2017 Golden Boot Awards: Vote Now for Artist of the Year

Welcome to the fourth annual Golden Boot Awards! The Boot’s fan-voted digital awards, the Golden Boot Awards will, in 2017, feature 10 categories of staff-selected nominees who made waves in the country music world between May 2016 and April 2017. Readers can vote for their preferred winner in each category as often as once per hour through 11:59PM ET on June 4. We’ll announce the winners on the site the following Monday (June 5).

Artist of the Year is a 2017 Golden Boot Awards category rich with household names as well as a few standout newcomers. It's up to you to pick this year's winner; you can vote in the poll below, but first, here are this year's nominees:

Kelsea Ballerini has turned into a star this year! Between tours with Thomas Rhett and, coming up, Lady Antebellum; working on her sophomore album; and a nomination at the 2017 Grammy Awards, she's on fire. Her tourmate Rhett is also an Artist of the Year contender this year; they're out on Rhett's headlining Home Team Tour together, and he recently took home Song of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year -- two big wins -- at the 2017 ACM Awards.

Dierks Bentley returns to the list of Artist of the Year nominees in 2017, as does this category's 2016 winner, Keith Urban. Carrie Underwood's back, too; she was 2016's only Golden Boot Awards Artist of the Year nominee, but she's got a few female friends with her time time around: In addition to Ballerini, there's Miranda Lambert and another newcomer with a quick-rising star, Maren Morris.

Also in the running for 2017 Golden Boot Awards Artist of the Year is Sturgill Simpson. The Americana darling has been seeing his stock rise more broadly since the release of his newest album, A Sailor's Guide to Earth, and his Grammys recognition.

Please note: Cheating will not be tolerated, and any voter found to be cheating will have their votes disqualified. A captcha has been put in place to prevent cheating. If you cannot read the captcha, press the top blue button next to it to refresh to a new one, or press the middle blue button to have the polling system read the captcha to you.