Homes of Country Music Stars 2012

Last year’s collection of 10 Homes of Country Music Stars barely scratched the surface of the number of performers’ homes on the market, recently sold, being purchased or getting unloaded.

What follows is a fresh batch of houses, mansions and compounds belonging to 13 performers, including three music-making married couples. This collection is about evenly divided between the young’uns (“American Idol” alumni), the stars who dominated the charts in the 1990s and classic country stars. It also includes homes of two country artists who feuded (and both are currently for sale).

Unsurprisingly, six of these homes, with photos from Realtor.com, are in Tennessee, and of those, three are in Nashville, but there are a few tropical getaways well. But for a genre so associated with cowboys, just one has stables.

By Colleen KanePosted 8 May 2012

Location: Nashville
Price:$1.435 million
Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: 4 full, 1 partial
Square footage: 4,865

At age 19, Kellie Pickler came in sixth on “American Idol” season five, then went on to record three albums and become the competition’s number 14 out of an all-time top 24,according to Billboard. Thanks to that early success, Pickler was able to pick up this contemporary stone-faced house at age 24.

The home is in Nashville’s established Green Hills neighborhood with plenty of mature trees, according to the Real Estalker. The house has an elevator, media room, screened porch with fireplace, terrace with barbecue, and a pool.

Location: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
Price: $7.9 million
Bedrooms: 7
Bathrooms: 7
Square footage: 9,742

A prolific performer who rose to fame in the ’90s wave of new country, Kenny Chesney is more likely to wear a ball cap than a cowboy hat on stage. Chesney has 15 albums under his belt, of which 14 went gold or higher. This probably helped him purchase his Stoneridge estate on St. John (one of a reported collection of three St. John properties). The estate overlooks Caneel Bay and the North Shore, and is set on national park lands.


Stoneridge has been on the market for years, beginning with a $14 million asking price in 2008, which at the time matched the top price any property had sold for on St. John. In addition to not being able to sell Stoneridge, Chesney has had some other strange luck on the domestic front—his Nashville lakefront home flooded in 2010 and more recently, an intruder who claimed to be dating Chesney was caught trespassing on his property.

Location: Nashville
Price: $1.449 million
Bedrooms: 5
Bathrooms: 6
Square footage: 4,900

Kelly Clarkson won the first season of “American Idol” at age 20, subsequently released five albums, won a pair of Grammys, and is rated No. 1 Idol alumout of Billboard’s top 24.

But the singer-songwriter is not quite as successful when it comes to real estate. In 2010, she sold this Belle Meade-area stone-faced house for $41,000 less than she purchased it for in 2007. That’s OK, because according to Zillow,she didn’t live on this 0.69 of an acre anyway, because she has a 50-acre estate in Fort Worth. According to the blog, she only bought the house because she needed a place to stay while collaborating with Reba McEntire for Country Music Television.

Location: Austin, Texas
Price: $5.995 million
Bedrooms: 9
Bathrooms: 9
Square footage: N/A

Dixie Chicks fiddler Martie Maguire listed her 1975 Texas ranch compound with three guest houses last fall. Martie and her Irish husband, Gareth Maguire, purchased the property for significantly less in 2004: $2.75 million.

The propertyseems ideal for someone else working in show biz, with a recording studio that includes a kitchen, an entertainment annex that has an exercise/dance studio, bar, media room, art room, and a pool patio area with fireplace. Should the buyer be a cowboy or girl, there is also a five-stall stable, riding arena and trail.

Location: Franklin, Tenn.
Price: $395,000
Bedrooms: 3
Bathrooms: 3
Square footage: 3,099

Carrie Underwood won season four of “American Idol,” after which her first album became the fastest-selling debut country album in Nielsen SoundScan history. In less than eight years, she’s made four albums and won five Grammys, but by country superstar standards, this house she owns is quite normal.

Underwood no longer lives in this two-story house in the Fieldstone Farms subdivision. She moved to a custom-built home in Ottawa with hockey-playing husband Mike Fisher in 2010, just after they married.

Location: Franklin, Tenn.
Price: $3.75 million
Bedrooms: 8
Bathrooms: 13
Square footage: 14,040

Alan Jackson is a prolific veteran of the 1990s country music boom, with 19 albums. In last year’s Homes of Country Music Stars, we covered Jackson’s 19,000 square-foot mansion that he sold in order to downsize.

Pictured here (and on the slideshow cover) is another Jackson home, and it’s currently on the market. It’s in the Laurelbrooke gated community, which features a park and tennis courts. The house has a two-story grand entrance with sweeping staircase, as well as a huge covered terrace with fireplace, a pool, billiards room, media room, and a gym.

Location: Goat Cay, Bahamas
Price: N/A
Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: N/A
Square footage: 15,000

Between Tim McGraw and his wife, Faith Hill, they have released 19 studio albums and have sold more than 80 million records worldwide. With sales on such a grand scale, it’s no wonder they could buy their own island.

Last year, the Daily Mail reported that the pair were finalizing the building of their plantation-style compound on the 17-acre island of Goat Cay in the Bahamas. Andrew Welsh of Private Islands Magazine told the Daily Mail that an island in the Exuma Cays would fetch $500,000 to $30 million.

Location: Nashville, Tenn.
Price: $999,995
Bedrooms: 2
Bathrooms: 3
Square footage: 3,428

Since his 1993 debut, Toby Keith has put out 15 studio albums, recorded 20 number 1 singles, and feuded with the Dixie Chicks. His house, built in 2000 in the West End/Whitland subdivision of Nashville, is currently on the marketfor just under $1 million.

The house features a two-story great room with fireplace and stone flooring, and the walled-in yard has a water feature and a pool.

Location: Hendersonville, Tenn.
Price: $595,000
Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: 3
Square footage: 3,100

In the previous “Homes of Country Music Stars” slideshow, we covered two properties belonging to country royalty Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash—the family’s Jamaica vacation home and the lakeside homestead in Hendersonville, the latter of which burned down. However, one Cash property remains nearby, a home across the street from their lake house.

The 1963 ranch house was designed by the architect who did the lake house, according to the Zillow blog. It was referred to as Mama Cash’s place, because Johnny’s parents lived there, and it was the last place Johnny himself lived before he died, because it was easier to navigate in a wheelchair. After a 2008 attempt to auction the home on eBay with a starting price of $1.4 million, this ranch (plus some musical memorabilia) was listed for sale in January at a deep discount. There is no public record of a sale and it is currently off the market.

Location: Lakeland, Fla.
Price: $2.3 million
Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: 3
Square Footage: 4,412

Not all classic country songs are about heartbreak, violence, poverty, drug or alcohol abuse, or a combination of the above. Many are downright romantic. Husband and wife performers George Jones and Tammy Wynette cranked out a few such love songs in their day, including “Near You,” “We’re Not the Jet Set” and “Take Me.” Wynette always wanted to live in an antebellum-style home like Tara in “Gone With the Wind.” Not long after the pair married in 1969, her dream came true. She told The Tampa Tribune in 1971, “This is the home for us. … It’s the only place we want to be.”

The house was built in 1902, and it is said that Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt were among those entertained there. Once Wynette and Jones moved in, they called it Old Plantation Music Park, and luminaries such as Johnny Cash and Charlie Pride partied here. The couple had a guitar-shaped swimming pool installed and were in the process of putting in a studio, but the neighbors were not keen on it. The pair wrote the songs “Two Story House” and “The Grand Tour” about the house before moving out in 1972. In keeping with the drama-filled country song lifestyle, the marriage ended in D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 1975.