Hannah Harper brought Carrie Underwood to tears when she auditioned for American Idol with a vulnerable original song about motherhood.
Now, she’s caught Lee Ann Womack’s attention.
Womack shared in a clip on Instagram on Monday (February 23) that she’d watched a video of Harper, 25, a stay-at-home mother of three from Willow Springs, Missouri, performing “Never Again, Again.” Womack released the song in 1997 on her self-titled debut studio record.
“(Harper) was singing it in her kitchen with a couple other people doing the harmony, and it took me right back to living in Donelson in a little bitty house,” Womack reflected. “My husband at the time was on the road with Ricky Skaggs. We had Aubrie [singer-songwriter Aubrie Sellers], and Aubrie was a kid and I just put her to bed. And I had a showcase coming up that I was gonna do, and I had found this song ‘Never Again, Again,’ written by a friend of mine from home, Barbie Isham. Barbie had just kind of — I don’t even know if she had it demoed yet, but she played it for me on the guitar and sang it. It was just real kind of basic. And so, I took that song, and after I put Aubrie to bed, I went in my bathroom and quietly started figuring out how I was going to make the song mine, and how I was going to sing it, and the licks I was going to do, and trying it different ways.
“To hear Hannah sing that song back to me — or not to me, but I was watching it — directly sing it lick for lick, like I figured out how I was going to do it in my bathroom that night was one of the joys, I think, of my career, and looking back and seeing younger people sing my songs,” Womack said. She wrote in her caption on Instagram: “You have a fan in me, [Hannah Harper]! Good luck this season.”
Womack also commented with heart emojis when American Idol’s official Instagram account shared Harper’s performance during Hollywood Week (and reactions to her heartfelt original song). Harper took the stage with “A Little Past Little Rock,” which Womack debuted in 1998.
“My youngest is 1, and shortly after he was born, I had postpartum depression. And so, I was sitting on my couch — I said I wasn’t going to cry — I was sitting on my couch wallowing,” Harper opened up during her now-viral audition in front of judges Underwood, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie. “And you have boys. You know,” she turned to Underwood, a mother of two. “Everybody wants to touch you, and I didn’t want to be touched. …I was just having a pity party, praying that the Lord would calm my spirit. And my son kept coming up to me. He said, ‘mom, open this. ..open my cheese.’ I’m like, ‘leave me alone with the daggum cheese!’
“And I finally opened his cheese, and when I did, I realized that God had put me in that place, and that where I was in my house was the biggest ministry that I could ever have, and being a mom,” Harper continued. “So, I gathered myself, and I got up off the couch, and I quit throwing a pity party and I realized that that was exactly what I wanted. And I kind of kicked the postpartum depression in the butt, and I said ‘I ain’t doing it.’ So, I wrote this song called ‘String Cheese.’”
For the first time this year, American Idol’s Hollywood Week is taking place in Nashville, Tennessee. Contestants have only one round to deliver “make-or-break performances” during Hollywood Week: Music City Takeover, which makes this “the biggest Hollywood Week cut in Idol history,” according to ABC. American Idol airs on ABC on Monday nights from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET/PT. It’s available to stream the next day on Hulu.
Bryan joined the star-studded lineup of the 2026 iHeartCountry Festival. The lineup also includes Kane Brown, Parker McCollum, Riley Green, Shaboozey, Dylan Scott, Russell Dickerson, Gretchen Wilson, Chase Matthew and Lauren Alaina. iHeartRadio’s Bobby Bones is returning as the event’s host. The show will take place on May 2 at Moody Center in Austin, Texas. Tickets to the show are available as of January 23. Fans across the country will be able to catch all the action as the 2026 iHeartCountry Festival will be broadcast live across iHeartCountry stations nationwide and the free iHeartRadio app on Saturday, May 2nd at 8pm ET/5pm PT (7pm CT).
