as I got back to Amarillo I picked up my guitar and put it to music. I also got the idea for “Two Left Feet” while taking Shae dancing one night at a “Guitar’s and Cadillac’s” dance hall in Fort Worth.

I finally released my first song “This Heart Belongs in Texas” to the public in February of 2022 and followed it up with my second song “Lone Star” in May. I began branching out and playing acoustic shows under my full name “Cameron James Smith” and sharing my originals with a live audience for the first time. “This Heart Belongs In Texas” shot up the Texas Country Music Chart for radio streams to #36 and I went on radio tour for the first time in the summer of 2022. I started to see what it was like to be an artist and I realized that if I ever wanted to have a career as a full-time musician, I wasn’t going to be able to make ends meet playing other people’s music.

My cover band continued to get opportunities to play for and open for some bigger acts throughout 2022. We got the opportunity to open for Aaron Watson and then we got the opportunity to open for Josh Turner. When we played at the Josh Turner show, it was the biggest crowd I had ever played in front of and it further solidified my desire to entertain crowds. I loved that I was able to bring joy and entertainment to so many people at once. However, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to make the jump from cover band singer to artist as soon as I was able to.

It turns out, this step was right around the corner for me and God had just been preparing me to take it. When everyone else graduated college, each of our lives were headed in different directions and the cover band broke up. My family came around me and helped me put a band back together under my name. I sang and played guitar, Connor played drums, Creighton played bass, my mom sang backup vocals, and my dad ran sound. This season of playing music with my family is one that I will forever be grateful for. It’s an unbelievably special thing to get to perform as a family and share music together. In July, Connor and I drove to Nashville so I could record “Two Left Feet” and “Leaving You”. I was beginning to build up a small repertoire of original music and I was so excited.

In September, I released my second radio single “Two Left Feet” and it also broke the top 50 of the Texas Country Music Chart. It was so much fun to get to share my own music and see other people be impacted by my work. Being an artist was different than simply fronting a cover band. As a cover band singer, you can only hope to be a great imitator of the original music and to remind people of their love for someone else’s work. But now I was able to share my own thoughts and feelings through music. When I sang my own songs, I believed in the words I was singing, because I wrote them. I discovered that another great passion of mine was getting to meet people and hear their stories. People would come up to me after shows and tell me how they could relate to the original songs I was singing and I felt immensely grateful for the impact I was able to have on people.

I proposed to Shae on December 18th, 2022 exactly 1 year to the date after we met. I rented out the venue that we met at and invited all of our friends and family and it was an incredible night. The next 6 months were filled with wedding planning and except for a few songwriting sessions, my music career took a backseat as we prepared to start our lives together. We opted for the shortest engagement possible because we had been dating long-distance for all of our relationship except for about 3 months. Shae graduated college in May of 2023 and moved to Amarillo and we were married one month later on June 16th. After 18 grueling months of long-distance, it was finally over! We took a honeymoon and I released my third radio single “Small Town Texas” exactly 2 weeks after our wedding. This meant that I got to go back on radio tour for a 3rd time only one month into marriage. Talk about bad timing on my part!

“Small Town Texas” also reached the top 50 on the Texas Country Music Chart and I started working on what would become the “Silveradios” EP. I had written “Silveradios” and “Thunder On The Plains”, but I didn’t know what to do with them. I wanted to release a collection of music in 2024 rather than one song at a time. Billy and I cowrote “Burn Holes In Our Boots” and “Hairtie In My Truck” with some other songwriters and prepared to record a 4 song EP in the fall of 2023. The day before we were set to record, I wrote “Knew Me When”. Hopefully as you read this story, you are able to pick up on what I began to see peppered throughout my entire story this far. At every turn and at every step, I was supported by other people. First it was my family, then it was my church, then it was my friends and my teachers. As soon as I started playing live music, people that I never would have known began to support me and encourage me and pour into my life and help me build my career. In an instant I was inspired to write “Knew Me When” to give credit to everyone that has been on this journey with me. I truly would not get to enjoy any of the opportunities I have without the support of the incredible people around me.

Things started to change for my brother Connor. We had played music together for 5 years, but he began to feel the Lord call him to be a pastor. After graduating college in 2023, Connor moved across the country to Kentucky to attend seminary in the fall. While I was heartbroken to lose my brother and my drummer, I was and still am so proud of him and the direction his life is taking.

Shae and I drove back to Nashville in October to record my 5 songs for the EP and I started to wrap my head around what it was like to have 10 original songs to play at shows. Up until now, I was still mainly a cover artist with a few originals, but now I had a foundation of original music. I released my final song from the first few batches of music “Leaving You” in December of 2023 and geared up to release my first collection of music in March of 2024.

Shae asked me not to tour for the first year of our marriage while we got our feet under us and I felt like that was a fair request from my new bride and a good idea. I kept playing local shows in Amarillo and around the Amarillo area. I got opportunities to open for Tracy Byrd and Casey Donahue and I kept investing all my money back into the band. Whether recording new music or upgrading gear or, God-Forbid, replacing gear, there was always something to spend money on. I kept enjoying opportunities to play my music locally and I even got opportunities to lead worship with my band at Fields of Faith events for Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

At home, we were learning what it’s like to be married and share income and responsibilities and on one occasion in February 2024, I brought home an 8 week old black golden doodle puppy that Shae promptly named “Nash” after our love for visiting Nashville.

I released the “Silveradios” EP in March of 2024 and chose “Burn Holes In Our Boots” as my 4th radio single. After Radio tour and another chart push, I had another top 50 Texas Country Music single and had begun to make some good relationships with radio stations and DJ’s around Texas and Oklahoma. I kept playing as many local gigs as I could throughout 2024 but I didn’t have any new music on the horizon. Better yet, I didn’t have the income to support new music development. Being an independent artist meant that on one hand I owned everything, but on another hand I had to pay for everything.

In October I decided to try to raise money for the next round of music. I had never attempted a crowdfunding campaign before and I knew that it was rare to have a successful one, but my only other option was to stop making music. In hindsight, it might have worked out better for me to release my 5 song EP separately as singles so I could better promote each song, but I also felt the pressure of being an “Artist” with so few originals out so it also felt like there was a race to 10 songs. It was here that I learned truly how great my support system is. I wrote “Knew Me When” a year earlier because I had an idea, but God was about to show me just how blessed I actually was. We raised $10,000 in one month and I was back in music development! I couldn’t believe how supportive the people around me were and I felt like the work I was doing and the music I was making was actually making a difference for people.

All of 2025 was spent developing this new music. We wrote 5 new songs and planned to record them in August. Throughout this time, God had been nudging me to do something that I hadn’t really done yet. I was still a worship leader on Sunday mornings, but at my shows, I was something else. I was focused on my career and my success. I was pointing people at me and trying to do everything I could to grow my following. I began to feel like I needed to be more overt about my faith from the country music stages I was on. I couldn’t continue to live as though Jesus was Lord of my life on Sunday, but I was in control the rest of the week. I began to pray about how to address this and I felt like I needed to write a song about it. I wrote both verses of “Maker of Man” on my own but I could not for the life of me figure out what I wanted the chorus to be. I didn’t want it to be cheesy, I wanted to have a genuine opportunity to share my faith at my shows and I wanted the song to be relatable. I pitched my idea to Billy and he helped me write the chorus and bridge for “Maker of Man”. Now I was heading back to Nashville to record 6 songs!

After a month of fundraising and 5 months of writing and  5 months of recording and production, the music was finally ready and in October of 2025, I released “Maker Of Man” as my first single from my new batch of music. I now finally had a faith song that I could sing at every show that also reminded me that without God I am nothing.

So now you’re all caught up. I hope through this story you aren’t tempted to think that I accomplished these things on my own. At every turn I have had incredible people spur me along and support me. These people have been placed in my life by God and every opportunity that I have has been ordained and set before me by Him. He has given me a new mission. I am not here to grow my career and become the next super star. I am here to point people to Jesus from every stage that I am given the opportunity to be on. Whether at church on Sunday or at a bar on Saturday night. My mission stays the same. I glorify Him because He has given me everything I have.

The summer after my freshman year of college is when everything changed for me. I knew that I loved music and performing, but I hadn’t really pursued it much in a year. It definitely felt like something was missing from my life, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

At this time in my life of missing music and wanting to find a way back in, my brother Connor started a high school band with some buddies. They had landed a couple of gigs at a restaurant and needed a singer, so in the summer of 2018 I joined and we started playing gigs as often as we could get them. My dad joined us as our “manager/sound guy/booking agent/promoter” and convinced us to learn 80s rock cover tunes like Jump (Van Halen) and Wanted, Dead or Alive (Bon Jovi) and Don’t Stop Believing (Journey). We found quickly that if we could do those songs well, we would actually get tipped by people to play music. After about a year of singing solely 80s tunes and learning the foundations of live performance, I asked if we could sing some well known country covers because I had recently discovered country music a few years back and I loved it. I also needed the vocal break from singing 3 hours of 80s rock. The band agreed and we started singing a mix of 80s rock and country songs at every show.

It would wind up taking us 3 years to play our first 100 shows and most of them were to nobody. But at the time, that didn’t seem to bother me because I was back where I belonged, singing and playing music and entertaining others. We played so many free shows when we first started out but after about a year we were able to start charging money for gigs.  I remember the night that we made enough in tips that we all received $75 each and I was in awe that we could actually get paid to do this! We started playing restaurants and then corporate events and then weddings and private parties. At this point, I realized that I loved music and wanted to play music for the rest of my life. I switched my degree over to business management because it would be easier and I could get out of college faster on that track and focus on what I really wanted to do which was play music.

In 2019, my second year of college, I was given an opportunity to be an employed worship leader at a church in Borger, Texas. I was finally able to quit the myriad of part time jobs that I had that weren’t music related and receive all my income from music. This was a big accomplishment because I didn’t know if that was even possible for me. I settled into a groove where I was playing cover band gigs on Friday and Saturday nights and leading worship on Sunday mornings. Except for the fact that I didn’t ever get to sleep much on Saturday nights, it was great. I was so thankful that the Lord had given me the opportunity to work as a musician.

We all remember 2020 so I’ll spare you the details, but it actually wound up being a decent year for me. After leading worship in Borger for a year and a half, I was given the opportunity to come back to my home church and be the worship pastor at St. Stephen’s Church of Amarillo. I grew up in this church and I loved it. My grandad was the pastor for 23 years and my dad still worked there so I jumped at the opportunity and began to lead a full worship team and 2 modern worship services every Sunday morning. This was a big change for me because I had only seen about 30 people per Sunday at my church in Borger, but it was the middle of Covid, so this new congregation that used to sit at 400 people was down to about 150. I was able to learn all of the new responsibilities of this job and get my feet under me as we came out of Covid and rose back up to our regular attendance numbers. It’s here that I really fell in love with worship. The Lord began to work on my heart and show me what an honor it was to lead His people in worshipping him. It was also at this time that my other brother, Creighton, joined Connor and I in our band and all 3 of us got to start performing together regularly! I graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in business management from West Texas A&M University in December of 2020 and began to focus full-time on music.

I was raised in the heart of the West Texas Panhandle in Amarillo as the oldest of 3 brothers. Our dad was a youth pastor and our mom was a teacher that sang on the worship team at our church, so I got my first impressions of live music performance in a worship setting. I started singing when I was 5 along to the christian radio station with my mom and I started playing guitar when I was 10. My first big performance came when I was 11 at a middle school talent show where I played a guitar that was way too big for me and sang “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey in front of 300 middle schoolers. I was terrified, but I needed to do it again as soon as possible.

When I was 12 I started playing on the youth worship team at church and I joined the church choir. From then on I was in music, so I can attribute a lot of my early musical development to church. In middle school I kept performing yearly at the school-wide talent shows and that’s where I got my first taste of performing in front of large crowds. It was nerve-racking but also exhilarating. I knew that I wanted to keep performing whenever I got the chance. I started roping my little brother Connor into my crazy desire to sink or swim in front of 300 classmates and we performed together for the first time at a middle school talent show when I was in 8th grade.

In High school I joined the school choir and further pushed into musical development. I competed in the All-State competitions as well as the UIL competitions and did anything I could to continue performing and singing. Playing in the talent shows at high school gave me opportunities to play in front of crowds of 1000 at a time and competitions like the battle of the bands gave me more opportunities to get familiar with performance with a band.

I also began to get opportunities to lead worship in High-school at church and at youth events and I began to grow a passion for worship leading as well! At this point, my musical tastes were primarily 80s classic rock and worship music. I kept searching for any opportunity to have a guitar in my hand and be singing in front of people.

After High school I actually took a step back from performing and my freshman year of college was focused more on education than anything else. I was not sure if I would get the chance to perform again but I was open to it. I kept leading worship occasionally whenever I had the opportunity at my college ministry, but didn’t seek out playing in other scenarios as much as I had in the past. I was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Finance and that pretty much took all of my time and focus.

(Me and Connor in middle school doing our best to keep it together)

The Cover Band

(Playing a guitar way too big for me at a Vacation Bible School)

(Creighton rocking the bass behind me)

(Billy, Me, and Connor in the studio)

(Me, Creighton, Connor, Mom & Dad at the Grand Ole Opry)

(Me, Jason, & Billy after my first Nashville co-writing session)

(Me and Connor leading worship at church)

(My first of many Grand Ole Opry tickets)

(Playing with a band at a high school talent show)

(2024 Easter Sunday pictures that were very difficult to get)

(Me, Dad, Mom, Connor, & Creighton at Connor’s last show)

(Me and Connor with our first band)

(Performing in 6th grade)

(Cringey band photos)

The Early Years

I was raised in the heart of the West Texas Panhandle in Amarillo as the oldest of 3 brothers. Our dad was a youth pastor and our mom was a teacher that sang on the worship team at our church, so I got my first impressions of live music performance in a worship setting. I started singing when I was 5 along to the christian radio station with my mom and I started playing guitar when I was 10. My first big performance came when I was 11 at a middle school talent show where I played a guitar that was way too big for me and sang “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey in front of 300 middle schoolers. I was terrified, but I needed to do it again as soon as possible.

When I was 12 I started playing on the youth worship team at church and I joined the church choir. From then on I was in music, so I can attribute a lot of my early musical development to church. In middle school I kept performing yearly at the school-wide talent shows and that’s where I got my first taste of performing in front of large crowds. It was nerve-racking but also exhilarating. I knew that I wanted to keep performing whenever I got the chance. I started roping my little brother Connor into my crazy desire to sink or swim in front of 300 classmates and we performed together for the first time at a middle school talent show when I was in 8th grade.

(Me and Connor with our second band)

(My first time in the studio recording vocals)

I also began to get opportunities to lead worship in High-school at church and at youth events and I began to grow a passion for worship leading as well! At this point, my musical tastes were primarily 80s classic rock and worship music. I kept searching for any opportunity to have a guitar in my hand and be singing in front of people.

Becoming an Artist

The End… For Now

After High school I actually took a step back from performing and my freshman year of college was focused more on education than anything else. I was not sure if I would get the chance to perform again but I was open to it. I kept leading worship occasionally whenever I had the opportunity at my college ministry, but didn’t seek out playing in other scenarios as much as I had in the past. I was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Finance and that pretty much took all of my time and focus.

In High school I joined the school choir and further pushed into musical development. I competed in the All-State competitions as well as the UIL competitions and did anything I could to continue performing and singing. Playing in the talent shows at high school gave me opportunities to play in front of crowds of 1000 at a time and competitions like the battle of the bands gave me more opportunities to get familiar with performance with a band.