Luke Combs has been singing ever since he could talk. "Vince Gill was what I started singing," he told WYRK's Liz Mantel and Clay Moden. "Brooks & Dunn, Clint Black - that was my favorite stuff to sing when I was little, burning up the cassette tapes."
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Combs and his family moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he attended A. C. Reynolds High School. Fellow country star Chase Rice, who is four years older, also went to that school.
By the time he started at A. C. Reynolds High School, Combs had stopped listening to Vince Gill and co. It was only when he discovered the music of Eric Church that he got back into country music.
Combs attended Appalachian State University, where he majored in criminal justice. "I wanted to be a homicide detective," the singer recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live! "But if you notice, I don't actually have the physical build of a police officer necessarily. I think solving the puzzle was the intriguing part to me, which is what I love so much about writing songs. It's a puzzle that has no pieces, so you make the pieces and then you have to put them together and that's the thing that I enjoy so much about writing music."
Combs began playing shows at Appalachian State University and realized he wanted to pursue a music career in Nashville. His first single, "
Hurricane," was written in December 2014, just three months after Combs moved to Music City. The song landed on the iTunes' Top 10 Country Chart in 2015.
Luke Combs first met his partner Nicole Hocking when she attended a singer-songwriter festival in Key West, Florida where he was performing. He wrote "
Beautiful Crazy" about her before they even started dating. "That got me some serious brownie points," he told ABC News in 2018.
The pair wed at their home in southern Florida during an intimate ceremony with family and friends on August 1, 2020.
Speaking on the January 13, 2021 episode of The Big Interview With Dan Rather, Luke Combs detailed his struggles with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The country star explained that he lives with Obsessional OCD, which is marked by intrusive thoughts of a distressing nature. He suffered from the condition during middle school through the end of college and while he largely has it under control now, Combs admits he still has moments "here and there."
"Essentially, my version of messing with the blinds or straightening the carpet are thoughts that I play over and over in my head," he said. "It'll be something about my health. I'll be worried that I'm about to have a heart attack, or a stroke. It becomes this very obsessive thing that I, you literally can never have an answer to."
Once Luke Combs started picking up gigs in bars around his hometown, he began experimenting with writing his own songs. "The first one was called 'Day Drinking' and it was really bad," he recalled to The BBC. "But a year or two after that, a group called Little Big Town put out a song called '
Day Drinking' that went #1. And so I was like, 'Well, at least I know that was a good title!' So that gave me a little bit of a confidence boost."
Combs took action after Hurricane Helene ripped through North Carolina in 2024, teaming up with Eric Church to organize the Concert For Carolina benefit, which took place on October 26, just one month later. The show came together so quickly thanks to support from the Carolina Panthers football team, which donated use of their stadium in Charlotte, and from a slate of stars that agreed to perform on short notice, including Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow and James Taylor. They ended up raising over $25 million for relief efforts.
"I have never been more proud to walk on this stage than I am right now," Combs said at the show.
Luke Combs owns well over 200 of his signature black Columbia button-up shirts that he wears on stage. He explained in an interview on Luke Bryan's Hulu series It's All Country that this simple, consistent look is intentional - it makes getting ready for performances easy and comfortable.
