Happy 27th wedding anniversary to Tim McGraw and Faith Hill! The couple wed on this day, Oct. 6, in 1996.
McGraw and Hill began dating while Hill was an opening act on McGraw’s Spontaneous Combustion Tour earlier that year. At the time, she was newly engaged to record producer Scott Hendricks, but it didn’t take long for sparks to fly between the tourmates instead.
“When we started touring together, I wasn’t involved with anyone, but she was,” McGraw recalls to Country Weekly. “But you can’t be around Faith and not fall in love with her. Things just kind of happened. When two people are meant to be together, there’s nothing that’s going to keep them apart.”
McGraw and Hill didn’t waste any time in deciding to spend their lives together. While still on the Spontaneous Combustion Tour, McGraw proposed to Hill, in a decidedly unconventional way.
“We were playing at a country music festival, and we had a trailer that was our dressing room,” McGraw says. “I had a big mirror that was in there, and right before I went onstage, I wrote ‘Will you be my wife?’… I mean, ‘Will you marry me?’ and I went onstage, and when I came offstage, she had written ‘I am going to be your wife, yes.’ And so, we still have that mirror.”
With so much of their lives spent in front of a crowd, the country stars opted for a low-key wedding, eloping in a secret ceremony in McGraw’s home state of Louisiana, then resuming their tour only four days later.
At the time of their nuptials, Hill was newly pregnant with their first daughter, Gracie Katherine, who was born on May 5, 1997. A very pregnant Hill can be seen in the music video for the couple’s first duet, “It’s Your Love,” which shot straight to No. 1 and became a multi-platinum hit.
McGraw and Hill, who are also parents to Maggie Elizabeth (born in 1998) and Audrey Caroline (born in 2001), have maintained a successful marriage in spite of their busy careers and constant public scrutiny.
“I think, for us, [the key is] being as normal as possible and raising our family and being in a family situation as much as possible …,” McGraw tells E! Online. “Certainly it’s different because of what we both do, but we try to keep it as much of a family environment that we can.
“And, most of the time … we try to make that the priority and the primary time that we spend,” McGraw continues. “For us, we leave the front doors when we go to work, but when we’re home, we don’t talk about none of the music that much … It’s a whole different world.”
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