Queen Latifah Picks BigCountry Over Luke Cope After ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ Battle on The Voice

Get Country Thang Daily first on GoogleGet CTD first on GoogleAdd us as a preferred source in Top StoriesAdd us as a preferred sourceAdd

In rehearsal, Queen Latifah gave BigCountry and Luke Cope a three-word instruction.

“You better sang,” she told them.

Her Battle Advisor, Patti LaBelle, had words for Luke. She called him out for being “a little afraid” and urged him to use his power. By the time the two Team Queen singers finished Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” their coach was full of praise.

“Y’all rocked that. You sound amazing together. I’m so proud of this performance,” she said.

Then she had to keep only one of them. On “The Battles, Part 2,” which aired on NBC on Tuesday, October 13, Latifah chose BigCountry, who had picked her team after a three-chair turn in the Blind Auditions. Luke had come in with a two-chair turn.

---

Latifah is new to the coaching chair this season, alongside Kelly Clarkson, Adam Levine and Riley Green, and the Grammy winner who made her name in hip-hop has called herself a big country fan. In a 2020 interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show, she named Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” a favorite and called it “kind of a rap record.”

Queen Latifah Kept BigCountry, and Riley Green Said He Would Have Thought Seriously About Stealing Luke Cope

Latifah laid out her reasoning right there on the show.

“Luke improved by leaps and bounds but BigCountry is a presence, a force to be reckoned with. So comfortable, so confident, full of energy, life and voice and ability. He is somebody everybody loved from the beginning,” she said.

Adam Levine told the pair, “You both have killer voices, you sounded best in this song when you sang together.” Kelly Clarkson raved about their harmonies and called the performance “pretty seamless and cool.”

Riley Green heard it differently, and he pointed to Luke’s high harmonies.

“It’s a great song, a really tough song, but they both had their own spin on it. If I would’ve had a steal, I would have thought very seriously about stealing Luke. He’s a great talent,” Green said.

Every coach praised the same duet, and one of them said he would have thought very seriously about stealing the other voice.

‘Tennessee Whiskey’ Has Passed From Voice to Voice Since 1981, on The Voice Stage Too

This is not the first time the song has shaped a singer’s night on the show. In the Season 21 Knockouts, Paris Winningham, 32, of Jacksonville, Florida, sang Stapleton’s version, and Blake Shelton, the only coach left holding a Steal, pressed his button seconds before the two-hour program ended to take him off Team Legend.

The song itself has always moved from one voice to the next. Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove wrote it, and David Allan Coe recorded it first as the title track of his 1981 album. George Jones carried it to No. 2 on the Hot Country Singles chart in 1983, and Chris Stapleton made it his breakthrough on his 2015 debut, Traveller.

---

Country Thang Daily reported in January that his version became the first country song to go double diamond.

That is a long line of great singers for two contestants to step into. The song went from Coe to Jones to Stapleton, and on October 13, two of Latifah’s singers shared it for one night. On Team Queen, the next verse of “Tennessee Whiskey” now belongs to BigCountry.