The 20th anniversary of Blake Shelton's debut hit "Austin" has the country star reflecting on his rise from small town Oklahoma to the bright lights of Nashville. Considering the source, it should be no surprise that a lot of these memories double as self-depreciating jokes.
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For example, he told Rob Stone and Holly Hutton, hosts of the Rob + Holly Show on Audacy radio stations, about the time he unwittingly accepted a bag of weed at a Birmingham, Alabama McDonald's.
"I had to do a breakfast performance at a McDonald's down there for the radio station, and the reason this stands out to me, because I've had some crappy gigs, but this stands out to me because because I performed 'Austin' and then I think I did 'Ol' Red,'" Shelton said (as quoted by AL.com). "I was just playing acoustically, but they were broadcasting it live on the radio, and this guy pulls into the McDonald's and he's kind of standing off to the side, and he's like, 'Hey, man, you're Blake, right?' I go, 'Yeah, it's good to meet you, you know,' and he said, 'I brought something for you,' and he handed me this little paper sack.
"And so I went, and I sit back down and I was talking to the radio people — we were off the air at this point — and I looked in the sack, and it was a bag of weed," Shelton continued. "And I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, I just got set up, like, he handed me this bag of weed and like, are the police going ... I had no idea what was going on. I ran to the bathroom and flushed it all down the toilet, you know — which I would have never done now, right, I'd be like, 'Hey, hey!' At the time, you know, I was 24 years old in Alabama, and I was like, 'Oh, my God, I just got set up. I'm going to jail.' But I didn't."
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The fast food chain's impacted Shelton's career in more recent years. Cecily Hennigan appeared on NBC's The Voice after video of the contestant nailing Todrick Hall's "McDonald's Drive-Thru" song trended on social media in 2018.
Shelton was the only judge to turn his chair during Hennigan's blind audition performance of Jewel's "Foolish Games."
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