Remember Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s Surprise Wedding?
Just months after getting engaged in a trailer at a country music festival, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill pulled off a surprise wedding at his aunt's house in Rayville, La.
The bride and groom said "I do" on Oct. 6, 1996, under a locust tree in his aunt's backyard (as told to Regis & Kelly in 2011). Very few people knew it was going to happen. The ruse was that everyone was invited to a charity softball game.
"We'd try to plan it a couple of times, but everybody kept finding out about it," McGraw shared.
Their families stood waiting for the couple to emerge from the tour bus in sports gear, but instead she had on a gown and he had on a tuxedo. Rayville is actually near where McGraw grew up, so it was plenty personal and very memorable.
"My sisters were a little upset because they wanted to dress up," he told the hosts, laughing.
Very few public wedding pictures exist on the internet, but Brides.com would later share that Hill was wearing a simple white wedding dress with pearls and no shoes. The barefoot look was fitting — during that same Regis & Kelly interview, McGraw says the first thing he noticed about his wife was her feet.
The outlet also reports Hill as three months pregnant at the time. Daughter Gracie was born almost exactly seven months later. If the couple knew she was pregnant when they married, they've never said. The wedding did come three-and-a-half months after the engagement, however.
McGraw's proposal took place at Country Jam in Grand Junction, Colo., on June 26, 1996. He'd asked for her hand many times before, but tried once more before taking the stage. When he returned to his trailer, he found a note from her in lipstick on a mirror that said she would marry him. They still have that mirror today.
To celebrate their 25th anniversary, McGraw took to Instagram and re-told that story:
In the 26 years since getting married, McGraw and Hill have toured together several times and recorded more than a dozen duets together.
Last fall they embarked on a new adventure: The Yellowstone spinoff 1883 finds them starring alongside one another as James and Margaret Dutton, great-grandparents to Yellowstone patriarch John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner.