Getting his big Drake: Debut single Anything Goes cracked country's top 20 late last year, but it wasn't until a 4-year-old latched onto his follow-up that Houser really made an impact on the market. A home video of Drake Dixon sitting in his car seat in a Costco parking lot while perfectly lip-syncing Boots On and wailing away on a blue guitar-shaped flyswatter became a viral sensation in country music circles. The clip got more than a million YouTube views – twice as many as Houser's official CMA-nominated video, which also features snippets of Drake's performance. "I tell people I'm just really glad he let me star in his video," Houser says.

Lake Houser: Houser grew up in Lake, Miss., a town of fewer than 500 between Jackson and Meridian. "It's a farming community, not much to do," Houser says. "If you wanted to have fun, you had to invent it." It doesn't even have a lake. "It was named after Robert Lake, a railroad man," he says. Houser started playing area bars in his mid-teens, "earlier than I was able to go in them," he says. "But they were all so far out in the country that nobody really paid much attention."

Father's son: Houser's desire to perform came from his father, Randy Houser Sr., also a musician. I'll Sleep, the tender final song on Anything Goes, deals with their relationship and the elder Houser's death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1997. "He was kind of the absentee father that I always admired for what he did, but there was also the side that he was not there."

Shakin' their moneymakers: One night at the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville, Houser was hanging out with his buddies Jamey Johnson and Dallas Davidson, watching women line-dance. "As Jamey puts it, she looked like she had a mini-fridge in her back pocket," Houser says. Houser pointed at one woman's backside and quipped, "Honky-tonk badonkadonk." The three wrote a song with that title and pitched it to Trace Adkins. "Like, we wrote it in 45 minutes, and 45 minutes later it was No. 2 on the charts," Houser says.

They're just two good ol' boys: Houser and Johnson, who also is up for the CMA's best new artist, are co-headlining this year's CMT on Tour through mid-December. "We've been playing clubs together for years, so this is something we've wanted," Houser says. "We've been saving up bail money."

Enlarge The Factory Photography Badonkadonk started it all: Randy Houser co-wrote Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, which became a big hit for Trace Adkins.