Shaboozey Age 2026: How Old Is the ‘Bar Song’ Star?

Last updated: November 10, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Shaboozey is 31 years old in 2026. He was born Collins Obinna Chibueze on May 9, 1995, in Woodbridge, Virginia, and he turned 31 on May 9, 2026 — a birthday that landed in the middle of the biggest year of his life so far. Three months earlier he had won his first Grammy. Three months later he released his fourth album, a 20-track Western concept record. And on November 2, 2026, he walked the CFDA Fashion Awards red carpet in Ralph Lauren and talked about Dolly Parton, the singer his Nigerian-born father loved, who had died in August at 80.

The age matters because the breakthrough came late. Shaboozey was 28 when “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” went to No. 1 in 2024, and 29 when it finished a 19-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, tying the all-time record. Before that he had spent a decade as a working independent artist — two albums, a soundtrack cut, a record deal signed and ended, and a move to Los Angeles that did not pay off for years. He was not a teenager handed a hit. He was a 28-year-old who had already made music for ten years when the world caught up.

This article gives the verified answer first and then the story behind it: the Virginia childhood split between two cultures, the football coach who gave him his stage name, the boarding-school years in Nigeria, the long independent grind, the Beyoncé call that changed everything, the record-breaking single, the Grammy win at 30, the new album at 31, the height question, the Ciara Miller rumours, and how his age stacks up against the other country stars of his generation.

Who Is Shaboozey?

Shaboozey is the Nigerian-American singer, rapper and songwriter who spent ten years as an independent artist and then, in the space of two years, became the biggest new name in country music. His full name is Collins Obinna Chibueze. He was born on May 9, 1995, in Woodbridge, Virginia, in the Washington metropolitan area, to parents who had immigrated from Nigeria. He is 31 in 2026, and the number only tells half the story — the other half is how long it took him to get here.

His sound refuses a single label, and that refusal is the point of his career. The records mix country, hip-hop, Americana, folk and rock, sometimes inside one song. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, the 2024 single that made him famous, interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 club hit “Tipsy” over country instrumentation — a rap hook, a fiddle, a bar-room chorus — and it worked on pop radio, country radio and streaming at the same time. Billboard’s chart reporting gives the scale of it: 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, 35 weeks atop Hot Country Songs, 27 weeks atop Radio Songs, and a Diamond certification from the RIAA for 10 million units in the United States.

By the time the single broke, he was already 29 and already on his third album. The Beyoncé features had come first — two songs on Cowboy Carter in March 2024 — and the Grammy win came after, in February 2026, when he was 30. The fourth album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, arrived on July 31, 2026, when he was 31. Every step of the rise has an age attached to it, and the ages run older than the usual breakout story. That is what makes the profile worth reading in full.

Early Life in Woodbridge: Two Cultures, One Voice

Woodbridge, Virginia, is a suburb in Prince William County, about 20 miles south of Washington, D.C., and it gave Shaboozey two cultures at once. At home, his parents kept their Nigerian roots close — his father was born and raised in Nigeria before immigrating to the United States, first settling in Texas, and his love of country music passed to his son along with the stories. Outside the house, the boy grew up American: Virginia schools, Virginia football, Virginia radio playing everything from hip-hop to country.

Part of his junior-high years were spent at a boarding school in Nigeria, an experience he has described in interviews as a turning point for his discipline and his sense of where he came from. He came back to the States, finished high school at Gar-Field Senior High School in Woodbridge, and started making music with friends — recording as a way of bonding, as he told iHeart in 2024, without ever thinking he would do anything serious with it.

The country influence came from his father, and the detail matters because it explains the sound that followed. A Virginia Senate resolution commending him in February 2025 records it plainly: he developed his love of country music from his father, a Nigerian immigrant who drew connections between the themes of country music and rural life in Nigeria. The songs about hard work, home, loss and Saturday nights translated across an ocean. When Shaboozey sings country, he is singing his father’s music as much as his own.

The Football Field Gave Him His Name

Shaboozey is a stage name, and it started as a mistake. His surname, Chibueze, is an Igbo name meaning “God is king”, and through his life it was mispronounced and misspelled by people meeting it for the first time. The version that stuck came from his high school football coach. Playing football as a freshman at Gar-Field, he walked in as the new boy who had to prove himself, and the coach looked at his last name, said it as “Shaboozey”, and wrote it on his helmet exactly that way.

He told the story himself in a 2024 interview on 102.7 KIIS-FM, and American Songwriter picked it up in June 2025: “My coach had just seen my last name and he was like, ‘Shaboozey,’ and wrote it on a helmet exactly how it’s spelled as my artist name.” The nickname followed him through school and around Woodbridge — everyone in town knew him as that — and when he started making music seriously, friends pushed him to keep it. “Man, Shaboozey. Just do that,” they told him.

The height goes with the football story, and it is the one fact in this profile that the sources genuinely disagree on. He is a tall man — nobody disputes that — but the number varies by outlet. SingerHeights lists 6 feet 4 inches (193 cm) and says he has described himself as 6’4″, which makes that the strongest single figure. Other outlets list 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm), and a few list 6 feet 0 inches (183 cm). This article reports the most-cited figure and the spread, because a profile that picks one number and hides the other two is not being honest with its reader. The full breakdown, with the source-by-source comparison, belongs in a height profile; the short version is that he is somewhere between 6 feet and 6 feet 4 inches tall, and the 6’4″ figure is the one he has used himself.

The Long Grind: 2014–2023, Ages 19 to 28

Shaboozey released his first single, “Jeff Gordon” — named for the NASCAR driver — in 2014, when he was 19. The same year he formed the production company V92. The early records leaned toward trap and hip-hop, with country and Americana creeping in at the edges, and the work came out slowly: a deal, a debut album, a second album, and years in between when almost nothing seemed to happen from the outside.

In August 2016, at 21, he signed a recording, co-publishing and ancillary rights agreement with Homeless Records, a deal later assigned to Kreshendo Entertainment, a division of Republic Records. The agreement gave up 50% of the rights to his compositions while it was in effect, and it was terminated in November 2019. The LA Times, in its 2024 profile, also reported a new lawsuit from his old label Kreshendo claiming breach of contract — a reminder that the business side of the grind was not clean, and that the decade before the breakthrough had legal bills attached to it as well as studio bills.

The move to Los Angeles came in 2018, when he was 23 — not 2016, as some briefs repeat. The LA Times profile puts it plainly: he moved to L.A. that year with a record deal and a bit of cash floated from his mother to pursue his dreams, and found little community for his country-crossover sound. “There’s like [Hollywood bar] Desert 5 Spot and that’s about it,” he said. “L.A.’s not really a hub for that. It’s hard trying to find those spaces here.”

The records kept coming anyway. His debut album, Lady Wrangler, arrived in October 2018 on Republic, when he was 23. The same year he landed “Start a Riot”, with Duckwrth, on the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. His second album, Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die, followed in October 2022 through Empire Distribution, when he was 27 — the title alone showing where his head already was. He was, by his own account to iHeart in June 2024, making music for about ten years by the time the breakthrough came. The decade is the difference between Shaboozey and the overnight stars he is compared with: he had already served the apprenticeship.

Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter and the Call That Changed Everything

The turn came in February 2024, at a showcase his management team at Range Media Partners had set up. He was 28, he had not played a show in a while — three or four years, by his own count — and his managers had to talk him into it. He had just joined Range, and everyone wanted to see him play. He stepped out and performed “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” for the first time anywhere. In the audience, by luck and by design at once, sat Ricky Lawson, a frequent Beyoncé songwriting collaborator and the A&R chief for her company Parkwood Entertainment.

The next day Shaboozey was in a studio. Beyoncé’s team had heard the unreleased song and wanted him on two tracks for her country album. Two weeks later the release date was announced, and when Cowboy Carter hit the streets on March 29, 2024, he found out he featured on two songs that made the final cut: “Spaghettii”, with Linda Martell — the pioneering country singer who was the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry in 1969 — and “Sweet Honey Buckiin'”. “Spaghettii” peaked at No. 31 on the Hot 100. He was 28, and he had gone from a showcase nobody expected him to play to a Beyoncé album in about a month.

The Beyoncé co-sign did something no amount of independent grinding had done: it put him in front of a global audience that already trusted her taste. Pollstar’s April 2025 cover feature tells the story straight — the showcase, Lawson in the room, the studio the next day — and the timing did the rest. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was released two weeks after Cowboy Carter, on April 12, 2024, riding the wave of attention the Beyoncé album had created for Black artists in country music. The song did not need the co-sign to be good. It needed the co-sign to be heard.

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)”: 19 Weeks at No. 1 at 29

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was released on April 12, 2024, as the lead single from his third album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, which followed on May 31, 2024. He was 28 when the single came out and 29 when it finished its run at the top — he turned 29 on May 9, 2024, a month into the chart climb. The song spent 19 non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, tying the all-time record held by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Old Town Road”. It also spent 35 weeks atop Hot Country Songs — the longest solo run in that chart’s history — and 27 weeks atop Radio Songs.

The numbers behind the record are the kind that change a career’s maths. The RIAA certified the single Diamond in September 2025, meaning 10 million units sold in the United States. Streaming kept climbing after that: American Songwriter reported in June 2025 that the song had passed 1.3 billion Spotify streams and earned its first Billions Club plaque, and WGLR reported in September 2025 that it had passed 1.4 billion Spotify streams. Forbes reported that the song alone earned roughly $10 million in royalties and streaming revenue in 2024 — one song’s gross earnings in one year, not his net worth, but the figure that explains why every estimate of his fortune jumped at once.

He also made chart history of a different kind: the first Black male artist to top the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts at the same time. The song debuted at No. 1 on eight different Billboard charts. It was performed on Saturday Night Live on December 7, 2024 — he was 29, the musical guest on an episode hosted by Paul Mescal — and it carried him onto the Coachella and Stagecoach stages in April 2025, the two festivals Pollstar built its cover feature around. A song about drinking in a bar, built on a 2004 rap hook, had made a 29-year-old independent artist into the defining country star of the year.

Shaboozey Net Worth 2026: –10 Million

The money followed the song, and the honest figure is a range. Shaboozey’s net worth is estimated at $5–10 million as of November 2026, anchored at $10 million by Celebrity Net Worth, which updated its figure for him on February 3, 2026. For the full money story — the Forbes royalty figure, the touring income, the brand work and the year-by-year breakdown — see Shaboozey’s net worth on Guide Net Worth, and for the same fortune from our sister site’s angle, Shaboozey’s net worth on Celeb America.

The spread has a clear explanation. The lower figures — $1–5 million from TheCityCeleb, $2 million from R. Couri Hay in mid-2025 — are earlier snapshots, taken before the full royalty year and the Grammy win had landed. The $10 million anchor from Celebrity Net Worth was updated on February 3, 2026, two days after the Grammy win, and it is the freshest detailed figure available. The Forbes number sits in its own column on purpose: roughly $10 million in royalties and streaming revenue from a single song in a single year is a gross figure, before the label, the management, the band, the tax and the split with co-writers. It explains the fortune. It is not the fortune.

What the range hides is the shape of the income. Streaming pays every month on a catalogue that now includes a Diamond single and a Grammy-winning collaboration. Touring pays in bigger chunks — the Outlaws Never Die Tour ran through the autumn of 2026 — and the brand work followed the fame, including a partnership with Jack Daniel’s built around the lyric “Me and Jack Daniel’s got a history”, which he has said he knew would land with fans the moment he wrote it. At 31, with a fourth album out and a Grammy on the shelf, the $5–10 million range is a snapshot of a fortune still being built, not a final figure.

The Grammy Win: History at 30

On February 1, 2026 — the first day of Black History Month — Shaboozey won his first Grammy. He was 30. The award was Best Country Duo/Group Performance, for “Amen”, his collaboration with Jelly Roll, and the win made him the first Black man ever to win in that category. “Amen” had peaked at No. 27 on the Hot 100 in the same week, and the win closed a circle that had started with the Beyoncé features two years earlier: from a guest on someone else’s country album to a Grammy winner in a country category, in 23 months.

His acceptance speech became the story of the night for a different reason. Accepting the award at the Premiere Ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, he dedicated it to immigrants and said, “Immigrants built this country, literally. So this is for them.” The line drew applause in the room and backlash online, including criticism from Nas, and on Tuesday, February 3, he posted a public statement addressing it. “I am both a Black man and the son of Nigerian immigrants,” he wrote, “and in the overwhelming moment of winning my first Grammy my focus was on honoring the sacrifices my parents made by coming to this country to give me and my siblings opportunities they never had.” He added that winning the award on the first day of Black History Month and becoming the first Black man to win Best Country Duo was Black history — a continuation of what generations before him had fought for, not only his own achievement.

The win matters to the age story because of when it came. He was 30, not 22, and the speech he gave was the speech of a man who had waited a decade for the moment and knew exactly who he owed it to. The first Black man to win Best Country Duo/Group Performance did it as the son of Nigerian immigrants, on the first day of Black History Month, two days before Celebrity Net Worth updated his fortune to $10 million. The dates line up because the year lined up: February 2026 was the month the decade of grinding turned into history.

The Outlaw Cherie Lee: A New Album at 31

His fourth studio album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, was released on July 31, 2026, through American Dogwood and Empire Distribution. He was 31, three months past his birthday, and the record was a deliberate step away from the safety of repeating “A Bar Song”. It is a 20-track concept album, co-created with Xaivia Inniss, built around a fictional outlaw named Cherie Lee — a gunslinger hunting the Bootcut Boys, the gang who murdered her sheriff father, from Texas to Montana — and it plays like a Western film in album form.

The guest list shows how far his standing had travelled since the Beyoncé features. Jamie Foxx narrates, introducing Cherie Lee and the tale of outlaw revenge and tragic love at the album’s centre. Teyana Taylor voices Cherie Lee herself on “Death of Jeremiah Walker”. Sam Elliott introduces the final act on “Don’t Count Down”. Gunna, Leon Bridges, Kehlani and Orville Peck all appear across the 20 tracks. The lead single was “Born to Die”, and the second single, “Cowgirl”, released June 10, 2026, became the album’s breakout — Apple Music calls it “another bar song for you and all your friends”, and RIFF, which scored the album 8/10 on release day, named it among the record’s strongest tracks.

The album’s reception says something about the age question too. A 31-year-old with one record-breaking single behind him could have made a safe follow-up. Instead he made a 20-track Western about a fictional woman out for revenge, with a movie star narrating and a country legend closing the record. NME called it an ambitious, cinematic tale of love and vengeance. The Daily Yonder, writing in September 2026, called it a sonic journey across frontier towns and open desert. He marked release week with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and on the TODAY plaza in New York City, and the Outlaws Never Die Tour — named for his second album — carried the record on the road from September 2026.

How Tall Is Shaboozey?

Shaboozey is a tall man, and the exact number depends on which outlet you ask. The most-cited figure is 6 feet 4 inches (193 cm), listed by SingerHeights and Glowtechy, and SingerHeights reports that he has described himself as 6’4″ — the strongest single claim for that number. Other outlets list 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm), including TheCityCeleb and Diffsense, which notes that with footwear he pushes 6’3″ or 6’4″ on stage. A third group lists 6 feet 0 inches (183 cm).

There is no verified measurement. He has never confirmed his height in an interview with a tape measure attached, and no official document with his measurements has been published, so every figure is a reported one rather than a verified one. The 6’4″ figure is the one this article leads with because it is the most-cited and the one he has used himself, but the reader should know the other two exist. The height does not change the music, the fortune or the age — it is one of the most-searched questions about him, and it belongs in a profile that promises the full picture, with the disagreement stated rather than hidden.

Personal Life: Ciara Miller and the “Cowgirl” Rumours

Shaboozey has no confirmed partner, and no confirmed marriage. That sentence matters, because the rumour mill has been busy since June 2026, when Summer House star Ciara Miller, 30, starred as Cherie Lee in the “Cowgirl” music video — a Western-themed video in which the two dance together and promotional images of him dipping her set the internet talking.

The pairing kept escalating in public. On July 29, 2026, Miller made a surprise appearance during his performance of “Cowgirl” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, joining him centre stage and leaning in for a kiss behind her cowboy hat that the cameras could not quite catch. Reports after the show said the two were “cozy” at a club later that night. On November 5, 2026, Miller shared Instagram photos of herself in Los Angeles with Shaboozey behind her, and Reality Blurb’s November 6, 2026 report describes them as romantically linked since the video.

Neither of them has confirmed a relationship. Miller addressed the rumours directly to Us Weekly on September 29, 2026, laughing them off without giving fans the confirmation they wanted: “Look, the internet is a really crazy place… I feel like they — the internet — will ship me with anyone with a heartbeat. And… I love Shaboozey, but they’ll literally ship me with anyone.” Parade reported in September 2026 that she was single and happy about it, and NBC noted after the Tonight Show appearance that neither Miller nor Shaboozey had commented publicly on the nature of their relationship. This article reports the link as reported — a video, a stage kiss, a November photo — and not as a confirmed romance, because neither of the two people involved has said it is one.

November 2026: The CFDA Red Carpet and Dolly Parton

The freshest news in this profile is eight days old. On November 2, 2026, Shaboozey walked the red carpet at the CFDA Fashion Awards at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, wearing Ralph Lauren, and spoke to People about women leading country music — and about Dolly Parton. “She was one of my dad’s favorite country artists,” he told People. “He was born in Nigeria and grew up there. The fact that [my dad] knows Dolly Parton just shows you how much of a global impact she had on the entire world, not just Nashville… and just her activism and just her wanting to just see country music become what it is today. I think she accomplished that, man. Dolly Parton forever.”

Parton had died on August 25, 2026, at the age of 80. Shaboozey posted a tribute on X the same day: “Rest in peace Dolly Parton, I wish I had the honor of meeting you. You were everyone’s favorite artist. Thank you for giving us some of the greatest music we’ll ever know.” The connection runs through his own records: both “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and “Cowgirl” nod to Parton’s “9 to 5”, the second with a direct lyric — “Girl, you found the right one, Dolly said it best.”

The same red-carpet interview carried a second piece of news. Shaboozey spoke about Ella Langley, whose “Choosin’ Texas” has passed the 19-week non-holiday No. 1 record he shared — the mark “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” set by tying “Old Town Road”. He praised her, and the grace of the answer fits the rest of the year: a 31-year-old who holds the record, watches someone younger pass it, and celebrates the women leading the genre he broke into. The CFDA appearance, the Dolly tribute and the Langley praise all landed in the same week, and together they are the clearest picture of where he stands at 31 — established, respected, and still talking about the artists who made his career possible.

How Shaboozey’s Age Compares: Country Stars at 31

Thirty-one is a crowded age in modern country music, and the table below puts Shaboozey next to the peers whose own age profiles Guide Net Worth has verified. He is older than Zach Bryan, who is 30 in 2026, and younger than Morgan Wallen, who turned 33 on May 13, 2026, and Lainey Wilson, who is 34. The spread is narrow — four years from youngest to oldest — and the careers inside it could not be more different.

The comparison cuts two ways. Against Wallen and Wilson, Shaboozey is the late arrival — they were headlining years before his single broke, and their fortunes reflect that head start. Against Bryan, a year younger, he is the slower burn: Bryan’s rise was fast and straight, while Shaboozey’s took a decade of independent records before the Beyoncé call. What the table also shows is how compressed modern country stardom has become: four artists between 30 and 34, all headlining, all with albums out in 2026, and the oldest of them only 34. For more on the genre’s biggest names in our Celebrity Net Worth section, the peer profiles above are the place to start.

Shaboozey: Age-by-Age Timeline

Thirty-one years old, a decade of independent records, two Beyoncé features, a 19-week No. 1, a Diamond single, a Grammy, and a fourth album that bets everything on a fictional outlaw. The timeline is the age story in miniature: a slow start, a football nickname that became a stage name, a Los Angeles move that took six years to pay off, and a 2026 that brought a Grammy in February, a birthday in May, an album in July and a red carpet in November. The next chapter is the one that decides whether the $5–10 million grows: the tour, the album’s long tail, and a 31-year-old who is still, by his own record, just getting started.

Shaboozey Age — Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Reporting

This article was reported on November 10, 2026, from live sources checked the same day. The birthdate of May 9, 1995, in Woodbridge, Virginia, and the age of 31 are sourced to Wikipedia’s Shaboozey biography, the Celeb America Shaboozey net-worth profile (November 2026), Bored Panda and TVOverMind (both updated May 9, 2026), Hello Rayo (July 28, 2026, updated August 10, 2026) and WhoWorth (updated November 10, 2026). The stage-name origin — the football coach, the helmet, the 102.7 KIIS-FM interview — is sourced to American Songwriter (June 21, 2025) and the Virginia Senate resolution commending him (February 2025), which also records his father’s Texas settlement and the country-music influence. The career dates — the 2014 first single, the August 2016 signing, the 2018 Los Angeles move and Lady Wrangler, the 2022 second album, the February 2024 showcase and Cowboy Carter features — are sourced to Wikipedia, Pollstar’s April 8, 2025 cover feature, the LA Times profile and iHeart’s June 3, 2024 report. The chart records — 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, 35 weeks atop Hot Country Songs, 27 weeks atop Radio Songs, the Diamond certification and the 1.4 billion Spotify streams — are sourced to Billboard reporting, Hip-Hop Vibe (September 17, 2025), American Songwriter (June 9, 2025) and WGLR (September 23, 2025). The net-worth range of $5–10 million is sourced to Celebrity Net Worth ($10 million, updated February 3, 2026) via the Celeb America profile, with the lower estimates from TheCityCeleb ($1–5 million) and R. Couri Hay ($2 million, mid-2025) and the Forbes royalty figure (roughly $10 million for one song in 2024). The Grammy win — February 1, 2026, Best Country Duo/Group Performance for “Amen” with Jelly Roll, first Black man to win the category, and the February 3 statement — is sourced to iHeart’s B-93 (February 3, 2026), Baller Alert (February 3, 2026), Music-News.com (February 4, 2026) and American Songwriter (February 4, 2026). The 2026 album — released July 31, 2026, 20 tracks, American Dogwood/EMPIRE, with Jamie Foxx, Gunna, Leon Bridges, Teyana Taylor, Kehlani, Sam Elliott and Orville Peck — is sourced to Apple Music (published July 31, 2026), RIFF (July 31, 2026, 8/10), NME (July 31, 2026) and Wikipedia, with the “Cowgirl” single date (June 10, 2026) from the album’s singles listing. The November 2026 freshness — the CFDA Fashion Awards red carpet on November 2, 2026, the Dolly Parton remarks to People, Parton’s death on August 25, 2026 at 80, and Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” passing his record — is sourced to Country Rebel (November 4, 2026) and Becoming.is (November 3, 2026), with the CFDA attendance confirmed by TheWrap and W Magazine (November 2–3, 2026). The Ciara Miller reporting is sourced to Reality Blurb (November 6, 2026), EntertainmentNow (September 30, 2026, via Us Weekly), Parade (September 16, 2026) and NBC (July 30, 2026); neither Miller nor Shaboozey has confirmed a relationship, and this article reports the link as reported. The peer ages are sourced to Guide Net Worth’s own profiles: Zach Bryan, 30; Morgan Wallen, 33 (born May 13, 1993); Lainey Wilson, 34. Where sources disagreed — on the height, on the net-worth figure, and on stale ages still listing him as 30 — this article gives the range or the most-cited figure and names the outlet behind each number rather than picking one. Figures that no outlet has confirmed are labeled as reported or estimated. Corrections: see our corrections policy on the About Us page; if a figure in this article changes, it will be updated with a dated note.