Keith Urban, Chris Stapleton and Kacey Musgraves Win the AMC 2018 Awards | The music

Keith Urban has been awarded the Best Artist Award of the Year at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards in 2018; Chris Stapleton and Kacey Musgraves also won the Great Gong Awards.

Urban told the Nashville audience where his wife, Nicole Kidman, was: "I wish my father was alive to see him, but I think he's watching over me tonight," while he won his prize. This comes after a year in which he released his 10th album, Graffiti U, which included Female, a song reacting to the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

Stapleton, a highly coveted artist, has also won three other awards: the year singer and the song and single of the year for Broken Halos. He released two albums in 2017, each ranking second on the US charts. Since then, he has recorded a hit duet with Justin Timberlake: Say Something, one of the three songs he wrote for the album Man of the Woods from the star of the R & B group. Stapleton has recognized this job from time charged in an acceptance speech, apologizing for his children's "not becoming as good as a father, as I would always like to be".

Musgraves defeated Urban and Stapleton as the album of the year for the highly acclaimed Golden Hour, beating a remnant of its exclusively male and commercial field. "It's really really crazy timing, because I just realized what it sounds like a lie: 10 years ago, I moved to Nashville," she told the audience.

Carrie Underwood, the co-host of the award, won the Singer of the Year award – she rebounded after a fall in November 2017 which left her 40 stitches to pull out Cry Pretty, who dominated the list of American albums in September. She alluded to the accident by jokingly wearing a bubble wrap dress, one of the 11 outfits of the evening.

Old Dominion won the vocal group of the year, while the Osborne brothers won the vocal duet award. Guitarist Mac McAnally won the Musician of the Year award for the tenth time – 2016 is the only year that he has not won since 2008 – and the musical event of the year. Year was awarded to David Lee Murphy and Kenny Chesney for their song Everything & # 39; s Gonna Be Alright.

Unlike the ceremony last year, where hosts Underwood and Brad Paisley made jokes about Donald Trump, Paisley had promised that there would be no political humor, declaring before the ceremony: "I can not find politics funny anymore, now." Silence for victims of mbad shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, led by Garth Brooks, who said: "Let the music unite us with love in their enduring memory."