Carly Pearce Shares Graphic Photos From Nasty Fall Right Before 2020 CMA Awards Debut: “Almost Bit Straight Through My Mouth”

Talk about bad timing… but the show must go on. Back in 2020, Carly Pearce performed at the CMA Awards for the first time, singing her hit “I Hope You’re Happy Now” alongside Charles Kelley of Lady A. The original duet of course features Lee Brice, but he had to drop out at the last minute after testing positive for COVID-19.

But honestly, that was the least of what went wrong for Carly leading up to this night…

In a post on Instagram, she explained the full story of her wild 2020 CMA Awards experience, which was complicated after she took a very nasty fall on Halloween night, just seven days before the show on November 11th in Nashville.

She explained that she fell walking down some stairs while dressed like a cat, and she never even had a chance to catch herself, landing flat on her face so hard she knocked herself out. Carly recalls waking up to her friend FaceTiming her mom to show her what happened:

“I’ve never talked about this publicly, but I’m ready. So it was Halloween 2020, and I went to a Halloween party dressed like a cat. It was pretty early in the night, and I was going down the stairs and I fell.

It was one of those kind of falls that you don’t catch yourself, so I landed straight on my mouth. It knocked me out, and I remember waking up to my friend FaceTiming my mom to show her what had happened.”

She showed a photo of what her mouth looked like after, and after seeing a dentist that Sunday, she figured out she had almost completely bitten through her mouth, and I can’t even imagine how much pain she must have been in…

She explained that the dentist put some fake pieces over her teeth until they could go in and fix everything just to get her through to the show, and for the entire week, she was at the plastic surgeons office every day:

“I ended up, the next day, realizing it was a Sunday and also realizing that the CMAs were very much approaching. I’m gonna insert a picture for you of what my mouth looked like right after it happened… so I ended up spending a very long time the next day with the sweet dentist and sweet plastic surgeon that came in on their off days after Halloween to help me with my face.

When I made it to the dentist we realized that I had almost bit straight through my mouth, so I have to get skin removed in here and get seven stitches put in my bottom lip. I spent the afternoon with the dentist who was able to put a fake piece on each of my front teeth and told me that I could come back after the CMAs to get root canals.

I then went over to the plastic surgeon and for the next week before the CMAs, I had to go to him every single day, and he would lay compresses on my face and scrape. Aquaphor was a healer, not anything expensive.”

She said by the time they got to show day, from far enough away, you couldn’t tell anything was wrong, though her friend didn’t notice that her lip started bleeding during the show.

Even still, she was able to get through the performance, and even won her first CMA Award later that night… but man, what a journey to get there:

“I put that on my face all day, every day. So yeah, by the grace of God, and Aquaphor and these amazing doctors, my face looked pretty normal to be able to go to the show, at least from far away. At one point during the show, my friend leaned over to me that was my date and goes, ‘Your lip is bleeding.’

So I perform my song, and when I was singing, I had a lisp. My teeth were that freaking loose. But I did it, and I made it, and it was all fine. I ended up winning Music Event of the Year. The events that had to all happen for me to make it to the show, to then win, was moment that I’ll never forget. 

I went and got three root canals the next morning, and I had to read about press and all of the people online talking about what a bad lip job I got done… my teeth have been reconstructed on the bottom several times because they chip off. I can never bite straight on.”

She went onto win the CMA Award for Musical Event of the Year for the song she performed, “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” but it’s a wild story and you can listen to her tell it here. The photo of her mouth is pretty gnarly, so I can only imagine what it actually felt like:

But I don’t know what she’s talking about in terms of people coming for her for over her not sounding right or having a lisp, because I truly had no idea at the time and never even noticed something could be slightly wrong.

In fact, when I went back and watched her performance today after hearing her tell that story, I was even more blown away at how amazing she sounded, and looked… I would have never had any idea there was even a slight issue if she hadn’t told on herself.