The 15th ACM Honors took place on Wednesday, August 24. According to its website, the ACM Honors is an awards show “dedicated to celebrating special award honorees, off-camera category winners.”
This year’s show was hosted by Carly Pearce and featured major award winners Miranda Lambert (Triple Crown Award), Connie Bradley (ACM Icon Award), Paul Barnabee and Dwight Wiles (ACM Lifting Lives Award), Morgan Wallen (ACM Milestone Award), Duane Clark (ACM Service Award), Chris Stapleton (ACM Spirit Award), Sonny Throckmorton and Shania Twain (ACM Poet’s Award), Yellowstone (ACM Film Award), and HARDY (ACM Songwriter of the Year).
While the awards show took place on Aug. 24, it aired on Fox on Tuesday, September 13.
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During the Fox broadcast, we were able to see a lot of things that we didn’t know happened, like Avril Lavigne singing “No One Needs To Know” in honor of Shania Twain.
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Another moment we didn’t know about was that Eric Church showed up unannounced to give a speech about Morgan Wallen! He was on hand to give Wallen the ACM Milestone Award.
“One of the honors in my career and in my life is getting to know Morgan over the last couple of years whether it’s on a golf cart, a fishing boat or over guitars late at night,” Church said. “I’ve seen him go through some things, I’ve seen him mature as an artist, I’ve seen him mature as a man. I can tell you this, we are very lucky to have him in country music.”
He presented Wallen with the award, who had no clue his hero would be there. Wallen even said he had a whole speech written up, but now that they’ve surprised him, he was just going to speak from the heart, telling everyone the first concert he ever went to was an Eric Church concert.
This was an awesome moment, that we’re sure Wallen will remember forever, but we’ll remember it forever as the first time we ever saw Eric Church’s bare face. He normally has at least a little bit of scruff on his face, but for the ACM Awards, he was clean shaven!
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He looks almost unrecognizable! Watch his speech in the video below.