I
t’s a sweltering July morning in Nashville and Haliey Welch has just ordered her first ever café Cubano. Sitting in a booth at a nearly empty Pinewood Social, a usually bustling tourist hotspot overlooking the Cumberland River, she takes a sip of the sugary concoction and makes an exaggerated expression of delight, as if she’s just tasted liquid gold. “Chelsea!” she hollers to her friend, Chelsea Bradford, one booth over. “You have to try some of this!”
Since a video of Welch uttering the now immortal sound “hawk tuah” (pronounced hôk too-ä) became part of the national consciousness last month, life has been a never-ending series of firsts, both mundane and outrageous, for the 21-year-old. The native of Belfast, Tennessee (population 700), has taken her first airplane flight, appeared onstage at a stadium concert, hit one million followers on Instagram, and is now sitting for her first national interview, with Rolling Stone.
It’s all a result of how she answered a question about a sex act posed to her by YouTubers Tim Dickerson and DeArius Marlow late one night in Nashville earlier this summer. “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang!” Welch said on camera, summoning a guttural spitting noise.
Written out, Welch’s answer reads raunchy and crass, but the way she delivers it in the clip ripples with innocence. Here was a giggling, smiling, fresh-faced farm girl describing oral sex without a hint of sexuality, in the same aw-shucks manner that a certain beloved country music legend makes jokes about her boobs. While she may not sing or write songs, the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” as she’s come to be known, exudes the charm and magnetism of a Gen Z Dolly Parton.
As she sips her coffee and nibbles on breakfast potatoes, two servers and the restaurant manager each make separate stops by the booth to gauge Welch’s satisfaction. To a number, they’re visibly excited. When RS has been in that same restaurant on days when Jack White, members of the Stranger Things cast, and country stars like Brothers Osborne were present, the staff was nonplussed. Later, an older diner will stop Welch and encourage her: “You keep doing what you’re doing, honey.”
But that begs the question: What is it exactly that Welch does?
Right now, it’s hard to say, but two days before our breakfast, Welch was in Fort Lauderdale to judge a bikini contest at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. She wore a mask onboard her Southwest flight to keep from being recognized, but a passenger busted her when she kept pulling it down to eat in-flight cookies. While waiting for an Uber, a passerby also clocked her. “He kept saying, ‘You’re her.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ and got in the car.”
To hear Welch tell it, she never wanted all this notoriety, but she’s determined to do something positive with it. “Maybe this was, like, God’s gift to me or something,” she says. “Everything that’s gonna come from this, it’s gonna be something good.”
THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE about the young woman born Haliey Aliene Welch — “There’s always a ‘lie’ in Haliey,” she quips, handing me her birth certificate, which she’s been carrying around in lieu of a passport — is how diminutive she is. Welch is tiny — like, really tiny. At 5’3″, she says she looked like “a chopstick” when she stood next to Shaquille O’Neal for a recent photo, and her petite frame plays into one of her biggest fears: being kidnapped.
“I’m paranoid about that,” she says. “If I’m in a big crowd, I’m looking around to see who all’s around me. You got to be that way nowadays, or they’ll pick up you up, toss you in a van and you’re gone.”
Since becoming famous, Welch rolls deep. Today, she has three team members (a manager, a publicist, and a videographer) with her, along with her best friend Bradford, who was by her side when she dropped that first “hawk tuah.” After quitting her job in a factory that manufactures the springs used to dispense bags of chips in vending machines, she hired a lawyer on the recommendation of another friend’s mom. Then she joined management company the Penthouse (they’ve adopted the motto “Protect the Hawk from the vultures”) and secured the same high-powered publicity firm that has represented Bruce Springsteen for decades. (When I point this out to Welch, she stops eating to ask, “Who is that?” but lights up with recognition when she learns her publicist also reps country singer Justin Moore.)
It’s hard for Welch to explain exactly how she wants to parlay her fame into a career. When pressed, she says she likes podcasting and has a vague idea of doing something in comedy but hasn’t gotten further than that. “I can see it going that route,” she says. According to Welch’s publicist, the firm signed on to help field Welch’s numerous interview and appearance requests to determine “what is going to support her and her story best — and what she’s wanting to do in the future with comedy and philanthropy.”
Brittany Bell*
“I want to do something that actually matters and make a difference,” Welch says. “That’s what the world needs.”
Today, that means helping animals. After breakfast, she and Bradford are going to PetSmart to buy supplies to donate to the local pound. Welch is a diehard pet lover and, back in Belfast, where just last weekend she was tending to a vast garden of kale, carrots, and potatoes, she has a miniature heeler named Ellie and a horse named Remmy Jane but steers clear of cats. “They always run away — or get run over,” she sighs.
Welch knows her way around a punchline and, over the course of breakfast, drops funny, homespun observations with the same ease and charm as she did the year’s most famous blowjob joke.
“I think the world needed to laugh,” Bradford says when asked to explain her friend’s appeal. “Haliey was able to make everyone stop and laugh together.”
When Welch begins to share bits and pieces of her backstory, it offers hints as to why she leans on humor. Welch was raised by her paternal grandmother from nine months old, and still lives with her today. She sees her father, a farmhand, somewhat regularly, but says she has no contact with her mother. “I’ve never had anything to do with her,” Welch says.
She points to a tattoo she got last winter on her right ribcage that reads “Still I Rise.” “After all the shit I’ve been through? Still I rise,” she says.
Welch wiped her social media six months ago — well before her online fame — for “personal reasons, like mental health,” she says, but reinstated them after the viral clip, in part to stop impersonator accounts. “I’m like, are you shittin’ me?” she exclaims. “These people are making money off of me and they’re not even me!”
Welch has made her share of loot too, though. According to reports, she’s sold at least $65,000 worth of official merch and will earn upwards of $30,000 for an appearance this weekend on Long Island. (Her manager, Jonnie Forster, declined to specify how much a Welch appearance commands, but offers it’s “enough to pay for her horse food and dog food for the rest of their lives.”)
And impersonators are only part of the battle. She’s also been subjected to various displays of vitriol online and only recently — at the advice of Shaq — stopped reading the comments, some of which skew political. One user referred to her as a “Trumptard.” “I don’t even know what that means,” she says.
Through no fault of her own, Welch found herself in the political crosshairs after playing a good-natured game of hot-or-not on Brianna LaPaglia’s Plan Bri podcast. Morgan Wallen was deemed worthy of the “hawk,” but former president Donald Trump, age 78, was not. Some framed it as Welch speaking out against the presidential candidate.
“I don’t want to be in the middle of it. Whoever you want to be president, that’s your business. What’s my opinion to you?” Welch says. “And I was talking about looks-wise. Donald Trump, I’m sure you’re a nice man, but you ain’t getting the hawk from me. He’s old enough to be my granddaddy.”
In fact, not many people are chosen to hear Welch’s catchphrase. While she did offer it up at the Zach Bryan show, she claims she didn’t say it once while judging that bikini contest in Fort Lauderdale and prefers to keep the two words close to the vest so they don’t lose their luster — even if some days she wishes she never said them at all.
“I don’t like attention on me and now it’s all over me,” she says. “I can’t even walk in Walmart without somebody coming up to me going, ‘Are you her?’
“They all think they know so much about me,” she continues, “but nobody knows shit about me.”
“Do you want them to?” I ask.
Welch shoots a devious smile. “Don’t worry. They will before it’s over with.”