Zach Top's journey from small-town Washington to groundbreaking country star

Michael Rietmulder / The Seattle Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — Zach Top's phone exploded one September morning. The incoming flood of congratulatory text messages was a little confusing until one of them included a picture that finally broke the news to the Washington-raised country singer.

Five months after the former Tri-Cities bluegrasser released his first straight-ahead country album, “Cold Beer & Country Music,” to much fanfare, the soon-to-be 27-year-old was nominated for New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards this fall. Top appears alongside other breakout stars like Megan Moroney, Nate Smith, Bailey Zimmerman and Shaboozey, who is responsible for one of the biggest songs of the year: “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”

The recognition from country music's first-ever televised awards show, airing live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET on November 20, caps an already incredible year for one of the genre's hottest newcomers.

“Oh man, I was thrilled,” Top said a few days after the CMA Awards were announced. “Very exciting. I didn’t expect something like this to happen so quickly.”

In fact, it's been less than a year since Top released “Sounds Like the Radio,” his first single submitted to country radio. The twangy hip-shaker came like an artist's statement and personal mission statement from a man with an old-school country sound that proudly harked back to the neo-traditionalists of the 1980s and 1990s.

“Damn, I can’t remember the last time there was a 4/4 shuffle on the country charts,” Top said. “So I thought if I could get one going up there, I might have done something for country music (laughs).”

Since then, the thoroughbred country man who grew up on a ranch in Sunnyside has crossed a number of milestones that suggest his decision to switch from bluegrass to country was a wise one.

One of those moments occurred this summer when Top returned to Washington to perform at the Northwest's premier country music festival, Watershed, at the Gorge Amphitheater.

“It was so fun,” Top said, “I grew up an hour and a half away from there or something and never went to the festival as a kid or anything.” I think it's a venue that's on almost everyone's bucket list, But especially because I live close to there.”

Aside from checking off the bucket list item and smashing some golf balls into the gorge, the Gorge homecoming gave the Nashville, Tenn.-based artist a chance to meet family and friends back home who had seen him left town in “an old Chevy pickup” and return years later on a tour bus.

Before moving to Pasco when he was 10 or 11, Top and his three siblings grew up on a 40-acre hobby farm in Sunnyside, where the family raised horses, goats, a few cows and a few chickens. His father worked in the ranching business and his mother homeschooled the children in the mornings before “she released us and told us not to come back until we heard the dinner bell.” Top, his younger brother and his two older sisters ran around the property in Central Washington, building forts and playing with the animals.

“I can't believe one of us didn't get seriously maimed or killed by one of those raggedy old whiners we had on the farm,” Top said of the horses, “but somehow we got out alive.” It's fun made to grow up.”

By his own admission, Top wasn't the best when it came to cowboy stuff, but he fell in love with “cowboy songs” through artists like George Strait, Keith Whitley and the Marty Robbins cassette, which took its permanent place in the cassette deck his father’s “old blue truck.” (In a “full-circle moment,” Whitley’s old bandleader Carson Chamberlain became Top’s first Nashville contact and mentor after Chamberlain reached out to collaborate in 2018.)

Top started taking guitar lessons when he was around 5 years old. His Kennewick-based music teacher, Marie Parks, was “big in the bluegrass world … so she taught us that,” Top said. When he was seven years old, Top and his siblings formed a family bluegrass band, aptly named Top String, and spent their summer weekends playing classic bluegrass-style country songs at area festivals.

By the time he was old enough to enter a roadhouse bar, Top had accumulated more than a decade of stage time performing with his siblings and later with the Washington-based bluegrass band North Country. Top, who has a modest amount of charisma, credits these formative performances with teaching him how to capture an audience.

“If I had a song blow up on TikTok and then I had to book a tour, I don’t know if I would have known what to do,” Top said. “You have this one song, but what do you do to entertain them for 90 minutes? So I think a lot of those things were really beneficial to me early on and helped me get to where I am today.”

Even after Top String disbanded when the siblings left for college, Top maintained his musical ties to the Northwest. While studying mechanical engineering in Colorado, he flew back to play mandolin and share lead vocals with North Country.

After teaming up with Chamberlain in 2018, Top flew to Nashville for songwriting sessions and eventually moved to Music City full-time. Top released his self-titled debut in 2022, a sweet and savory eight-song collection of bluegrass tunes, including “In a World Gone Wrong” – a fiddle-stroking, banjo-picking number that harkens back to his Washington days with another one of his Ensembles, Modern Tradition, and still cracking his setlist.

Before Cold Beer & Country Music, Top was the first artist to sign with Leo33, a start-up indie label led by former Universal Music Group Nashville executives Rachel Fontenot and Katie Dean, and the rest is history .

If there's one place in Top's country pivot where his Washington roots shine through, aside from a passing reference to Seattle in “Cowboys Like Me Do” that's more for “ear candy” purposes, it's in the song “Dirt Turns to Gold”.

In recent years, country music has become increasingly popular, particularly as artists have increasingly explored more pop-oriented sounds and collaborators. The highlight was that two of the world's biggest pop stars, Beyoncé and Post Malone, released country albums this year. Another Washington native, Tucker Wetmore — creator of ear-splitting country jams with a contemporary palette and poppy melodies — also saw a career takeoff in 2024.

Top, who sits at the more traditional end of the country spectrum, believes there's plenty of room for everything from Morgan Wallen to George Strait, but that after years of pushing boundaries, there's a longing for the classic country sounds.

“I think you get something that's kind of fresh and new and pushes the boundaries of country music a little bit, and people get excited about it and follow that for a while,” Top said. “Then it takes its course and we return to the middle, where country music has always been. I feel like I showed up when it was time for the pendulum to swing back a little bit. So here we are.”

And early signs suggest that this true country picker with a timeless sound may well have staying power.

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