Shania Twain will host the 61st Academy of Country Music Awards on Amazon Prime Video at 8 ET and 5 PT, and one of the artists she is watching most closely is Ella Langley. Langley, who has five ACM nominations, is set to perform on Sunday night’s show.
Twain, a five-time ACM winner who first took home awards in 1996, said Langley takes her back to the kind of country she knew before the genre’s borders widened. “Brings me back to the early country that I grew up with and was singing as a child,” Twain said, adding that Langley is “really country Western” and that she has missed that sound in the business.
That reaction helps explain why Langley has become one of the names drawing attention at this year’s show. She topped the Billboard Hot 100 with “Choosin’ Texas,” is headlining The Dandelion Tour through mid-August and is also on supporting dates for Morgan Wallen’s Still the Problem tour. The ACMs, founded in 1966, remain the longest-running country music awards show, and this year’s broadcast also marks the show’s return to Las Vegas in 2026 after a three-year stint at the Dallas Cowboys headquarters in Texas.
Twain’s comments also point to a larger question hanging over the genre: where country goes when a new artist sounds unmistakably rooted in its past but is breaking through on a much bigger stage. “Maybe we’re going to have another Dolly Parton finally again, who is the first woman to ever go global,” Twain said. “Why don’t we have five of those by now, right?”
For Langley, the timing is obvious. She arrives at the ACMs with chart momentum, multiple nominations and a live slot on one of country music’s biggest nights. For Twain, the answer to her own question seems to be yes: there is still room for an artist whose appeal starts with the twang she heard as a child and travels from there.
