Music

Country singer breaks ribs, punctures lung, keeps singing

by Luke Ottenhof

In the musical battle for machismo and hypermasculinity, country will almost always come out on top (not that there are too many contenders for that title). You’d be hard-pressed to think of another genre which touts male resilience and sturdiness to an almost-masochistic level. Case in point: on Friday night at the Starland Ballroom in New Jersey, Texan country artist Granger Smith fell offstage, broke two ribs, and punctured a lung. And then got back up and kept playing.

Smith was apparently standing on a monitor at the edge of the stage when it slipped from under him, sending him tumbling over the stage and slamming against a metal guard rail. He climbs right back up onstage, surveys the crowd for a minute, then fist-bumps his drummer and remarks of the shaky monitor, “Must’ve been a city boy that put that up there.” Dang pesky city boys!

Check out a video of the scramble:

Smith was admitted to a hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey where they confirmed he had two broken rips and a punctured, partially-collapsed lung.

He cancelled a handful of shows over the weekend to head home to Texas to recuperate. Along with the news, he tweeted, “I took a pretty hard spill last night in Jersey. I’ll be out of the hospital and 100% soon!” Can’t keep no good boy down, can you?