Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum’s Ford Theater this weekend, singer-songwriter Carter Faith offered more than a performance. In a room built for listening closely, she joined the museum’s Songwriter Session series, where contemporary artists and veteran hitmakers step out from behind the machinery of the music industry to share the stories, choices and chance discoveries that become songs.

Faith’s appearance arrived alongside the museum’s newest iteration of American Currents: State of the Music, the annual exhibition that surveys the shifting landscape of country music through the artists, recordings and cultural moments that defined the previous year. The exhibition, open through January 2027, currently features Faith among the voices helping shape the genre’s present tense.

Her debut album, Cherry Valley, released in 2025, takes its name from a real place encountered on the road to a songwriting retreat. From that point of departure, Faith created a fictional world attentive to love, loss and resilience—enduring subjects in country music, but filtered here through the perspective of an artist coming into her own. Named one of CMT’s Next Women of Country in 2023, Faith has released several EPs and more than a dozen singles since 2020, and in 2024 signed with Universal Music Group Nashville, now Music Corporation of America.

That trajectory places Faith within a broader conversation about country music’s evolving center of gravity. Her career has already taken her from opening slots for Little Big Town, Maren Morris, Carly Pearce, Keith Urban and others to her first headline tour. At the museum, however, the emphasis was less on momentum than on meaning: the way a song begins, the way a performer inhabits it, and the way a genre renews itself through individual memory and collective tradition.

The session was filmed and will premiere at a later date as part of the museum’s Live at the Hall digital program series, available to stream on the museum’s website.

For the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum, programs such as Songwriter Sessions extend the institution’s role beyond preservation. The museum collects, interprets and presents country music history for diverse audiences through exhibitions, publications, digital media and educational programs, positioning the art form as both heritage and living practice. One of the most-visited history museums in the United States, it received the National Medal of Arts in 2024 and remains accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.

Operated by the Country Music Foundation, a not-for-profit educational organization chartered by the state of Tennessee in 1964, the museum also oversees Historic RCA Studio B®, Hatch Show Print®, Haley Gallery, CMA Theater, CMF Records, the Frist Library and Archive and CMF Press. More information is available at www.countrymusichalloffame.org or by calling (615) 416-2001.