Garth Brooks

Brooks married songwriter Sandy Mahl on May 24, 1986. The couple had three daughters together: Taylor Mayne Pearl, August Anna, and Allie Colleen Brooks. Brooks named his first daughter after singer-songwriter James Taylor, one of his primary musical influences. Brooks and Mahl separated in March 1999, filed for divorce in late 2000, and finalized their divorce in December 2001. Brooks cited family obligations as the central reason for stepping away from full-time recording and touring in the early 2000s, committing to remain retired from regular touring until his youngest daughter graduated from high school.

On December 10, 2005, Brooks married country singer and cookbook author Trisha Yearwood at their home in Owasso, Oklahoma. The two had met early in their careers and maintained a close musical partnership and friendship for years before dating. Brooks proposed to Yearwood on stage before an audience of 7,000 people in Bakersfield, California. Yearwood has frequently collaborated with Brooks on stage and in the studio, and has included recipes inspired by him in her published cookbooks.

Troyal Garth Brooks was born on February 7, 1962, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the youngest child of Troyal Raymond Brooks Jr., an oil company draftsman, and Colleen McElroy Carroll, a 1950s country singer who recorded for Capitol Records and performed on the Ozark Jubilee. Raised in Yukon, Oklahoma, in a blended family with four half-siblings and one sister, Brooks participated in weekly family talent nights where he learned guitar and banjo.

Athletics played a major role in his youth. In high school, Brooks competed in football, baseball, and track and field. He earned a track scholarship to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, where he competed in the javelin throw. While in college, he worked as a bar bouncer and formed the band Santa Fe to play local venues, including Wild Willie's Saloon. He graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in advertising, later completing his MBA there in 2011.

After an initial 1985 trip to Nashville proved unsuccessful, Brooks relocated there permanently with his wife Sandy in 1987. Working with producer Allen Reynolds, he released his self-titled debut album on Capitol Records in 1989. The record produced top-charting singles including "If Tomorrow Never Comes" and "The Dance", the latter accompanied by a popular music video that broadened his appeal beyond core country listeners. In late 1990, Brooks was inducted as a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

His 1990 follow-up, No Fences, catapulted him to international fame, driven by the signature hit "Friends in Low Places", "The Thunder Rolls", and "Unanswered Prayers". In 1991, his third album, Ropin' the Wind, became the first country album to enter the Billboard 200 at number one upon debut. Brooks brought arena-rock theatrics to country touring, wearing a wireless headset microphone to run across stages, douse himself in water, and swing from ropes. In 1997, he drew an estimated 980,000 attendees to a free concert in New York's Central Park, the largest audience in the park's history.

In 1999, Brooks assumed the alter ego of Chris Gaines, a fictional rock star created for a planned motion picture titled The Lamb. He released the pre-soundtrack album Garth Brooks in... the Life of Chris Gaines, supported by an appearance on Saturday Night Live and a VH1 Behind the Music mockumentary. Although the lead track "Lost in You" gave Brooks his only Billboard Top 40 pop single, the project perplexed the public, and the film was ultimately shelved.

Facing growing tension between his touring career and his home life, Brooks officially announced his retirement from recording and performing in October 2000. After releasing the studio album Scarecrow in November 2001, he retreated to Oklahoma. During this period, he maintained a commercial presence through exclusive catalog distribution deals with Walmart and occasionally performed at benefit events.

Brooks began a partial return to performing in October 2009 with Garth at Wynn, an intimate, acoustic weekend residency at the Encore Theatre in Las Vegas that ran through January 2014. In July 2014, he signed with Sony Music Nashville to launch an official comeback, releasing the album Man Against Machine and embarking on a massive three-year world tour alongside Trisha Yearwood that sold more than 6.3 million tickets across North America.

Following the world tour, Brooks launched the Stadium Tour in 2019, performing in major athletic venues across North America, including a record-setting 90,000-ticket show at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 2022, his performance of "Callin' Baton Rouge" at LSU's Tiger Stadium generated crowd noise intense enough to register on the university seismograph. He subsequently launched the Garth Brooks/Plus ONE residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and released his fourteenth studio album, Time Traveler, in 2023.