Two weeks after he had the time of his life at the 2024 Grammy Awards, Jelly Roll was absent on Sunday (Feb. 18) from the People's Choice Awards. In the process, he missed out on claiming hardware —the fan-voted Male Country Artist of the Year prize— in person.
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One day later, Jelly Roll posted a video on Twitter in which he explains his absence.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there. Here's the truth: I'm actually standing in the juvenile courthouse right now, I just walked out of the juvenile facility," he explained. "We partnered with the Beat of Life to bring a music program to the kids. This has been on my calendar for a long time. I promised these kids I was coming. I know whenever I was a kid in here I got let down a lot. I didn't want to be one of the people letting these kids down. I had to honor my word.
"I hate I wasn't there, but don't take me not being there as a sign of anything other than love and respect and me trying to do better for my community, baby," he continued. "Anyways, these kids wrote some big songs today, man. We're going to work something out where y'all can start hearing what we're working on in this juvenile, but the Jelly studio is running."
Real talk pic.twitter.com/PC4sFCljM3
— Jelly Roll (@JellyRoll615) February 20, 2024
Per its website, the Beat of Life's mission is "to create music programs for Nashville's most vulnerable, challenged, and hurting populations... pairing the world's absolutely heartbreaking statistics with the incredibly compelling evidence of music's power to break through and possibly change it all."
Jelly Roll's award win and overlapping good deed came the same week as the announcement of his ambitious Beautifully Broken Tour, which will find the "Save Me" singer headlining arenas across the country.
