Randy Travis To Drop New Music Over A Decade After Massive Stroke Gave Him 1% Chance To Live

Country music legend Randy Travis is making a triumphant return to recording more than a decade after suffering a near-fatal stroke.

The seven-time Grammy winner announced on May 1st that he will drop a new single titled Where That Came From on Friday, May 3. It will be his first new recording “in more than a decade.”

“You’ll hear much more about the special team of folks who came together to help make this magical moment in my career possible in the coming week,” Randy wrote in an Instagram post. “In the meantime, just know that when it comes to me singing songs for you, there’s always more where that came from. Thank you for singing along all these years.”

Randy Travis has been largely out of the music industry since his 2013 stroke that doctors said was a “complication of his congestive heart failure,” according to a spokesperson.

The singer suffered a stroke three days after being hospitalized for viral cardiomyopathy, which affects the heart muscles. The near-fatal event sent him into emergency surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. At the time, he had less than a 1% chance of survival.

Because doctors didn’t believe Randy would pull through, they asked his wife, Mary, to make the difficult decision to take her husband off life support. But she refused.

“Even in his state, his semi-coma state, he squeezed my hand,” she told TODAY in 2019. “And he laid there, and I just, I saw this tear just fell. It was, you know, one, two at a time. And I just went back to the doctors and I said, ‘We’re fighting this.'”

While Randy Travis beat the odds, his wife, Mary, shared that “the whole third midsection of Randy’s left brain was affected, which is speaking, writing and reading.”

Randy kept in touch with his fans with his 2019 memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith and Braving the Storms of Life, and his 2020 documentary, More Life.

This story’s featured image is by Jason Kempin/Getty Images.