The 29-year-old hip-hop country star became an overnight sensation after Beyoncé put him on her Cowboy Carter album and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” went No. 1 on the charts. Now he has a Jack Daniel’s partnership and his own record label.
By Zoya Hasan, Forbes Staff
Cowboy boots are click-clacking on the hardwood floors and hands are up in the air at New York’s Irving Plaza theater on a Wednesday night in September. Onstage, Shaboozey takes a gulp from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to commemorate the sixth stop on his first headliner tour. Nearly an hour later, he walks off and the crowd cries out in unison—despite performing 16 songs, he never played his No. 1 hit, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and the audience knows what’s coming for an encore. After five minutes, he bounds onto the stage and performs the song—twice.
At 29, Shaboozey has never been happier. Or, at least, he’s never felt an adrenaline rush like this. Born Collins Obinna Chibueze to Nigerian immigrants—his stage name comes from a high school football coach who mispronounced his last name—he left his hometown of Woodbridge, Virginia in pursuit of his musical dreams eight years ago. Not long ago, he was sleeping on couches in Los Angeles, he’s now traveling on his tour bus to greet the thousands of fans coming to watch him perform. He likes to play it cool, but with six Grammy nominations this year—including Best New Artist—the genre-blending musician is finally finding the validation he was looking for after three studio albums.
“Some of my friends are in LA to this day and haven’t been able to find that breakthrough for themselves,” says Shaboozey, a 2025 Forbes Under 30 honoree. “I was right about not giving up.”
The newfound success is owed to his big hit, which puts a country spin on J-Kwon’s 2004 hip-hop song “Tipsy.” The track tied the record (at 19 weeks) for the longest-running number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It’s hitting nearly 2 billion streams globally, and SiriusXM alone has aired it 160 million times since the song was released in April. The flood of radio play and streams is also making him rich: “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has earned Shaboozey some $10 million in royalties and streaming revenue this year, according to Forbes estimates.
“In the last two years, there’s been a lot of change in terms of what the generic country fan sounds like, listens to, looks like,” says Spotify’s head of country artist partnerships, Jackie Augustus, noting that artists such as Lil Nas X, Post Malone, Jelly Roll and more recently, Beyoncé, have brought new sounds and new fans to the country music scene. “Shaboozey is doing it in a way that nobody else is.”
When rumors of Beyoncé recording a country album began circulating last year, Shaboozey’s team was eager to get him in a studio with Queen B. “They were, like, ‘Maybe you can get on it,’” he recalls. The ploy worked—Shaboozey was featured on two songs on Beyoncé’s chart-topping Cowboy Carter album. Then “A Bar Song” sent his career into the stratosphere. And the alcohol-fueled lyrics “Me and Jack Daniel’s got a history” also proved to be a business opportunity when the Tennessee whiskey giant offered to sponsor his tour and make him a spokesperson. “Where he goes, Jack wants to go with him,” Jack Daniel’s senior brand manager Loni Gray says. Now brands ranging from Crocs to YSL Beauty are tapping Shaboozey for social campaigns, while he fulfills every artist’s dream as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live this weekend.
Growing up 20 miles south of Washington, D.C., Shaboozey spent much of his youth trying to carve out his identity. “Being Nigerian,” he says, “it was always about fitting in and trying to figure out where my group of people are.” Much as his name stood out, Shaboozey felt he was destined to leave Virginia. He would have loved to attend a liberal arts school, like New York University, but ended up at his local community college. (His grades weren’t the best, so he never tried for NYU, he says.) But Shaboozey knew his creativity would provide a path forward. He tried his hand at writing novels and short films. He even started a small production business called V Picture Films in 2014 and would shoot music videos for local artists with a camera his mother bought for him. “It was kind of just needing to find something to do to take me out of the staleness of Virginia.”
Making music was just another creative outlet, until a rap song he recorded at 19, “Jeff Gordon”—about the NASCAR legend—ended up becoming a local hit. Fraternity houses at nearby James Madison University were calling him to do shows and the bars soon followed. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is something I can do full-time,’ since people were willing to pay me for it,” he recalls. Then he received a call from 300 Entertainment, the record label that represents Megan Thee Stallion and Young Thug. Although the label never followed up after he flew to New York for a meeting, Shaboozey decided to drop out of school and pursue a music career.
His parents weren’t fans of the idea. His father had launched several businesses—ranging from a chicken farm to a startup incubator called Empower Africa—and wanted his son to pursue a career that provided financial security. “I didn’t really tell anybody about the music until it was working enough,” Shaboozey says.
By 21, he was en route to Los Angeles with his life savings. It wasn’t going well until he met Nevin Sastry, who was pursuing his own dream of becoming a music producer. Sastry came across one of Shaboozey’s demos and the two ended up bunking together in a studio apartment in East Hollywood. They made the hip-hop song “Winning Streak,” which landed Shaboozey his debut album, Lady Wrangler, with Republic in 2018.
Lady Wrangler had a country vibe, inspired by his childhood. Shaboozey’s father, who first immigrated to Texas, had often played artists like Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson. “He was trying to achieve the sound he’s doing now even with that, but it leaned more hip-hop” Abas Pauti, Shaboozey’s manager, tells Forbes. “We said, ‘For this to go worldwide, I think we have to take this more country.’”
Flash forward a few years and Shaboozey has embraced the cowboy persona from head-to-toe with wide-brim hats, Wrangler jeans and Western belt buckles. For his next album, he says he’s saddling up to go as country as it gets.
Shaboozey is also now the cofounder of his own record label, American Dogwood—an imprint of his record company, Empire—which gives him ownership of his masters and a higher royalty percentage. Soon, it will allow Shaboozey to sign other musicians. “Artists are the best A&Rs,” says Shaboozey, who cites Jay-Z as a role model. “Artists are the best producers. I want to have my own house and be able to say, ‘This is something that I put together.’ My dad always gave me different business books and told me about people I should look up to—I apply a lot of that to my music.”
“The music was already pretty exceptional when he brought it to us and we were already aware of who he was,” Ghazi Shami, founder and CEO of Empire, tells Forbes. “When I sit with Shaboozey, I see an entrepreneur who also happens to be a brilliant musician.”
But first, he has an upcoming Spring tour in Europe, which he’s determined to be more vocally prepared for. Before his hour-long, whiskey-soaked performance in New York, Shaboozey sat in his dressing room with a steam inhaler strapped to his mouth, silently signing vinyl records for his latest album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going.
“The music’s only going to get better. Now I understand doing the live show, seeing what people respond to,” Shaboozey says. “I’m in the door now.”