Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” spent its 19th consecutive week atop the Billboard Hot 100 this week, tying the longest reign by any non-holiday song since the chart began in 1958.
“Humility and self-deprecation go a long way when it comes to connecting with fans,” Doug Eldridge, founder of Achilles PR, told Taste of Country of Langley’s staying power. Music critic Marcus K. Dowling added that the song works because it ties “a female performer to an emotive core defined by lovestruck universal yearnings.”
Movieguide® readers have been watching Langley’s rise for a while now, and her faith has been at the center of the story. When she swept the ACM Awards in May, winning Female Artist of the Year among seven trophies, she thanked “Jesus, for letting me do this for a living” — crediting Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert for praying over her backstage during what she called a rough stretch mentally.
“Choosin’ Texas” now ties Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, both of which also logged 19 weeks at No. 1. Only Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” with 22 weeks accumulated across multiple holiday seasons, has spent longer at the top — and that record isn’t built the same way, since Carey’s tally is stitched together year after year rather than run consecutively.
Related: Ella Langley Delivers Strong Message About Social Media We Need to Hear
The song isn’t just holding on, either. For the tracking week, it pulled 24.3 million official streams and a radio audience of 55.7 million, according to Parade, while also leading the Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales charts and sitting atop Hot Country Songs for a 37th week. Released through SAWGOD/Columbia Records with Triple Tigers running country radio promotion, it’s also spent 12 weeks leading Billboard’s Songs of the Summer ranking.
Langley hasn’t always known what to do with the attention. When the song hit 17 weeks at No. 1, her entire public reaction was a short Instagram Story: “17?!?” A few weeks earlier, at 14 weeks, she’d summed it up in one word: “insane.”
That aw-shucks disbelief tracks with the story Langley tells about herself. Raised Baptist in Hope Hull, Alabama, she has said she was “saved again” at a church-run haunted house event and said earlier this year that her relationship with Jesus “has changed drastically over the last year.” It’s the kind of biography Movieguide® has pointed to before in asking whether Langley might be the rare mainstream country star whose faith isn’t a marketing footnote but the actual engine of the music.
For a genre built on authenticity as a selling point, that distinction matters. Plenty of artists talk about being real. Fewer back it up by thanking Jesus from a stage in front of millions, or by naming the specific friends who prayed with them before they walked out to accept an award.
Langley isn’t slowing down to enjoy the record, either. She’s currently on the second leg of her sold-out “Dandelion” tour, with upcoming stops at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado and two nights at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Whether “Choosin’ Texas” holds at 19 weeks or climbs into outright second place next week, the bigger story for Movieguide® readers may be a young artist who keeps pointing the credit somewhere other than herself.
Read Next: Why Ella Langley Can’t ‘Shut Up About’ Her Relationship With Christ
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
