Luke Combs Started Playing the Guitar at 21 After His Mother Gave Him This Advice

It’s never too late to learn the guitar — just ask Luke Combs.

During an interview with Clint Black for Talking in Circles that debuted on Friday, Oct. 10, the “Beautiful Crazy” singer reflected on when he began playing guitar and what seemingly inspired him to wait until he was 21 years old.

At the time, Combs, now 35, was working two jobs and had dropped out of Appalachian State University.

He then moved to Nashville with a small following and picked up the guitar when his mother encouraged him, claiming two major country stars began strumming at the same age.

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“I didn’t start playing guitar until 11 years ago. Never played. I had been singing my whole life just as a casual thing I enjoy to do, it made me happy, other people liked when I did it, kind of thing. Girls thought it was cool, which didn’t happen a lot for me,” said Combs.

“So I sang a lot and then I picked the guitar up. I was in college, and college was coming to an end. It’s like, you’re 22, it’s time to get out of here, you’re the old creepy guy now.”

Combs also mentioned that his parents, Rhonda and Lee Combs, had gifted him a $50 Ivanez guitar when he was in middle school. He took one lesson and decided at the time that “my parents want me to do this so I’m not doing it because it’s not cool.”

“So I still had that guitar in the closet, and my mom came out, and she was like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re sitting around sulking. You know Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, they didn’t start playing guitar until they were 21,'” he said.

Combs added: “And I was 21, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m way better than those guys.’ I don’t even know if that is true or not. I don’t know if they actually learned [then], or my mom was just like, please, she would say anything to get me out of doing something. So I started playing.”

Combs’ mom wasn’t entirely wrong about when the fellow country stars started playing guitar.

Per East Tennessee State University’s alumni page, Chesney, 57, didn’t start playing guitar until he was a student there. “He received a guitar for Christmas one year and began practicing several hours a day,” the website states. “He then joined the bluegrass band at ETSU where he learned to write songs.”

McGraw, 58, meanwhile, started playing guitar while in college. Per an Instagram video shared in September, he sold his high school ring during his freshman year and “bought a guitar for 20 bucks.”

“Spent the whole summer, learned about 50 or 60 songs on the guitar for the whole summer, and that was my repertoire,” he said.

Combs said that despite not knowing anything about the guitar, he taught himself how to play. He spent all summer playing on his porch, and the following year, he was writing and playing his own songs.

Combs’ EP The Prequel is available to stream