As little as five years ago, if you told Scotty Hasting he’d be playing the Grand Ole Opry, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
“July 28, I’m making my Grand Ole Opry debut, which is something I never thought I’d be able to say,” Hasting told LINK nky.
A prodigy he is not; he came to music late in his life as a way of dealing with “the demons,” as he puts it. Hasting served as an Army infantryman in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, where he was shot ten times, an incident that has come to define much of his life, including his music career.
Hasting sat down with LINK nky to discuss his journey from solider to country musician, including his Grand Ole Opry premier this Saturday.
“I grew up in the Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky area,” Hasting said. “My mom lived on the Ohio side. My dad lived on the Kentucky side.”
He graduated from Conner High School in Hebron and enlisted out of a recruiting office in Eastgate, Ohio. He was in Afghanistan for only three months before he was shot.
Hasting and others had been called out to investigate someone suspected of manufacturing improvised explosive devices at his home. They were walking towards the house when they were attacked.
“There was a guy hiding behind a wall, and he just opened fire,” Hasting said. “He was maybe 15 feet from me. He was close enough to where not only did he hit me with the round but I also felt the blast from the rifle.”
He was shot ten times: five in the shoulder, four in the hip and one in his thigh. He survived, but he was never the same.
“From then on out still to today, it’s just been trying to heal as much as possible,” Hasting said, both physically and mentally.
The army moved him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and then later to Fort Riley in Kansas. Although he eventually regained some measure of physical independence, like many combat veterans, the return to civilian life was a challenge. He struggled to find solace in the face of the PTSD and depression that arose from his experience in Afghanistan.
In time, however, he did find some peace, not in music but in archery. He was even a member of the US Paralympic Archery program, shooting both recurve and compound bows.
Then COVID hit.
Everything, including the archery programs he’d relied upon for peace, shuttered. The world went quiet. The demons returned.
“When it gets quiet is when the demons knock the loudest,” Hasting said. “And COVID was very quiet, and I needed something to get out of my head.”
In the corner of his room sat a guitar.
“I thought it was cool to just have a guitar there, and then one day I was like, you know, I’m gonna learn how to play this thing,” he said.
He taught himself to play by watching tutorials on YouTube. He’d always enjoyed country music, especially artists from the 90s and early 2000s, so he focused on chord progressions common in country songs. The first song he learned to play was Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.”
Once he had a working knowledge of how to play, he turned his attention to writing his own material, educating himself on song structure and song writing, as a means of channeling his feelings into something productive, something that would provide him with peace in the way archery had.
He had moved to Nashville, even before he started playing music. Nashville’s outskirt communities began to reopen before the city proper. He noticed that an event space in Cookeville, Tenn., had open mic nights. The first song he played live was the first song he’d ever learned: “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.”
Being on stage was unlike anything he’d experienced before.
After that first performance, he knew.
“This is what I need to do forever because I knew for that little bit of time that I was on stage, I was able to be in that place of escape and that little bit of peace that I could find from the PTSD, the depression, the anxiety that ate away at me every day,” Hasting said.
He sought every open-mic opportunity he could on the outskirts of Nashville, and in time the city itself began opening back up. From there, he spent about a month walking up and down Nashville’s Broadway thoroughfare, bugging promoters. In time he was playing five nights a week.
He signed a contract with Black River Entertainment at the end of 2023, a deal that brought him under the tutelage of songwriter, producer, and Vice President of A&R at Black River, Doug Johnson.
Many of Hasting’s songs revolve around his struggles with PTSD. One song, in particular, “How Do You Choose” unpacks Hasting’s feelings of survivor’s guilt, he said. In spite of his injuries, there were many he served with who arguably received less grievous harm but still didn’t make it.
“The chorus of that song is quite literally the argument and the conversation that I have with God on a daily basis about, why the hell am I here?” Hasting said. “Why am I able to be here, and they aren’t.”
An acoustic version of the song comes out this week.
He was playing a show in Washington, D.C. earlier this year for a veterans nonprofit called the Pen Fed Foundation when he got a call from actor Gary Sinise, who informed him about an upcoming show at the Grand Ole Opry, celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Forrest Gump.” Hasting knew Sinise from watching the movie when he young as well as the advocacy work the actor’s done for veterans over the years. He had even tried to meet Sinise when he was still in the Army.
In a recorded conversation that Hasting later put on his Instagram page, Sinise invited Hasting to play at the Grand Ole Opry.
Then, about a week and half ago, he finally got to meet Sinise when visiting Sinise’s foundation for veterans.
“When he walked in the room, I gave him a big ass hug, and I said, ‘Dude, it has been 13 years in the making right here,'” Hasting said. “‘Like, I’ve been trying to meet you for 13 years, and now we’re finally here.’ And I said, ‘And now the crazier part is that we’re both making our Grand Ole Opry debut on the same night, and you’re the one that asked me to do it.'”
When asked what communities can do to help people suffering from PTSD, Hasting said, “Just be normal with these people.
“At the end of the day, that’s all we’re looking for. The biggest thing that we miss more than anything is the brotherhood and the camaraderie with our guys. So if we can find that in the community, it’s the same thing.”
Hasting will make his debut at the Grand Ole Opry this Saturday, July 28. The event begins at 7 p.m. Central Time, 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Tickets are sold out, but people can tune into the event at the live stream link here. Learn more about the event at opry.com.
Be among the first to listen to the acoustic version of “How Can You Choose,” released this Friday, at the link here.
